15 July, 2425
USNA Star Carrier America
SupraQuito Naval Yard
0915 hours, TFT
“Give me one good reason, Commander, why I shouldn’t have you court-martialed.”
Gray had ordered Dahlquist to report to him in his dayroom in person, an unusual demand in an era of instant in-head communications. Gray’s reasoning was that if you were going to chew a new one in an errant subordinate, it was more effectively done in the flesh, as it were. Besides, he preferred to be able to watch the person’s eyes, to gauge his emotional response and get a feel for what was going through his head. It was too easy to hide behind the mask of an electronic avatar when you were linked in-head. Hell, it was possible to have a personal secretary impersonate you in an in-head conference and have no one else the wiser (though the AIs running the link would know. Usually. There was software that would fool even them).
Dahlquist stood at rigid attention in front of Gray’s desk. He was wearing his dress uniform—USNA Navy black and gold, but with the blue collar tabs and trim on the tunic identifying him as High Guard.
“For a start . . . sir,” the man said, “I wasn’t under your command at the time.”
“Excuse me, but you were,” Gray shot back. “High Guard vessels, officers, and crew are always subject to lawful orders by ranking naval personnel. Or are you telling me you were subject to Korosi’s orders at the time?”
“No, sir! I am a loyal North American!”
Dahlquist’s attitude, Gray thought, stopped just a micron or two short of insubordination. The man was hostile, and he was feeling put upon. And Gray was pretty sure he knew why.
“Then would you mind telling me why you pulled such a dumb-ass stunt out there? According to the after-action reports—Commander Mitchell’s report in particular—you ignored orders to await the arrival of America and her escorts and took your ship in dangerously close to the alien vessel.”
“I took the action that, in my professional judgment, seemed best. Sir.”
There it was, then, the one defense most difficult to challenge, whether in the middle of an op or in a court-martial. The captain of a vessel was required—by naval regulations, by law, and by common sense—to do what he felt was best to ensure the success of his mission and the safety of his ship and crew . . . in that order. Other officers might question that judgment, but would do so in the knowledge that they hadn’t been there and couldn’t know the entire situation.
Senior officers sitting on a court-martial board tended to give the accused the benefit of the doubt, if only because they would want the same leeway if the situation were reversed.
It would have been so much simpler if Dahlquist had simply ignored Gray’s original order, as it appeared he’d done earlier in the op. He might have been charged then with cowardice, or at least with disobeying a lawful order and dereliction of duty. By taking the Concord into harm’s way, though, the man had certainly scuttled any possible charge of cowardice in the face of the enemy.
“Okay, Commander,” Gray said quietly. “Suppose you explain to me just what your reasoning was. Why did you disregard my orders and lay Concord in close alongside the alien vessel?”
“Sir. First of all, it wasn’t clear that you had jurisdiction over my ship. I received no formal orders putting me under your command.”
“Never mind that, Dahlquist. Why did you approach Charlie One?”
“Sir. The alien appeared to be out of action—no signs of life. Three SAR tugs had the thing under tow, and there were four fighters in the area. But the nearest capital ship was thirty minutes away. A lot can happen in thirty minutes, and I thought there was a possibility that the alien would repair the damage and get under way again. If it did . . .” Dahlquist shrugged while remaining at attention. “I just thought if I put Concord close alongside, the added threat of Concord’s weapons might keep the alien in check. Sir.”
“I see. And of course you had no idea that the alien had technological capabilities that would completely outmatch those of the Concord.”
“Yes, sir. Especially that trick they pulled with time. Everything happened so fast, at least from our perspective. I think they were warping time around the Concord as soon as we came within a few hundred meters of their hull.”
Gray studied the officer before him, considering options. His first guess had been that Dahlquist was just another arrogant Ristie who hated Prims, that he hadn’t wanted to subject himself to the orders of a man he felt was unsuited to command. That would explain his reluctance to rendezvous with Charlie One early on, but that would have looked like cowardice, an extremely serious charge. Too, his display of misplaced bravado might have been intended to dispel that impression . . . and had gotten his ship into deep trouble.
But perhaps he’d misjudged the man. Gray hadn’t been there, after all, and the political situation had been fuzzy.
Besides, there were some practical issues at stake here. If Gray decided to press charges against Dahlquist—to have him court-martialed—it meant relieving him of command immediately. His choice, then, would be to put another officer from another ship in command of the Concord, or promote Concord’s first officer to that position. Who was it? Ah, yes. Lieutenant Commander Denise Ames. A transhuman . . .
And here Gray’s Prim upbringing began to intrude itself, and he didn’t like that. Born and raised in the Periphery ruins of Manhatt, Gray shared the Prim attitude toward transhumans—that they were rigidly precise products of genetic engineering strong on math and logic but weak on emotion and being human. The stereotype held that all transhumans were OCD—deliberately afflicted with what amounted to obsessive compulsive disorder. The joke was that they should actually be labeled as CDO—with the letters in alphabetical order, the way they were supposed to be, damn it!
And how, Gray wondered, was his mistrust of transhumans any different from a Ristie’s mistrust of a Prim?
Putting that aside for a moment, he wondered who could he transfer? Right here in America’s bridge crew there were several line officers who would serve—Laurie Taggart or Dean Mallory, for starters.
But there would be no time for a new skipper to get settled in and familiar with ship and crew, and no time for the crew to warm to a new CO. There was also the likelihood that Gray might be accused of favoritism, especially if Ames was at all popular with Concord’s crew. It was always better, when possible, to go with the existing chemistry in a crew’s makeup. Of course, if that chemistry was thoroughly fucked up to begin with . . .
And therein lay the dilemma.
Concord had already been reactivated as a Navy warship and assigned to Gray’s command, along with two of her sister ships. Gray wanted officers whom he could trust.
But just as important was the morale of those crews.
Balancing those two things, Gray reached a decision. It wasn’t worth hauling the man before him up on charges. If he did, it was quite likely that Dahlquist’s best-judgment defense would get him off . . . and the man would be more insolent than ever.
But Gray could put the fear of God into the man, and in the hierarchy of a naval task force, the commanding admiral was God.
He leaned forward on his desk, riveting Dahlquist to the deck with his glare . . .
. . . and let him have it, both barrels.
The Long Way Down
Midway
Quito Space Elevator
1955 hours, TFT
“Here’s to fucking peace!”
“To fucking peace!”
Eight members of the Black Demons had taken over a back corner of the bar, ordered their first round of drinks, and over the course of the next hour had had the servebots bring more . . . and more . . . and still more. Megan Connor tossed back her drink, wondering as she did if she was going to need a shot of dryout just to make it back up-stalk to the ship.
The Long Way Down was popular with fighter pilots and ship crews. Most of the people in there were military, though recently the star-carrier pilots had been noisily making it their own. We’re a noisy bunch, Connor thought, but why the hell not? Damn it, we’ve earned the right to cut loose a bit on our down time.
The most recent toast delivered, they clinked their emptied glasses back down on the tabletop. Earth, at half phase, glowed in magnificent blue-and-white radiance at their feet.
The Long Way Down was a bit unusual as space-elevator businesses went. It wasn’t positioned at geostationary orbit with the naval base and the rest of the synchorbit facilities, but at Midway, perched halfway up, at the 17,900 kilometer level. At geosynch, 35,800 kilometers above the summit of a mountain in Ecuador, the rotational forces balanced those of gravity perfectly, and the facilities were at zero-G, or free fall, and making one orbit around the planet below in exactly one day. At an altitude of 17,900 kilometers, however, which was known informally as either “Midway” or “Level 17-9,” centrifugal force didn’t quite balance the force of gravity, and structures experienced one eighth of a gravity, a bit less than on the surface of the moon.
Which meant that places like The Long Way Down didn’t need to build rotating habs to simulate gravity. Things fell slowly, but they did fall, and you could walk on the decks at this level if you were careful not to lose your footing. The owners of the bar had put in real transplas for the deck of the main lounge, not viewalls or vids. Patrons had the giddy sensation of walking on an actual window looking straight down almost 18,000 kilometers. From here, Earth spanned a full forty degrees, though at the moment the eastern half was cloaked in night. The sunset terminator cut across the Atlantic Ocean, with the North American coastline still in daylight. The megopoli of Brazil, however, were aglow with golden-orange light, frozen starbursts of illumination picking out the ruin of vanished rain forests and the heavily populated coastline of the Amazon Sea.
Connor could see the elevator cable off to one side, vanishing with the sharp perspective into the depths below. A flash of motion out of the corner of her eye caught her attention: a silvery pod traveling down-line, on its way to the sprawling metropolis at Mt. Cayambe on Earth’s equator.
Lieutenant Don Gregory placed an open hand on the tabletop, bringing up a menu glowing in the air in front of him. He closed his eyes, thoughtclicking for a refill on his drink. “What I want to know,” he said, “is whether the Genies are gonna stay peaceful.”
Genies was a joking reference to the Confederation’s government in Geneva.
“They’d better,” Connor said, laughing, “or we’re gonna kick their asses again.”
“Tha’s the problem,” Lieutenant Ruxton said, morosely studying his half-empty glass. “We didn’t really kick their asses the first time, did we? We’ve just been holding . . . holding th’ bastards off . . . at, at arm’s length, right?”
It sounded, Connor thought, as though Ruxton was the one who needed the dryout.
“Oh, we beat ’em fair and square, all right,” Lieutenant Fred Dahlquist said. “Zapped ’em with recombinant memetics and gave ’em a dose of religion!”
“Aw, not that crap again,” Lieutenant Chris Dobbs said. “You conspiracy theorists—”
“Hey!” Dahlquist snapped back. “I got it from a girlfriend who works at Cheyenne Mountain! She said we sent a team of cyber-commandos into the Geneva network and planted Starlight as a peace movement, to turn the Pan-Euros against their own government.”
“And risk having it spread over here?” Dobbs said. “I don’t buy it!”
“Who cares where it came from?” Connor said, shrugging. “If it means not having to fight the bastards, I’m all for it. We shouldn’t be killing other humans anyway. We’ve got enough problems with the Sh’daar.”
“The scuttlebutt I heard,” Lieutenant Sara Hathaway said, “is that pretty soon we’ll have peace with the Sh’daar, too. They say the Glothr are turning out to be the good guys.”
“Not likely, chica,” Lieutenant Martinez said. “They were negotiating with the Confeds, fer cryin’ out loud.”
“We don’t know for sure which Confeds, Enrique,” Connor pointed out. “Korosi’s gang? Or the peace-and-love Starlighters? Maybe they came to Earth as part of a peace overture.”
“Shit. We had peace with the damned Sh’daars once,” Gregory said. “Twenty years ago. But that didn’t last long, did it?”
“The problem,” Connor said carefully, “is that the system is too big. War is no longer a simple matter of good guys fighting bad guys. Hell, maybe it was never that simple. But what we call the Sh’daar is such a . . . such a huge . . . entity. So many separate species, with such wildly different views of the cosmos. It’s a wonder they could ever coordinate themselves as a group to attack us at all . . . and it might be that controlling all of them, getting a number of them to attack at the same time, or to stop attacking at the same time, is simply impossible.”
“Well that’s a hell of a note,” Dahlquist said. “They want to surrender, and bits and pieces of them keep on attacking! That could cause some real diplomatic problems, y’know?”
“I don’t think diplomacy comes into the picture,” Hathaway observed. “I mean, how could it? The very concept of diplomacy is a complicated one, and none of the species we’ve encountered so far thinks the same way as we do. We may never be able to talk with some of them—the Turusch or the H’rulka, for instance. Not as clearly and openly as we talk with the Agletsch.”
“And it’s only because the Agletsch are so good at creating artificial languages and have such a good working knowledge of other Sh’daar species that we can talk with any of them at all,” Gregory said, “including the Agletsch. You’re right, though. The human species has survived the last few decades only because the enemy has as much trouble talking to each other as they do talking to us.”
“I don’t think that’s it at all,” Lieutenant Bruce Caswell said. “From the sound of it, the Genies were getting along with the Sh’daar just fine.”
“If by ‘getting along’ you mean ‘sell out the human race,’ ” Gregory said, “sure!”
A servebot glided up with Gregory’s drink, floating on magnetic fields working against the superconductors buried in the deck. Connor actually preferred establishments with live waitstaffs. Most such places that catered to the military, however, were heavy into nudes and live sex.
To be clear, Connor was no prude. She’d been born and raised on Atlantica, one of the free-floating seasteads riding the global currents outside of any territorial waters—places where naturism was pretty much a way of life. But the constant emphasis on sex performances in bars catering to the military had been boring at first, annoying after a time. A few places like The Long Way Down focused on drinks, food, and high-altitude ambiance, pretty much in that order. She finished her own drink and, after a moment’s thought, ordered another.
“So the question remains,” Martinez said. “Is the fucking war really over?”
“Of course it is,” Dobbs said. “The Genie government’s fallen apart. Korosi is under arrest. The Starlighters are taking control. It’s over.”
“It would be really nice to believe that,” Connor said quietly.
“So what do we know about these new aliens?” Hathaway asked. “I know they’re at Crisium now. Can we talk to them yet?”
“They’re working on it,” Martinez said with an expansive shrug. “It’s tough ’cause they talk by flashing at each other, y’know?” He wiggled his fingers in the air in demonstration. “At least their computers have translations for Bug.”
“Yeah, the damned Bugs talk to everyone,” Lieutanant Jon “Messer” Schmitt said. “But remember that the Glothr were talking to someone in North India without Agletsch help. I find that very interesting.”
“I’d be willing to bet that Intelligence is all over that right now,” Gregory said. “Maybe the Glothr are the new Sh’daar mouthpieces.”
“What,” Hathaway said, “replacing the Aggies?”
“Why not?” Connor said. “It kind of makes sense, too, given where the Glothr might be coming from. Or when . . .”
“Hey, that’s right,” Gregory said. “You reported that their outbound course was lined up on the Beehive, didn’t you?” He looked at her with an intensity that might have been interest in the topic, but might also have been something else. Interest in her, possibly . . . ?
Connor shook her head, but didn’t dismiss the thought outright.
In the meantime, she pulled a data download from her personal RAM and popped it onto the local shared net, where all of them could see it. The ghostly outlines of a three-dimensional navigational chart floated above the table, but was visible with far more clarity and detail in-head.
“Wait, what’s this?” Schmitt wanted to know. “Charlie One’s course?”
“Yeah.” Connor shrugged. “I did a quick AI analysis of the alien ship’s course during the chase,” she told them. “Turned out it was aligned perfectly with M44.”
“M44?” Dobbs asked. “That another galaxy?”
She shook her head. “No. An open star cluster. It’s a clot of around a thousand stars about five hundred and some light years out. It’s known both as the Beehive and as Praesepe.”
“Praesepe? What the fuck’s that?”
“Latin for ‘manger.’ ” The Romans, apparently, had seen in the scattering of dim stars not a crab, but two donkeys, and thus the central cluster represented the manger from which they were eating.
Gregory was studying the chart on his in-head. “The Triggah,” he said. “They were headed for the Praesepe Triggah.”
“Triggah” was fighter pilot’s slang for “TRGA,” or “Texaghu Resch Gravitational Anomaly.”
“Pretty obvious, isn’t it?” Connor said. “I think our Glothr friends might not only be from a long way away. I think they’re from a long when away. Here. Have a look.”
Agletsch Data Download 019372
Stellar Systems and Clusters: Beehive Cluster
Classification: Green-Echo
OBJECT CLASSIFICATION CODE: A9: Open Star Cluster
NAME: Beehive Cluster
OTHER NAMES: Praesepe, M44, NGC 2632, Cr 189
Location:
Constellation: Cancer; Right Ascension/Declination: 08h40.4m, 19o 41’
Distance: 577 light years
Number of Stars: At least 1,000
Total Mass: ~580 Solar Masses
Stellar Makeup: M-class red dwarfs: 68%; F, G, and K-class sunlike stars: 30%; A-class stars: 2%, including 42 Cancri, an A9 III giant; K0 III giants: 4; G0 III giants: 1.
Age: ~600 million years
Core Diameter: ~22 light years
DESCRIPTION: With the Hyades and the Pleiades, Praesepe is among the closest of the open star clusters to Sol. It also has a somewhat larger population than most other clusters. From Earth, it is a faint and fuzzy patch of light just barely visible to the naked eye that has been known since ancient times, and was among the first astronomical objects to be studied by Galileo Galilei through an early telescope. . . .
Planetary Systems: Two planets discovered in the year 2012—“hot Jupiters” at that time designated as Pr0201b and Pr0211b—were the first exoplanets to be discovered circling stars within a star cluster. Current estimates suggest a total planetary population of well over 6,000. To date, no direct human explorations of the Praesepe cluster have been carried out. . . .
Alien Stellarchitecture: Analyses of Agletsch galactic records in late 2424 indicate the presence of a modified Tipler cylinder at the Praesepe cluster’s heart, one of the so-called Sh’daar Nodes. Known as TRGA artifacts and presumably constructed by a now vanished galactic civilization perhaps as much as a half billion years ago, these massive cylinders, rotating at close to the speed of light, provide shortcuts through both space and time, and may serve as highways, of sorts, connecting the modern galaxy with the home galaxy of the Sh’daar Collective some 876 million years in the past. . . .
Where the great globular clusters like Omega Centauri were densely packed balls of millions of stars crammed into spherical swarms more than a hundred light years across, open clusters were less dramatic. The Beehive cluster was perhaps forty light years across, a loose gathering of about a thousand stars estimated to be 600 million years old, and was thought to have had the same origin as another open cluster, the Hyades.
No human expedition had yet ventured into the Beehive, however, and the cluster was not thought to be a likely place for inhabited worlds. If those stars were only a half billion years or so old, any planets circling them would still be harsh, young, and either sterile or possessing only the most primitive beginnings of single-cell life. When Earth was that old, life had only just begun appearing within the newborn world’s churning seas. The Beehive cluster would be no different.
And yet . . .
Connor slipped through several gigabytes of data, following up on the mention of the TRGA. That enigmatic object might well change everything.
TRGAs were Tipler cylinders, theoretical structures first proposed as a solution to general relativity equations by the Hungarian mathematician and physicist Cornel Lanczos in 1924. Fifty years later, physicist Frank Tipler analyzed the equations and proposed that an ultra-dense cylinder rotating at extremely high speeds around its long axis might make travel through vast expanses of space and even through time itself possible. Later calculations had ruled out the time travel aspect; apparently, using a Tipler machine, as they were called, to move through time was possible only for a cylinder of infinite length.
There proved to be a loophole, however. Incorporating exotic matter with negative energy into the structure would generate the closed timelike curves permitting travel back in time without requiring a cylinder of infinite length.
But Tipler cylinders were purely hypothetical, useful for balancing relativistic equations but with no more physical reality than tachyons, which had been imagined back in 1967 for the same purpose.
Then the first TRGA was encountered at a star called Texaghu Resch, 112 light years from Sol. This Texaghu Resch Gravitational Anomaly, first noted in Agletcsh records as one of a large number of so-called Sh’daar Nodes, was described as an “inside-out Tipler machine,” a titanic and obviously artificial structure that appeared to focus space- and time-bending forces within the lumen of a hollow rotating tube. At first, it appeared to be a part of a vast network of interconnected nodes providing a kind of trans-galactic subway system permitting instantaneous travel across thousands of light years. Among other places, the Texaghu Resch Cylinder permitted ships from Earth to jump across 16,000 light years to the Omega Centauri globular cluster in an instant instead of months.
Eventually, though, by tracking the movements of Sh’daar ships through that first cylinder, the America battlegroup had discovered a particular path across space and time, one connecting with the N’gai Cloud, a pocket-sized galaxy just above the plane of the Milky Way some 876 million years in the past. That small galaxy had been absorbed by the Milky Way perhaps 200 million years later; its corpse—its central core—existed still as the giant globular cluster Omega Centauri. The battlegroup had passed through the TRGA cylinder to the heart of the N’gai Cloud, confronting the Sh’daar on their home ground in the remote past.
The Sh’daar, who’d been using the TRGA cylinders to attack or absorb galactic cultures in their future—Earth’s present—had agreed to stop their cross-time predations, perhaps because they feared that the humans would interfere with their past and wipe them out.
And yet, their predations had begun again twenty years later.
What, Connor wondered, had changed?
“Scuttlebutt,” Martinez said with the air of one making a holy proclamation, “says that America is going back to Tee-sub-minus zero point eight seven six gigayear, and seriously kicking some Sh’daar ass.”
The Tee-sub-minus phrase referred to the remote past time America had visited once before. It was clumsy and of real use only to physicists, but Martinez had rattled it off perfectly. He must have been practicing.
“Yeah,” Ruxton said. “But will it be Tee-shub-mine . . . uh, wha’ he said. With the Sh’daar? Or the ur-Sh’daar? Makes a subshtansh . . . makes a . . . a big difference, y’know.”
“I don’t see how,” Caswell said. “Sh’daar? Ur-Sh’daar? They’re all the same.”
“Not anymore,” Hathaway said, chuckling. “The Urs are gone.”
“Sure,” Gregory said. “But what if we went back in time to before the ur-Sh’daar Singularity? If they knew that they were going to leave behind such a mess . . .”
“I doubt they’d be able to do anything about it, Don,” Connor told him. “I mean, what would they be able to do? Stop whatever happened before it happened? That probably wouldn’t even be possible.”
“No,” Gregory said, “but they might hang around long enough after the transformation to help the stay-behinds.”
“Maybe. I don’t think we understand what happened, myself. Not really. It’s hard enough understanding non-human behavior when we’re on a more or less level playing field, like with the Agletsch. We know they trade in information—data they have for data we have, plus a few heavy elements like rhenium and neptunium two thirty-seven. Good old-fashioned capitalistic enterprise. We can understand that, right?
“But when we’re trying to understand a collective of space-faring civilizations with a much higher technological quotient, and living hundreds of millions of years ago in an entirely different galaxy . . . how are we supposed to even begin to understand them?”
Gregory laughed. “Your problem, Megan, is that you don’t believe in the Singularity at all.”
They’d had this conversation before. “No,” she replied. “I don’t.”
Sometimes known as the Vinge Singularity, after the mathematician and author Vernor Vinge, who popularized the concept in the late twentieth century, the Technological Singularity—first described as a possibility in the mid-1950s by the brilliant polymath John von Neumann—was supposed to be that point in a civilization’s development where organic intelligence merged with artificial intelligence in ways that would utterly and forever transform the very concept of intelligent life. For humans, the GRIN technologies, as they were popularly known, were seen as the drivers of this inevitable change: Genetics, Robotics, Information systems, and Nanotechnology.
But was the change, the transformation into an entirely different order of life and intelligence, really inevitable? All attempts to predict Humankind’s transcendence into a higher intelligence had so far failed. Futurist Raymond Kurzweil had predicted that the Technological Singularity would occur, had to occur, no later than the year 2045. Vinge himself had predicted—in the 1990s—it happening after 2005 but before 2030.
And yet, four centuries had passed since then, and there’d been no apotheosis of Humankind, no transcendence to a superhuman state.
Hyperintelligent AIs were commonplace, and humans carried circuitry within their brains and peripheral nervous systems that let them connect to electronic networks, to machines, to AIs, and to other humans in astonishing and powerful ways. Human minds had been augmented by technology, but not replaced by machines, not rendered obsolete, and not transformed into something unrecognizable. Nor had humans elected to have their minds digitally uploaded to artificial realities, a form of immortality that might benefit the copy but not the original, which, after all, remained in the real world to age and die. People could piggyback their consciousness in remote robotic vehicles, but when the link was switched off, they awoke back in their bodies of flesh and blood.
In short, they were still human.
And because of this, Megan Connor was convinced that the Technological Singularity was all hype, speculation, and imaginative nonsense, and would be so for the foreseeable future. She didn’t know what had happened to the ancient ur-Sh’daar . . . but it seemed more likely to her by far that modern humans simply didn’t understand an alien civilization that had existed that far back within the deeps of Time.
Humans weren’t gods, and they weren’t about to become gods. Transhumanism was a myth. Next question, please. . . .
“I think the big question,” Hathaway said, pulling them back into the current discussion, “is what the Glothr think about us intercepting their ship . . . and what they’re likely to do about it.”
“If they were here to make peace with the Confederation,” Martinez said, “they’ll just have to make peace with us now.”
“I wonder,” Connor said, “if they can even see any difference between us and Geneva.”
“Interesting point, Megan,” Gregory said. “Of course, any alien who knows us well knows we’re a fractious bunch. Always at each other’s throats . . . unless outsiders give us something to unite against, that is.”
“Ha!” Schmitt said, slapping the table. “It didn’t work this time, did it? I mean, we’ve been fighting a dozen different races from the Sh’daar Collective for almost sixty years, but that didn’t stop us from getting into a damned nasty little civil war.”
“Semper humanus,” Connor said, shaking her head. “Always human.”
“Well that’s a depressing thought,” Hathaway said. “You’re saying we can’t change. . . .”
“Oh, we’ll change,” Dobbs said, ordering another drink for himself. “The Singularity is coming, brothers.” He raised his empty glass in salute. “Hallelujah!”
“Can I hear an amen?” Gregory added, laughing. They both looked at Connor, who just shrugged them off—she knew they were saying this not just out of belief, but because they knew it would bother her. Not tonight.
“Watch it, you two,” Schmitt said. “They haven’t rescinded the White Covenant yet.”
“Oh, they will, they will,” Hathaway said. “The way Starlight is spreading across Europe, and even over here now? They’ll have to.”
“Yeah, and when you look at it, old Dobbs here has a point.” He glanced around the restaurant’s interior, as though checking for eavesdroppers. “If Starlight was a religious virus, it sure as hell ended the war in a hurry, didn’t it?”
“I’ve heard those rumors,” Connor said. “I don’t believe them.”
“No?” Gregory asked. “Damn, Lieutenant. What do you believe?”
“That the USNA is still very much alone in the universe,” she said, “and we still have a long way to go. Forget the transhuman crap and Singularity and all the rest of that stargod shit. Right now we need to focus just on surviving as a species.”
“Nah,” Ruxton said. “Tran . . . tran-shumans’ll win out. Homo shuperioris! Homo . . . Homo techno . . . uh . . .”
“Easy there, Rux,” Caswell said. “You’ve been hitting the juice pretty hard tonight. You okay?”
“Coursh I am, fuckin’ bitch . . .” He sagged, his face dropping to the tabletop.
Caswell looked up at the others. “His wife left him,” he explained. “He got word from her this morning.”
“His . . . wife? You mean he’s a monogie?”
“ ’Fraid so. They were from the Boston Periphery, y’know? Apparently, she got in with a transhumanist associative.”
“Ah,” Martinez said, nodding. “Some transhuman groups reject the whole idea of marriage or long-term partnerships.”
“Well sure,” Gregory said, nodding. “If you’re a transhuman and going to live forever, you don’t want to be stuck with the same partner for eternity, do you? Eternity is a hell of a long time!”
Connor arched an eyebrow, leaning back in her chair. She wasn’t sure what she thought of monogies, though fleet scuttlebutt had it that Admiral Gray himself was one. Most Prims were, though they tended to have the rough edges smoothed off when they entered polite civilization.
The poor bastard. No wonder he was trying to drink himself into oblivion. Ruxton was facedown on the table, snoring loudly. “Shall we shoot him up with dryout?” Schmitt asked.
“Nah,” Caswell said. “Let him sleep. We’ll hit him when it’s time to get him back up to the ship.”
“So . . .” Schmitt said, trying to change the subject. “Any bets on how the Glothr thing’s gonna shake out?”
“Maybe,” Gregory said, smiling, “our new Glothr friends will show us the way.”
“Sure,” Connor said. “If we can ever figure out what this means.” She raised her hands, opening and closing her fingers quickly to mimic flashing lights.