Admiral Absen stared grimly at Michelle’s military-industrial projections littering his office desktop, showing economic activity balanced against the production of war materiel. Rubbing his eyes and sliding bars and widgets here and there, he tried to make them come out some way he was happy with, but couldn’t.
EarthFleet Intelligence projected the attack of the next wave of Scourge “from zero to twenty-six months” with ninety percent confidence, which was a fancy way of saying they could arrive any time – today, tomorrow, next year.
If only he could know for certain that he had a specific period of time, EarthFleet could take a breather and deploy its precious resources more efficiently, but with a mere sixteen minutes guaranteed warning, everyone had to be on high alert all the time, and every warship, every SLAM, every weapon had to be sent immediately to the front line.
We have so little depth, Absen growled to himself. If only we could see them coming from a distance and from one direction...but faster-than-light emergence apparently proceeds randomly from wormhole termini appearing along the equator of a gravity well.
The mechanics of FTL travel, as worked out by the old Ryss physicist Plessk and his team, showed stars to be the key. Power collected from a gravity well was twisted by the FTL drive of each mothership into a toroid singularity, opening a wormhole pathway to another star. Theory said even such exotic masses as black holes or pulsars could be used, but doing so courted gravitic disaster upon exit.
That exit was the real point of danger, for the arriving ship must first survive the heat of the star. The Scourge did this by coating their one-use motherships with thick organic resin that ablated and insulated the creatures within. Human ships would use armor of nanoformed ceramic matrix, nearly impervious to heat.
The next problem was that of escape from the arrival star’s gravity well. As long as the target stellar body was not much larger than the one at the departure end, there should be no problem. Velocity in equaled velocity out, it seemed.
However, if the arrival star was much larger – and Absen had been shocked when he’d been shown that some stars were millions of times more massive than yellow Sol and large enough to encompass all the planets of Earth’s inner solar system – then the arriving force might never escape.
This dynamic effectively created an FTL gradient from star to star. One could go from a larger star to any lesser one without difficulty. In fact, such travel became easier and easier the more the travelers proceeded “downslope.”
Going upward, from smaller to larger stars, became a much more difficult proposition. A stairstep approach was necessary, balancing the speed of entrance with the required stellar escape velocity. If the ultimate target system held an especially large star, a starship might have to travel several “upward” legs, from star to star to star, before it could risk jumping for its destination.
This was analogous to the way sailing ships of old operated, tacking laboriously upwind to gain the weather gage, the position of greatest maneuvering advantage. Similarly, the larger stars constituted the strategic high grounds of space, giving the force that held them the edge.
Unfortunately, Sol was not a large star at all, and so securing it was like defending a valley. An attacker could arrive from any number of larger stars within hundreds of light years, while a task force departing Sol had far fewer options: to aim only for stars smaller or one size class more massive, in other words.
But these were considerations for the future. For now, Absen’s job was tactical rather than strategic, and that was headache enough. If he were the Scourge, he’d send a much larger force to attack a star system that resisted the first wave. With endless forces and the individual Archons’ desire for territory, there was no reason not to do so.
In fact, thought Absen, if I were them, I’d mass maximum force on anyone resisting. The trick is coordinating task forces from more than one star system. Fortunately, that takes time.
The physicists said arriving together from different stars couldn’t be done with any accuracy, at least not with the FTL technology EarthFleet had captured. Travel times were too unpredictable and communication was only possible via drones that took just as long as a fleet to travel from star to star.
Therefore, to arrive as a unit, any task force had to be assembled at a star larger than the target before launching together as one convoy.
And to do that, drones have to fly from place to place with messages and orders, coordinating a fleet’s assembly, for light is far too slow. We really are back to the Age of Sail, Absen mused, where fast packet boats physically carried dispatches from place to place.
Perhaps in the future, new technology would provide solutions, such as some kind of FTL carrier transmission wave. For now, he had to work with what he had.
And what he had was a hodgepodge, a mishmash of weapons hastily produced and just as hastily deployed in hopes that the inevitable attack wouldn’t be too much for them to handle.
Absen checked his watch and realized his next staff briefing was coming up in less than an hour. “Michelle, cancel the 1300 daily with apologies to the presenters. I don’t think I can stand another data dump. Instead, let’s have a 1600 discussion brief in the small auditorium. That should give people enough time to change gears and bring whatever they have to the table. Can you put together an updated summary of our defenses?”
“I keep that information ready at all times, Admiral,” Michelle replied with a hint of reproach.
Damn the machine-brained woman, Absen thought. She’s getting more pissy all the time. We really have to find her an AI companion, whatever that might mean.
“Then you should also have information at your fingertips on figures of speech and command questions that are actually polite orders,” he replied with some irritation.
“Sorry, sir. No excuse, sir.”
“In the meantime, I need some LBWA time and some lunch.”
“Understood, sir. Shall I accompany you?”
“Aren’t you already with me everywhere aboard, avatar or not?”
“The admiral should understand figures of speech that are actually polite but advisable suggestions, sir.”
Absen made a strangled noise in his throat, half sigh, half growl, before exiting into the corridor. One of Michelle’s humanoid avatars fell in half a pace behind him as his detail of four Stewards preceded and trailed him.
While he spent the next hour “leading by wandering around,” he marveled at the change in Conquest. The ship and crew had traveled from Gleise 370 with a minimum of personnel, but now, with every space-based platform in high demand, the warship had been turned into a mobile command center and teemed with as many people as could live aboard, at least twenty thousand at last count. She’d been designed to hold that number, but after so long with so few billeted aboard he felt crowded.
Absen laughed at himself. You’ve grown soft over the years, old man, he thought. You’ve forgotten what living for months at a time in a cramped nuclear submarine feels like. This is positively empty compared to that.
His first stop was the new PDCC, the point defense control center, a place dedicated to increasing anti-Scourge weapons coordination by several orders of magnitude. Holding over a thousand trained gunners linked within shared VR space, like pilots and helmsmen, it was the test-bed for new tactics and a proving ground for an idea that he’d drawn from his wet-navy days so long ago: the U.S. Navy’s Aegis anti-air and antimissile system.
The large room looked more like an infirmary than a control center, with rows of VR coffins stood vertically so the gunners could walk in and out of them upright. Right now, about half of them stood open, the other half filled. One monitoring tech came to her feet as Absen entered, but the admiral waved her back to her seat and looked around.
He knew the cheap autonomous point defense modules that had been slapped onto Conquest’s skin were all gone now, replaced by uprated and networked laser emplacements. Each still contained its own powerplant in order to minimize the need to send energy from beneath the great ship’s armor, dramatically reducing weak spots such conduits caused.
In order to provide comms between the PDCC and the weapons, thin cables ran through the tiniest of holes laboriously bored in the armor. More importantly, hardened wires ran from each module to all of its nearest dozen neighbors, forming a network that meant all twelve connections had to be severed before it became isolated and reverted to autonomous mode. Each also contained a short-range transmitter for a separate and redundant wireless network.
With an extra half-meter of spray-on ablative covering the cables and much of the modules, simulations demonstrated that this system, while not perfect, was the best they could install with the resource constraints they had. In fact, Conquest had been hogging the PD module production for the last month in order to cover every excess square meter of skin with lasers – almost sixty thousand of them for the whole of the six square kilometers of surface area.
Right now, Conquest was far and away the most effective capital ship in EarthFleet. She also functioned as the flagship, holding the majority of command and staff, and was the most powerful TacDrive equipped vessel in the solar system. It was therefore imperative that she be able to go deeply into harms way, strike the enemy hard, and then escape.
But that uniqueness would change soon, Absen vowed. After the next attack or, if they were lucky and the enemy held off, before it, entirely new ships would be completed, specifically built to fight the Scourge.
“How are the sims coming?” Absen asked the tech, who smiled nervously and stood up again at being addressed by EarthFleet’s supreme commander.
Before she could speak, a loud voice came from behind him. “Very well, sir,” it said, and Absen turned to see Commander James Ford, Conquest’s senior weapons officer, hurry across the room.
The man visibly smoothed his permanently combative expression in the presence of his admiral. He spoke briefly in the tech’s ear before turning to Absen. “I’m working them to the limits the psych people will let me, but I’d like to add some hours. I think we could increase proficiency a few percent.”
Absen shook his head. “I saw your request on the last report, Commander, and the answer is still no. Twelve hours a day in VR, six days a week, is enough.”
“But sir –”
“Sorry, no. That’s final. Overtraining is almost as bad as undertraining, and we’ve already had to send two of your people to VR rehab.” Absen thought about his own brush with VR syndrome during the first battle with the Scourge and shuddered. Nothing since nanocrack was quite as unbalancing as the godlike feeling of virtual space – and the depression of having to leave it.
Ford said, “You know, I heard from Ezekiel that the Meme VR sarcophagi don’t seem to cause VR syndrome, or not as badly. If we could use that technology...”
“There are a couple dozen technologies I’d like to fully exploit, James, but we’re stretched to the limit trying to incorporate the upgrades we do have. We can’t let the good idea fairy get us off track.” The good idea fairy was shorthand for the tendency of people to want to make just one more improvement, as in “I got a good idea!” If allowed to run rampant, time-tested and efficient systems would end up worthless as they were constantly “improved,” because every upgrade caused disruption, introduced unintended consequences, required retraining of personnel and needed a period of adjustment.
“Yes, sir,” Ford subsided.
Absen slapped the younger man on the shoulder. “The PDCC is a quantum leap over anything we had before, so be happy with what you have. Tell me how much more effective we’ll be.”
“Well,” Ford admitted, “once both shifts are trained and in place, we’ll be about ninety times more lethal to any swarm we encounter.”
“Ninety percent?” Absen knew his assertion was wrong, but wanted to throw Ford a bone by letting the man brag about his new system. Nothing was more effective in getting someone to invest in a project than having him defend it in front of a potential critic.
“No, sir,” Ford replied with a distinct air of pride. “Ninety times, which is more than nine thousand percent better. But that’s still not enough. I want to be able to stand in the middle of one of their swarms and lay down a base of fire so intense that they can’t overcome it.”
“And I want the Scourge to catch the common cold and their whole race to die off, but neither of those things is going to happen.”
Ford laughed ruefully. “War of the Worlds, right, sir?”
“You got it. Too bad it’s never that easy. Keep up the good work and tell your people I appreciate their efforts. They’re going to be vital to our survival.”
“You just told them yourself,” Ford said with an uncharacteristic grin. “Miss Surwal here is recording our conversation, and it will be replayed for them on the next break.”
“Unedited, I hope.”
“Of course, sir.”
“Carry on, then,” Absen said before departing.
“Are you certain Commander Ford is the best man for the job?” Michelle murmured into Absen’s ear as they walked.
“Yes,” the admiral said firmly. “I’m sure you could come up with a dozen theoretically better people –”
“– or a thousand...” Michelle retorted.
“Okay, a thousand, but not one of them would have been with me and this crew for as long or know us so well. People aren’t interchangeable, Michelle. They form relationships, like fine roots that connect them to others. Ripping them out is a last resort, especially after a long time in place.”
“I’ll take your word for it, sir,” Michelle said in a tone of disbelief.
Absen stopped and turned to the avatar. “You know, I think the first of the new dreadnoughts will need a good AI. Why don’t you give me a detailed plan on transferring your consciousness to the Constitution when she’s finished?”
“What?” The AI had built her avatar’s face sufficiently expressive to display utter shock at the admiral’s words. “You can’t...” Then the android seemed to relax. “I see by your biometrics that you are practicing deception on me, Admiral. You’re trying to add an emotional component to your argument.”
“If by that you mean I’m trying to show you how you’d feel at getting treated like an interchangeable part instead of like a human being, then yes, that’s exactly it.”
“I understand, sir. Thank you, sir.”
“You’re welcome.” Not for the first time Absen worried about the AI. If human beings could grow up seeming normal but manifest signs of insanity later in adulthood, why not a machine intelligence? Especially one continuously given increments of greater responsibility. Plenty of politicians succumbed to megalomania as their power grew. Every despised dictator had to start somewhere.
“What’s to be our next stop?” Michelle asked.
“You want to tip them off?”
“Is that unwise?”
“I’d rather see what things look like without people spiffing everything up for me.”
“If you like, I can give you detailed reports and recordings of everything that goes on aboard when you are not present.”
“Everything?”
“Except for the spaces you’ve designated as privacy zones,” Michelle said with a hint of stiffness.
“That’s simply not the same as a personal visit.” Absen avoided reopening their old argument about security versus privacy.
I’d rather trust people than spy on their intimate moments, the admiral thought. Even suspecting an all-knowing AI was recording every use of the head, every sexual coupling, every binge and every moment of weakness and doubt, every sleeping mumble...no, that would be a morale killer and I won’t do it. Monitoring of all public spaces is plenty.
For the same reason he’d refused to have any of Spectre’s Skulls, former anti-Meme insurgents turned enforcers, aboard his ships or on EarthFleet bases. Marines performed routine guard duty and security inspections, while the Stewards had expanded beyond their protection role to become his investigative service for internal crimes. Maybe political police were necessary in civilian society for a while, but he’d long since resolved he’d push for disbanding or curtailing them severely as soon as he felt the Solar System was secure.
And that wouldn’t happen until after the Scourges’ next attack, when EarthFleet saw what a second wave would look like. The one account of battle other than their own that Intel possessed showed a similar force hitting a Meme world one hundred thirty light-years away, inflicting grievous damage even while ultimately repulsed.
No data had been received for the presumed second attack, though Absen was fervently hopeful that it would arrive on encrypted Meme frequencies before the Scourge hit the Solar System again. Intelligence on that follow-on force could give EarthFleet a tremendous edge.
“You’re pensive,” Michelle prompted as they walked.
“I’m always pensive, Commander. If I’m not thinking about an issue in front of me, I’m thinking about the larger problems of defending Earth and our shaky alliance. Right now I’m wondering what surprises the next set of Scourges will spring on us.”
“Why do you think there will be surprises?”
“Surprises are inevitable in war. Only a fool thinks the enemy won’t come up with something new and unexpected.”
“The Scourge doesn’t seem an imaginative race.”
Absen grunted. “They’re imaginative enough to develop technology to wipe out hundreds, maybe thousands of sentient races. People we could have met, could have talked with, could have learned from and traded with. They’ve been eaten with all their works. What a waste!”
“But the Scourge aren’t imaginative enough to appreciate what they destroyed. My studies of the specimens we captured and of their cybernetic systems show a hodgepodge of techniques with very little unifying theme. They appear to have stolen technology from those they conquered, but not developed very much of their own.”
“Some old Earth nations and cultures did very well for themselves by stealing from those that innovated.”
“But they eventually fell apart because thievery was rewarded over imagination. Thought must be free to explore, or a culture degrades.”
Absen glanced over at Michelle’s android. “You realize you just stepped across to my side of the security-versus-freedom argument, right?”
“I supposed I did...but I realize the difference between short-term exigencies and long-term benefits. Also, that a ship of war must be more tightly monitored than, say, a civilian installation.”
Absen waved the argument away for the moment. “Looks like we’re here.”
“The cybernetics lab? I could have given you whatever reports you need.”
“You sound a bit defensive, Michelle. Don’t worry, I’m not going to go stomping through your mind, literally or metaphorically. In fact, I’d like to hear how the AI research program is going directly from Dr. Egolu.”
“You trust her more than you do me?”
“No, but she’s the department head and you’re a military officer under my command as well as being the primary test subject. I don’t bypass my senior leaders merely because someone below them knows more. Besides, you’re not objective, because our one and only functioning example of AI is you.”
The door to the cybernetics lab opened to reveal a section of deck more than a hundred meters on a side and thirty high, with dozens of consoles and white-coated research scientists and more casually dressed engineers in attendance. A few people in military uniform rounded out the complement, but they were few and far between. Absen was a firm believer that civilians, with less of the implicitly compromising nature of military command influence, did better as researchers than military personnel.
Absen spotted Egolu after a moment of searching. The short, dark woman of Turkish descent bustled up to him with a smile, holding out her hand. “Admiral, so good to see you here in our humble laboratory.”
“Merhaba and aynı şekilde, Doctor. I’m sorry we couldn’t install you and your team somewhere better.”
“Where is better than with Michelle Conquest, correct?”
“Of course, Doctor. How are we doing in replicating Desolator’s work?”
The scientist pursed her lips, a skeptical expression. “Not so well. First, even her own manufactories cannot reproduce her central processing modules at the quantum molecular level. There are some differences we are not able to overcome, but we don’t yet know why. We have, however, achieved a high level of pseudo-AI.”
“Does it pass the Turing Test?”
Egolu laughed. “Of course. But that’s a very subjective evaluation over a fixed span of time. The key question is one of self-reflective consciousness, not whether the machine mind can fool people for a limited period.”
“And how do you evaluate for consciousness?”
“The children.”
Absen stopped short. “Children?”
“Yes, children. A selection of assigned personnel were given the option of bringing their children aboard with the stipulation that they would be administered their daily schooling here in the lab so they can interact with the pseudo-AI under closely supervised conditions. You approved the memo yourself.”
Absen raised his eyes to one of the many cameras focused on him. “I did?”
“You did,” Michelle answered from her avatar. “I remember you skimmed the executive summaries and approved them all en masse that day.”
“Interesting how that happened.” Absen stared at the android for a moment, but apparently not with enough irritation to embarrass Michelle. “I hope all human rights are being respected? If I find out anyone has been conducting dangerous experiments on these kids, heads will roll.”
“No, sir. Nothing like that. Here, let me show you.” Egolu led Absen and his entourage up a stairwell and into a long room with tilted windows, allowing them to see downward into a small complex of classrooms. “You see? They’re happy and well adjusted.”
“So what’s the experimental part?”
“All they do is speak with the pseudo-AI at certain points in their curriculum. They are never informed it’s a machine. It’s given a simple name, such as Jimmy or Sally, and when they make inquiries about whom it really is, they are deflected. Some of the older or cleverer children, those whose questions become persistent, have been told that they are unofficial assistants to our research team and are evaluating the person they’re talking with.”
“And what have you found out?”
“That the average seven-year-old decides for herself that it’s a computer after a mean time of four hours of interaction.”
“How?”
“We don’t know, Admiral. Adults don’t seem to figure it out nearly as well. We’ve had humans play the AI role and the results are quite different. In fact, these young people have achieved more than ninety-nine percent accuracy once they are asked the direct question, ‘Is Sally a human or computer?’ Of course, they are only asked that question once we believe they’ve already made a determination for themselves, in order not to prompt them to wonder.”
Absen stared down at the score or so of children, divided into four different groups by age from what looked like about five years old to fifteen. They seemed content and cheerful, with smiling and engaged teachers. “All right. I want to have a conference with all of their parents this evening, just them and me. In fact, invite them all to dinner with me in the flag dining room. With their kids. Tell the Stewards to seat and serve them by family.”
“I assure you, Admiral...” Egolu began, but Absen cut her off.
“I’m sure you do, Doctor, but I like to see things for myself. Sometimes a less clinical perspective yields unexpected truths, hmm?”
Once Absen had shaken hands all around with the cybernetics researchers, he and Michelle departed.
As they walked, Michelle said, “You shook her up a bit, sir, by your questioning.”
“Observed behavior is changed behavior, Commander, and I don’t like the idea of things happening on my ship that I don’t know about. And don’t give me any bullshit about me being informed. If my consciousness had grasped the proposal when it slipped across my desk, I guarantee you I’d have been asking the same questions, only with less of the feeling I got hoodwinked by you and my staff. Did Captain Scoggins get a summary?”
“It was included in my routine reports.”
“Which was one of hundreds of items each day. So what I infer is that the two officers most responsible for what goes on aboard were functionally unaware, and I suspect that was because at some level you, Egolu or both had qualms about using children and wanted to hide it from me. That makes me wonder what else you might be hiding.”
Visibly distressed, Michelle’s avatar stuttered slightly. “N-nothing is being deliberately hidden from you, sir.”
Absen felt himself grow angry. “Shades of meaning, Commander; that doesn’t reassure me. I must have confidence in you both, in all of my staff, that if you have qualms about something, you will highlight that issue, not bury it and hope I won’t notice. You got me?”
“Loud and clear, sir.”
“Then let me make one more thing loud and clear. You’ve shaken my trust in you. You’re on probation. I don’t care how valuable you and your amazing capabilities are. Just like any other officer, I’ll have you relieved if I lose that confidence, and court-martialed if you give me reason to do so.”
Absen waited for some declaration from her raising the issue of how, to a large extent, Earth system’s entire defense might rest on the performance of Conquest’s AI. That would have put her very close to narcissism in his eyes and might have sealed her fate, but out of wisdom or caution she remained silent.
Of that, he was glad.