Netlink (33 page)

“Operation Nova. That’s what you’re calling it?”

“It seemed appropriate. The Expeditionary Force will be visiting Nova Aquila first. It’s supposed to be strictly a scouting mission, with the objective of learning as much about the Web as possible, but we’re going in ready for anything. You’ll be protecting
Gauss’s
passengers, a small army of scientists, mostly xenologists and linguists, but also programmer techs and artificial intelligence specialists.”

“Huh. Who’s running that show?”

“Dr. Jason Sanders, from the Xenobiology Department at the University of Jefferson. Your brother’s going along too.”

“Daren?On the
Gauss?”

“Yes. And Dr. Oe. You remember her? She was with him at the party.”

“The Nihonjin woman from the University.” She felt cold inside. “I remember.”

“She is a New American citizen, Kara. As loyal as you or me. I doubt they would have let her go if she wasn’t.”

“Why not? We’re bringing half of the Empire along with us anyway. A few more won’t hurt.”

Katya stared hard at her daughter. “This is strictly a volunteer mission, Kara.”

“What does that mean? What are you saying?”

“Just what it sounds like. You don’t have to go if you don’t want to.”

“What about my unit? Have they been asked to go?”

Katya nodded. “This is an unusual mission, one that’s going to go farther into unknown space than we’ve ever gone before. This one had to be a volunteer mission for all personnel.”

“And they’re going?

“Some of them have signed on already, but most of the people in your squadron are waiting to hear what you decide.” She smiled. “You seem to be popular with your unit, Kara.”

“Kuso, I don’t try to be. Half the time I’m working their tails off. The other half, like recently, I’m not even around.”

“Well, I’ve been hearing good reports on you. From your unit. From your commanders. I’d like to have you along, if we can.”

Kara started to nod, then looked up, sharply, eyes widening. “Wait a minute. Along? You’re coming too?”

“That’s right.”

“But… but you’re a senator!”

“So?”

“You’re supposed to stay here. With the government!”

“Seems to me this is one time when the government had better know exactly what’s going on out there, and what the consequences of its acts are.”

“I don’t know if I want my mother going out into a shooting war.” She folded her arms. “You could get hurt out there!”

“I think I’ve been in combat enough to know what I’m risking. And your father’s going, too.”

Kara tried to suppress the wild scramble of fright. The whole family was going to be there, and from what she’d heard of the situation so far, it wasn’t going to be fun.

“Somebody’s got to stay and run the government, right?” she said weakly.

Katya shrugged. “Hardly matters, does it? We’ll have an I2C communications linkup, so I won’t be out of touch with New America. In fact, the whole Shichiju will be able to participate in this one. We’ll have medes along, aboard the
Gauss
and several of the other civilian vessels. The whole human race will be linked in on this, watching.”

“Good God! The
medes
are coming?”

“It was my idea, actually,” a new voice, a man’s voice, said from the empty air overhead. “May I join you?”

Katya looked up. “Come in, Dev.”

Empty air shimmered nearby, taking on texture and form. Kara had seen images of Dev Cameron, of course. His exploits were closely studied at the Academy, and that included simulations narrated and monitored by an analogue patterned closely after the original.

But this man, gray-eyed, tall, not much older than herself—this was the
original.

“Excuse me for eavesdropping,” he said. “But I was eager to meet you, Kara.”

“Uh… it’s nice to meet you. Why’d you vanish off into the great unknown and leave my mother hanging?”

“Kara!” Katya flared.

“Honest question. The honest answer is I needed the DalRiss just to exist at that point. I’m still… I suppose ‘alive’ is still the right word, still alive more in their Naga fleet computer than I am here.

“But there was more to it than that. I thought I could be useful to the DalRiss. They wanted me to accompany them. And, well, your mother never did care that much for virtual relationships. After I, ah, misplaced my body, I couldn’t very well offer her anything else. Right?”

Kara nodded. “I guess. It just seems so… cold.”

“You don’t know how cold,” Dev said. “Believe me. It wasn’t just your mother who suffered.”

“So, um, what’s happening now?” Kara looked from Dev to Katya and back again. “Are you back for good now? Or what?”

Dev broke the eye contact, turning his head toward the window that overlooked the mountains. “I imagine that depends on what happens with Operation Nova.”

“Oh.” Kara looked at Dev’s image and decided she could get to like the guy after all. He really wasn’t quite the macho hero type she’d imagined, based on what she’d read and what she’d heard from Katya.
This
was the man who’d linked with a planetary Naga, throwing one-ton boulders from a mountaintop to claw ryu-class carriers from the sky? He actually seemed kind of cute, and she could see why her mother had been attracted to him.

He was a lot like her father in some ways, only much younger. Well… that was the effect of being downloaded, of course. And when she looked at his eyes, they seemed much, much older than the rest of him.

“Okay,” she said. “Then tell me why the medie circus is in on this. I’d think this sort of thing would be better being done in secret.”

“Why?” Dev asked, turning to face her again. “Not to hide it from the Imperials, certainly. They’re on our side.”

“So I’ve just been informed.”

“And we’re not even trying to hide anything from the Web. Quite the contrary, in fact. If what we think we understand about them is accurate, it might well be the only way to get them to perceive us as
another
intelligence, a mind separate from their shared mind, if they see our equivalent of a shared mind. The linked minds of much of the human race.”

The thought was dizzying. “Kuso! How many is that?”

“There are thirty or forty billion people on Earth alone,” Dev said. “I don’t know what the exact figure is. Plus almost eighty colony worlds, with populations of a half billion or so, like New America, on up to Chien V, with, what? Three billion? Something like that. The total population must be well over a hundred billion or so, though. And anyone who wants to will be able to link in.”

“Everybody but genies and nullheads,” Kara couldn’t help adding. Genies, of course, were forbidden by law from carrying computer-link hardware, save in certain, specialized cases. “Nullheads” was slang for the disenfranchised millions—how many millions, no one could say—who for one reason or another, political, economic, religious, moral, or simple fear—didn’t have cyberlink hardware of any kind.

“Technic
civilization will be able to participate, Kara,” Dev said quietly. “In fact, it’s vital that it does, or as much of it as can. What we do out there could determine the future course of evolution—or extinction—for the entire human species.”

“Just so you realize that the whole species isn’t one nice, neat, small package. Some of it’s got warts. Some of it doesn’t have access to high-tech toys.”

“Some don’t want that access. We’ll work with what we have to work with.”

“And the idea is still to try to reason with the Web?”

“If we possibly can,” Katya said. “We don’t even know if communication,
real
communication is possible. If it is, the xenologists on the
Gauss
and other research vessels should be able to learn how to do it. We’re going in armed with everything Dev picked up, everything we’ve learned since. We have Naga fragments that may be able to reveal some of the past, give us common ground for a dialogue.”

“But if they can’t talk,” Dev said, “yes, we’ll have to fight.” Kara gave a wry grin. “From what you guys’ve told me, that’s not going to be easy. Odds of millions to one? And against an opponent who may just be as far ahead of us as we are ahead of mice?”

“It won’t be that bad, Kara,” Dev said. “We’ll be going back better prepared this time.”

“We’ve been studying the records Dev brought back,” Katya added. “We’ve found what may be some weaknesses in the Web’s position. And ways that we can exploit those weaknesses.”

“I’d like to see what you have.”

“Certainly.”

“Are you with us, then?” Dev asked.

“Of course I’ll be coming along,” Kara said. “If my people are going, you don’t think anything could keep me away from this dustup, do you?”

Dev looked at Katya, smiled, and gave a small shrug. “She is your daughter, Katya.”

Katya smiled at him. “I’ve known that for a long time.”

Chapter 21

The universe is not only queerer than we imagine. It is queerer than we
can
imagine.

—
J. B. S. H
ALDANE

mid–twentieth century
C
.
E
.

“Just what is it we’re hoping to accomplish out there, anyway?” Kara asked.

She stood in front of the viewall, looking out at the vast assembly of starships gathered in New American orbit. Both her mother and father were there, Vic resplendent in his Confederation general’s full-dress grays, Katya in a simple coverall with a tasteful holographic animation of kaleidoscope shapes and colors running down the border of the torso seal. A number of others were there as well; space was in short supply aboard the
Gauss,
and most compartments were both too small and too crowded.

Embarkation parties were something of a tradition, however, at least aboard civilian vessels, and the science ship’s lounges had been adapted as party centers for the passengers, who gathered to watch the panorama of the Aquilan Expeditionary Fleet against the gold, green, and blue of New America, to eat the hors d’oeuvres provided by the ship’s nanoprocessors, and to make nervous jokes about the coming jump into the unknown.

“You know as much about that as the rest of us, Kara,” Vic replied. He took a sip from his drink. “You were in on every staff meeting from the time you got back from Kasei on.

Kara looked back over her shoulder at him. “I’m not talking about specific strategy. I just wonder if it’s at all clear what we’re getting into.”

“Peaceful communication if we can pull it off,” Katya said. “With a civilization far older than our own. And if not, well, probably the best we can hope for is to let the Web know we won’t simply wait to be absorbed or integrated or whatever they think they can do to us.”

“We’ve got a chance,” Vic added. “A good one.”

Accommodations were not nearly so luxurious as those aboard the
Teikoku,
of course.
Gauss
was smaller by far, and space was at a premium, with some eight hundred passengers aboard a vessel designed to handle half that many. It was made even more cramped by the need for extra stores of raw material—carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen, especially—for the nanoprocessors that would be providing them with food, water, and air.

Heat management was arguably the biggest problem on older vessels like the
Gauss;
everyone aboard agreed that it was a good thing they would be piggybacking it to their destination with a DalRiss cityship this time instead of taking the usual long, hot route through K-T space. A joke making the rounds of both the science teams and the warstrider squadrons held that the death of an Achiever was a small price to pay to avoid the indignity of being cooked in their own juices by the time they reached their destination.

“This might not be the time to go into it,” Kara said quietly. “But I’ve got a bad feeling about this one. A lot worse than I had before Sandstorm.”

“Is the Academy endowing our warriors with psychic powers now?” Katya asked.

“Let her say it, Kat,” Vic said. “You know as well as I do about soldiers’ hunches.”

“This isn’t like
that,”
Kara said. “I don’t have any grand premonition of death, or whatever.” She shook her head. “It’s just—well, this is a strange thing for a soldier to say, I know, but I wonder if we’re not going about this all wrong. Sun Tzu says to match your strength against your opponent’s weakness, not against his strength.” She waved an arm, taking in the massed fleet visible against the New American disk. “It looks as though the Web’s strength more than anything else is sheer weight of numbers. That’s what Dev seemed to be saying, anyway, that they won by sending millions and millions of machines against the DalRiss and overwhelming their defenses. And here we are trying to match them strength for strength.” She raised an eyebrow as she looked at her father. “Seems like a bad strategy, General.”

Vic chuckled. “You could be right. We wrangled about that with the Imperial Ops staff for weeks.”

“Who was arguing what?”

“The Imperials were all for sending in the big guns. The ryu carriers and a flock of heavy cruisers. Admiral Munimori even suggested that the Imperials could handle the whole show by themselves, without our help. The rest of us—especially Dev—wanted a more subtle approach. Something less dependent on matching the Web, as you put it, strength against strength.”

“The Confederation doesn’t have that powerful a warfleet, Kara,” Katya added. “We can’t afford to stretch ourselves too thin, or take risks too large.”

“Like we weren’t taking risks with Operation Sandstorm?”

Katya grimaced. “That was a case of doing what we had to do in order to survive as an independent government.…”

“Agreed, Mums. I wasn’t really arguing the point. And I can understand that our survival as a species is at stake here. But if we can’t hope to beat them by matching their numbers, what approach can we use?”

“Technology,” Vic said simply.

“Technology.Against a technic civilization billions of years old. A civilization capable of energy-to-matter conversion, able to travel across half of the goking Galaxy, and possibly even able to pull off a little time travel now and again.” Kara raised a skeptical eyebrow. “This makes sense?”