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Hence Fermi’s statement:
where are they?

The answer, six centuries later, was still elusive, but most researchers were beginning to suspect that the flaw in the Fermi paradox lay in the assumption that other species would as gleefully colonize the stars as Man seemed wont to. The DalRiss had created one colony in their long history, because their culture was predisposed toward large, slow-growing, close-knit communities whose primary artistic and scientific focus was on watching and reshaping life rather than adding planets to their empire—gardeners rather than explorers. No one knew how long the Naga had been seeding worlds, but in many cases they’d occupied planets for generations without the human colonists on the surface even being aware of their presence. The Communes and the Maias were so different no one could be sure if they qualified as intelligent or not, but they certainly weren’t interested in exploration. Even human societies went through periods when outreach all but ceased, and the population was more interested in consolidation than in new frontiers. That had been the case in human space for some time now.

“Clearly,” Daren said, “the Web should have been able to colonize the entire Galaxy if that’s what they wanted to do. But from what we’ve been gathering lately, it seems more likely that they’re exploiting the Galaxy for raw materials, turning stars into more machines.”

Kara blinked. “Stars… into machines?”

Daren stared into his drink, swirling the ice cubes and the amber liquid in the glass. “Understand, this is based on very limited data. All we really know about them is a brief glimpse of some structures in the Galactic Core, and what the DalRiss saw at Nova Aquila. But here’s what we think is happening. They find a likely star and trigger a nova. We don’t quite know how they do that, but clearly they have machines that actually penetrate the star’s surface and carry out activities of some type deep inside, maybe even down at the very core. The star explodes, throwing off huge amounts of matter, mostly hydrogen and helium. They gather that, harvest it, really, by guiding it into one of the gateways opened by a Stargate, and probably send it back to the Great Annihilator at the Galactic Core. It’s possible they may simply be interested in using the Galaxy as a resource, as raw material… not in exploring it. Or talking to young upstarts like us.”

“So you’re saying… what?” Kara asked. “No curiosity? No initiative?”

“And no change,” Daren said, nodding, “for billions of years.”

“Hard to imagine,” Vic said.

“Not if we assume that their brains are essentially deterministic in the way they work.”

“Quantum theory again,” Kara said. She’d heard about this idea in downloads on AI design. It was well established that the human brain worked through principles described by quantum dynamics, that the whole hoary problem of free will was tied up with the notion of determinacy. Quantum-oriented AIs had eerily human capabilities because they thought in the same many-branching, nondeterministic mode as did humans.

“Are you saying that they can’t have original ideas?” Vic asked. “That was the argument against self-aware computers back at the dawn of the electronics age, you know. They could only think about things they were programmed to think about. No originality at all.”

“It’s probably not that extreme a case,” Daren said. “They have developed a starfaring civilization, after all, though Taki and some others think that might have been put in place by their organic predecessors. Certainly they could make obvious, deterministic advances, just like you said, Mother. One step at a time. As long as those steps were logical.
Rational.

“But when it comes to the big step into quantum physics—”

“Ah!” Vic said. “They couldn’t make that single, basic shift in their perceptions of how the universe worked!”

“That’s it. From what we’ve seen so far… and from what we’ve deduced based on the bits of thought patterns that the Cameron probe download was able to record and send back, we think they may never have stumbled on the idea of quantum mechanics, that they think and work in a strictly deterministic and rational way. Interesting, isn’t it? That bit of rigidity may hamper their exercise of what we would call imagination.”

Kara grinned. “Well, it does take imagination to dream up something as weird as quantum physics.”

“Precisely,” Daren said. “They can’t conceive of something as basic to our physics as, oh, a quon that can be a particle if you look at it one way, and a wave if you look at it another. Or that occupies a fuzzy area around the nucleus of an atom… but you can never quite pin down where the damned thing is. Things like the I2C would be completely beyond their reach.”

“So, that’s why you say they could harvest Hawking radiation,” Kara said, “but not understand what they were doing. They might accept that a black hole appears to be leaking radiation in defiance of normal relativistic theory, but never figure out what was really going on!”

“It might not even occur to them to be curious about it,” Daren said with a shrug.

“A lack of curiosity,” Katya said thoughtfully, “that would explain why they’re no more advanced than they are, even after billions of years.”

“Right. You know, xenologists long argued about what would happen when two starfaring cultures encountered one another. The chances of both of them being at the same technological level is literally astronomical. One or the other should, almost certainly, be way, way ahead of the other one. And in a military conflict, the primitive bunch wouldn’t stand a chance.

“Then we met the Naga, and they didn’t even have technology except for what they’d patterned from other civilizations in their group memory. Then we met the DalRiss, but they didn’t count either. Their civilization was older than ours, but their technology had evolved along radically different lines, so it’s hard to compare. They’re ahead of us in space transport, but behind us in things like weapons and basic electronics.”

Kara laughed. “So now we meet
these
guys, as far beyond us as we are beyond amoeba, and we find out they’ve been so handicapped by a lack of imagination that they’re no further along from flint knives than we are!”

“You know, it
could
be that there’s a fundamental limit to how far technology can progress,” Vic said.

Katya chuckled. “Come back in a hundred years and tell me that. Or in ten. There are no limits, except the limits we place on ourselves.”

“Well, it’s the one thing we have going to keep this a fair fight,” Vic said. “If we’re not able to pull several fairly big surprises on the Web, they can still mop up on us, simply because they have the numbers.”

“You said we were working out some specific tactics,” Katya said. “I wasn’t in all of those meetings. What tactics?”

“Well, if it turns out we can’t talk to them, we’re going to end up relying a lot on that Imperial firepower out there,” Vic told her. “Their PACs and primary laser batteries will keep off the small stuff… especially those tiny, laser-driven sails that Dev reported. We’ll use saturation bombardment with thermonuclear warheads. And warflyers will be deployed to keep the small stuff from building up on the hulls of our big boys.”

“Grooming,” Kara added with a grin. “Picking off the vermin.”

“That won’t be enough by itself, of course,” Vic continued. “We’re working on several large assumptions, but they’re logical assumptions, based on pretty solid evidence. Come. Look here.” He walked over to a computer access console on one of the bulkheads, found an interface that wasn’t in use, and palmed it. Several glittering metallic shapes appeared above the console’s holoprojector as he uploaded a file from his personal RAM. “These are some of the different types of ships Dev saw, taken from his memory and filed for study.” He pointed at the largest of the shapes, a black sphere made fuzzy by the thickly clustered antennae covering its surface. “This is what we’re classifying as an Alpha type, Katya. The largest single machine Dev saw, and also one of the rarest. He saw three at Nova Aquila, and none at the nebula.”

“A command ship?” Katya asked softly. “Those antenna arrays make it look like it does a hell of a lot of communicating. Suggests some sort of a command center. Maybe the brain of the whole operation.”

“Well, it’s probably nowhere near that simple,” Daren told her. “Communication, yes, but the brain function of the aggregate machine intelligence is probably spread out over all of the members. Still, it’s possible these Alphas serve as coordinators for the group intelligence.”

“Like a CPU in a nonquantum computer system,” Kara said.

Vic abruptly closed his eyes, consulting an internal data feed. “Kuso,” he said suddenly. “The time’s getting away. I’ve got to odie back to the
Karyu.”

Katya looked bleak. “Already?”

“ ’Fraid so, love. I’ve got a staff meeting over there at seventeen-thirty. I can just make it.” He took her hand. “There won’t be time afterward for me to shuttle over again. This’ll be it. Until the nebula, anyway.”

“Until the nebula.”

They embraced closely, kissing. After that, it was Kara’s turn. “You take care of yourself, Dad,” she said in his ear as he hugged her close.

“You bet I will. You too, you hear me?”

“Yes,
sir,
General, sir!”

“I’m going to walk your father to the shuttleport,” Katya told her as Vic and Daren shook hands and clapped shoulders. “I’ll see you before launch.”

“Right, Mums.”

“Kind of funny,” Daren said as the two walked out of the ship’s lounge. “Having all four of us in on this, like a family outing.”

“All five,” she said.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Your father’s along, too, remember?”

Daren smiled. “Y’know, I hadn’t even thought about that. Hagans, Alessandros, and Camerons all, sallying forth to meet the inhuman foe!”

“I don’t see how you can joke about it, Dar. I really am worried about how we’re supposed to face something as big, as powerful as the Web.”

“With the firepower the Imperials have massed out there? I doubt that we’ll even get to
see
any of the Web machines. None alive, anyway. Those big ryus out there’ll fry the lot of them to cinders before they get within a hundred thousand kilometers of us!”

Katya turned and looked at her brother, her initial surprise turning to understanding. Daren was almost two years older than she was, yet sometimes he seemed so young. A
kid…

Had combat made that big a difference in her, changed her
that
much? Her perspective on combat, any combat, was that it was a dirty, messy, terrifying, and very deadly affair. Daren almost sounded disappointed that he was going to miss out on all of the fun. Had she ever been that young?

“Believe me,” she told him. “If the Web is half the threat your dad says it is, you’ll be seeing a lot more of the gokers than you’ll care to.”

Hours later, Kara, Katya, and Daren watched in thoughtful silence for a time as the
Gauss
maneuvered closer to the looming, black shadow of a DalRiss cityship. The
Gauss
was large, nearly four hundred meters in length, but she was dwarfed to toy-sized insignificance by the sheer mass of the DalRiss creature, which had a central body core measuring two kilometers across, and six stubby, massive limbs that increased its overall diameter by nearly three kilometers more. As the
Gauss
edged closer and closer to the cityship’s underside—“under” as defined by the flat part of the torso that had rested on the ground when it was living on a planetary surface—one of the computer techs nearby giggled nervously. “Into the belly of the beast,” she said, and others around her laughed.

“Attention. Attention,” the voice of the ship’s AI announced. “We will be losing gravity in three minutes. All passengers, be aware that conditions of zero-G will prevail throughout the transit period, and that both your persons and your personal effects must be secured for the duration. Crew members, assume your microgravity stations.…”

Tucked away against the DalRiss ship’s belly,
Gauss
wouldn’t be able to keep her hab modules rotating. At least, Kara thought with a wild, barely suppressed surge of amusement, not without tickling the poor creature half to death.

The passage to Nova Aquila would be made in several jumps, navigating the route by way of regions already plotted and incorporated into the latest crop of DalRiss Achievers. The first major rendezvous for regrouping and final preparations would be the nebula the
Sirghal
had escaped to, now positively identified by Confederation cosmologists as the North American-Penguin Nebula complex two thousand light years from Earth. Once the entire fleet was gathered and checked, then, they would make the final jump to Nova Aquila. The multiple-jump maneuver should foil Web attempts to backtrack on the AEF’s approach, even though in all probability such deceptions were useless. The Web almost certainly knew now where Earth and her offshoot worlds were.

With the final warning sounding for zero-G, Kara made her way back to the hab module assigned to the Black Phantoms as barracks space, found her bunk, and strapped herself in.

She found herself thinking about Ran Ferris.

She wasn’t even sure where in the ship he was, though he would be with his squadron, probably on ‘C’ level. They’d had only a few hours together after her return from Sandstorm. One quick liaison in separate comm modules, just before embarkation… and a lingering good-bye in a virtual simulation of a streamside grotto in the New American Out-back. There’d been no time for anything more. No
time…

She found herself hungry for him, with a desperate, deep yearning that was as inescapable as it was predictable. Biology had a way, she’d noticed, of trying to arrange for the continued propagation of the species at the times of greatest danger.

She hated the idea of being a slave to biology.

But she couldn’t deny her feelings either. She needed Ran… and she needed to be needed.

She wondered when she would see him again.

Then there was no more time to think. Somewhere within the depths of the DalRiss cityship around them, an Achiever died.…”