Symbionts (11 page)

“You’re not counting the Naga?”

“With only one Naga to a world and no knowledge of their fellows, I don’t see how you can apply the word civilization to them.”

“That’s true. Well, I know the feeling, Dev. I’m not that much older than you, and they have me jacking a regiment. Fielding’s Laws, I guess.”

Dr. Karl Gunther Fielding had been a twenty-fifth-century philosopher-scientist who’d programmed a classic study called
Man and His Works.
He’d been the first to state as a law what had already been obvious for some time:
Cephlink technology extends human productivity by reducing the time necessary to achieve expertise.
The second law followed from the first.
Cephlink technology increases personal stress levels by reducing the time necessary to acquire physical experience.

In other words, the ability to download memories, knowledge, and even certain skills into people with the right implant hardware had transformed human culture in countless ways throughout the past five centuries, but perhaps the most important was the end of the notion that “adulthood” began at a certain chronological age. A formal, career-oriented education that had required eight or ten years of advanced schooling during the twenty-first century could now be downloaded over a period of months. At the same time, however, confidence, maturity, and seasoning were still products of experience. While there was no objective difference between events experienced physically and events experienced through downloads, the fact remained that someone forty standard years old had still endured, roughly, twice as much life as someone who was twenty standard.

Within the modern, cephlink-dominated military, rank was not nearly so closely linked to age as it once had been. Dev’s navy rank of captain and Katya’s equivalent army rank of colonel were not unusual for people in their late twenties. His understanding of formal space navy tactics, of leadership techniques, even of political theory was as complete as that of any of his peers… more so, in fact, than some, because he’d had the opportunity to apply his downloaded training in combat.

The downside, though, was the uncertainty that a given course of action, a given decision, a given order was
right.
That came with a life experience that Dev was beginning to realize he lacked. Linked to a starship’s AI, or—worse—caught up in the god-glory of a Xenolink, he felt invulnerable, superhuman.

But now, with no electronic enhancement save the program tricking his brain into accepting the reality of sunset, waves, sand, and the warmth of the girl in his arms, he felt very small indeed.

“Maybe,” Dev said, “Congress will vote the notion down.”

Chapter 7

Few technological advances have so changed the way we learn as cephlinkage. Why describe a place to students when a simple link and data download can transport them there in a fully interactive ViRsimulation?

Of course, while ViRsims can shape our thinking by providing an ideal forum for the exchange of ideas, they can do nothing about the
ways
in which we think.

—
Man and His Works

Dr. Karl Gunther Fielding

C.E.
2488

The measure passed, 351 to 148, with 19 abstaining.

Currently, there were within the orbiting Heraklean sky-el called the Rogue 518 delegates representing various Frontier colonies in the Confederation Congress. The majority were by now dedicated to independence from the Terran Hegemony and the empire of
Dai Nihon
and had demonstrated that dedication by signing Sinclair’s Declaration of Reason; a minority, about two hundred or so, either remained undecided or still hoped to achieve an eventual reconciliation with
Dai Nihon,
perhaps within the framework of some sort of commonwealth of worlds. Those delegates who’d opposed any change at all in the Frontier worlds’ colonial status had been left behind on New America when Congress had fled that world ahead of the Imperial invasion force. Whether or not they could still be considered to be delegates of the Confederation Congress, albeit nonvoting ones, was still a matter for frequent debate.

As currently interpreted, however, the rules for passing major, policy-level measures or legislation required a two-thirds majority of those delegates present, so Operation Farstar had needed 346 yes votes to be approved. Obviously, many of the delegates who did not yet agree on the need for a complete break with the Terran government had voted yes on Farstar. Dev wondered why they’d supported the measure.

“I’d have thought,” Dev told Sinclair, “that they’d be afraid we’d really screw things up by getting involved in whatever’s going on out at Alya A-VI.”

They were in the conference room set up as part of CONMILCOM’s Headquarters suite aboard the Rogue. There were no chairs present, but at the sky-el’s half-G level that was little more than a minor annoyance, and it did allow more men and women to crowd in next to the round, central desk with its holographic projector and AI interface pads. The low, gray-surfaced egg shapes of link modules lined the compartment’s bulkheads. Most were empty now, but a few were occupied by duty officers maintaining a communications watch with Argosport and with picket ships scattered across the Mu Herculis system.

Eighteen CONMILCOM staff officers were gathered in the room for the briefing, not counting Dev, Katya, and Sinclair himself. One civilian was present as well. Her name was Professor Brenda Ortiz, and she was a xenosophontologist, the closest thing to an expert on the DalRiss that the Confederation had. An attractive woman of perhaps forty-five standard years, she wore her dark hair long at the top and braided down her back but had shaved the sides of her head to give free access to the T-sockets behind her ears. Dev felt a sense of kinship with her; like him, she was from Earth.

“They are afraid of exactly that, Captain,” Sinclair replied. “That we’ll screw things up. But they’re more afraid of doing nothing, which is what will happen if we can’t break this deadlock of personnel, weapons, and supplies. Right now, Congress feels—and for once our intelligence sources tend to support the feeling—that we have five months, possibly six, before the Empire moves against our base here at Herakles. Our fleet is still no match for theirs, so if we first move against the Imperial forces at any of the other colony worlds we’re going to get slapped down, hard. If we stay here and wait, sooner or later we get slapped once and for all.”

“Damned if we move,” a short, dark-skinned man with silver hair and a major general’s rank tabs on his collar said, “and damned if we stay.”

“That’s about where we stand, General Chabra.”

“Well, there’s a problem then, sir,” Dev pointed out. “The Alyan system is one hundred thirty light-years from Sol, so that’s…” He consulted his personal RAM files, performing a quick calculation based on Mu Herculis’s distance from Sol and the angular separation between Alya and Mu Herc in Earth’s skies. “Make it one hundred five lights from here to Alya,” he said a second later, as the figure appeared in his mind. “That’s a three-and-a-half-month trip, minimum. I don’t care how glad the DalRiss are to see us, we’re not going to be able to travel there, kick the Imperials out and get solid DalRissan help, then make the voyage back here before that five- or six-month deadline. It’s impossible.”

Sinclair nodded. “Actually, we’ve had a thought on that, but it’s such a long shot we can’t realistically count on it. But the one DalRiss starship we’ve seen in action demonstrated instantaneous travel, all the way from Alya A to Altair in literally no time at all. If you succeed in your mission, you may find your trip back to Mu Herculis takes less time than you imagine. In fact, the single most important reason for establishing close ties with these people is the possibility that we can learn how to duplicate that.”

“Surely that’s what the Japanese have had in mind all along, Travis,” General Darwin Smith said. “They’ve had a presence at Alya A-VI since 2540, now, and they still haven’t found out how the DalRiss manage that trick. How is our expeditionary force supposed to do in weeks or days what the best Imperial scientists haven’t been able to accomplish in three years?”

Sinclair glanced across at the civilian. “Professor? You had some thoughts on that.”

“Actually,” Brenda Ortiz said, “we think the Imperials may be asking the DalRiss the wrong questions. They want to know how to duplicate DalRiss technology through machines, especially that remarkable space drive of theirs. The idea, of course, is to learn how to build our own version, to install it on our ships, though some of us doubt that it can be done that way. We know the DalRiss use a biologically tailored organism, something they call an Achiever, in order to bend space. The thing might not be possible at all unless we use DalRiss technologies.”

“In other words, we’ll have to grow our starships the way they do,” a woman, a brigadier general, suggested, “and crew them with Achievers?”

“Exactly,” Ortiz said. “We don’t know how to do it yet, and it might take years to figure it out. But before we can even begin we have to be able to talk with the DalRiss. As long as the Imperials are there, we won’t have that chance.”

“I bring all of this up,” Sinclair said, “to stress again the importance of Operation Farstar, to the Rebellion, to the future of the human species. We’ll be dealing with a technic culture that has evolved—in its social systems, its logic, and its technology—along a completely different path than we did. No, Dev, you probably won’t be able to zip home in the blink of an eye, but even the faintest possibility that you’ll learn how makes the gamble worthwhile.”

“It won’t help if we make it back,” Katya said, “and find out that the Imperium invaded Herakles the month before.”

“We’d kind of like to know that we’ll have a Confederation to come back to,” Dev added.

“Of course.” Sinclair nodded. “The truth is, we, the Confederation government, I mean, won’t be able to stay here much longer in any case. As I said, intelligence thinks another five months or so before the blow lands. Me, I’ll be surprised if it takes that long.”

“They could have scouts snooping around the edge of the system now,” one of Sinclair’s aides pointed out. “If they dropped out of K-T space far enough out, then came in slow, low-powered, and in stealth mode, we’d never know they were there.”

“My point exactly, Paul. For the time being they’re being cautious, but they can’t just let us squat here and thumb our noses at them. They’ll be back, and with numbers enough to overwhelm even your rock-throwing trick, Dev.”

Dev nodded. “They might also try coming in on the other side of the planet, where a rock thrower wouldn’t see them and couldn’t get at them. If they sent fighters in low and fast, coming in over the horizon…”

“Or they could bombard the surface from a distance,” Sinclair said. “Or try to board the Rogue with marines while it was on the other side of Herakles from New Argos. One way or another, they’ll get us. They must be devoting considerable AI program time right now to the problem of which way to try it.”

“So what can we do?” Katya asked. “What will
you
do, I mean, since we’re obviously not going to be here.”

“Leave,” Sinclair said. He gave Katya a hard glance, as though he expected her to say something. When she didn’t, he went on. “Right now, the Confederation delegates who make up our Congress number some five hundred people from various Frontier worlds, and there are as many more staff personnel, aides, programming technicians, and the like. With some crowding, they could fit aboard the
Transluxus
and a few of our merchantmen, if they were converted to handle passengers. I intend to give the Confederation a migratory capital, one always on the move from system to system.”

“Nomads,” Ortiz said, surprised.

“Well, there’s no law that says your capital has to stay in one place, is there? We’ll avoid Imperial fleet concentrations, try to move to wherever they’re not.”

“Even the Imperium can’t be everywhere at once,” Dev said thoughtfully. He was impressed by this idea, a new twist to an old, old problem. “Not with seventy-some star systems scattered across a hundred-light-year volume of space.”

“And in each system we visit,” Sinclair continued, “we can counter Hegemony propaganda, recruit new personnel, arrange for maintenance for our ships, buy supplies… and in general let the people know what we’re fighting for.”

“Well, sooner or later you will run into the enemy,” Katya pointed out. “The Imperials pose the most serious threat, but every system has Hegemony system defense craft, orbital monitors, that sort of thing. And sooner or later you’re going to drop out of K-T space and find an Imperial Ryu there waiting for you.”

“In which case,” General Chabra said, “we drop back into K-T space as quickly as we can and go someplace else. As you say, they
can’t
be everywhere.”

Sinclair spread his hands. “I’m damned if I can see another way to manage this. We came to Herakles in the first place hoping we could find a place to set up shop that the Empire would overlook. Unfortunately, they found us despite our precautions, so they know we’re here and they know we’re a threat. They
will
come after us because they can’t afford to let us grow strong, and they can’t afford to have the Hegemony see them acting with weakness.

“If we stay put on any one world, whether it’s Herakles or New America or some world far outside the Shichiju, the Empire’s going to find us and they’re going to squash us like a bug. If we stay on the move, well, we have a chance, at least, of staying ahead of the Empire, hidden by the sheer enormity of space… and we keep the Rebellion alive.”

“I still wonder how you’ll be able to carry on the business of running a government,” Katya said. “I mean, how eager will a world be to see this migratory fleet suddenly appear on its doorstep. ‘Hi, there. We need to tank up on slush hydrogen, and, by the way, how would your young men and women like to join the Confederation army?’ I’d imagine the local populations would be reluctant to help us, especially if they know that helping the Confederation fleet is going to bring an Imperial squadron in to exact some kind of retribution. The Imperials will have observers everywhere, remember, taking notes.”