7

1506 .1111 UCS Hermes
Stargate
Carson Space
0816 hrs, GMT

From General Alexander’s electronic viewpoint on board the Hermes, it appeared that the tide had definitely turned. As the Xul Nightmare-class huntership began to crumple, folding itself into its own rogue microsingularity in a burst of hard gamma radiation, he allowed himself the exhilaration of knowing the Commonwealth had won.

“There he goes,” Taggart’s voice said.

“I see him, Liam. Did our penetrators get clear?” “Not sure yet, Marty,” Taggart replied. “Lots of telemetry

coming through.” The admiral paused, studying the streams of incoming data. “Yeah . . . I think we hit the jackpot with this one!”

“I want verification that our people are out of there.” Sending human minds in virtual reality into the very bowels of Xul hunterships seemed to Alexander to be an incredibly high-risk proposition. If the Xul could pattern the minds of humans on captured starships and upload them into their own virtual realities, they could do the same with human emulator software penetrating their own networks. Only two factors made the idea worthwhile in his mind—the amount of sheer data these raids could return, and the fact that the target ship, by his express order, was about to be destroyed in any case. Alexander would not allow humans—even downloaded human copies—to endure that kind of imprisonment, that kind of terror and pain.

“No information yet, General. We’ll need to wake them up, take them through the usual post-mission debrief. It’ll take time. . . .”

“Just make damned sure we get them back,” he snapped. “Their minds as well as their bodies! And I want to see an analysis on what they managed to pick up as soon as one is available.”

“Right, Marty.” Taggart had that whatever-you- sayGeneral tone to his mental voice, one Alexander had heard plenty of times before. It was the tone of voice one reserved for a micromanaging CO, or an officer who was telling his people how to do jobs that they knew damned well how to do.

The hell with it. He didn’t care what Taggart thought, or anyone else, for that matter. Operation Clusterstrike had been his, suggested by him and largely planned by his command constellation. He wanted to be in on the pay-off, wanted to know what the Penetrators had gleaned from the Xul Nightmare.

He also needed something to show Yarlocke and her crowd back at Defense, something positive.

If he didn’t, 1MIEF would be recalled, and that would have some very bad consequences indeed.

Senate Committee Deliberation Chamber Commonwealth Government Center, EarthRing
1025 hrs, GMT

Cyndi Yarlocke always enjoyed the view from this largest of the deliberation chambers within the Government Center. The walls were opaque, of course, but the entire surrounding viewall and the room’s vaulted ceiling were set to transmit seamless imagery from optical scanners mounted on the Ring’s outer framework.

The effect was that of transparent walls looking out into space. High on one wall, Earth hung against a backdrop of stars, impossibly beautiful, impossibly fragile, a marble, illuminated now from the right and showing only half its surface, of ocean- blue and intricate swirls of cloud-white. Beyond, its half-full phase mimicking Earth’s, the Moon hung in silvery splendor.

If you looked closely, the scattered lights of cities could be picked out on the dark sides of both. It was dawn over eastern North America; the megopoli of Vancouver, Portseattle, and the two Californias drew the Pacific coastline in myriad points of cool, white light, strung together on a luminous, tightly woven net, like shining drops of dew on a spider’s web.

Since the very first tentative voyages to the Moon, that view of Earth seen from space had been an icon of fragile and delicate beauty, of oceans and clouds, of ocher deserts and green plains and wrinkled mountains and bright-lit cities all gathered together in a single, tiny sphere of intense color no larger than a fist held at arm’s length.

More delicate still, though, were the Rings. . . . They encircled Earth at roughly Geosynch, some 35,700 kilometers above the planet’s equator. Beginning as an accretion of artificial space habs and modules and orbital stations, the ring complex had been under construction since the middle of the 24^th Century, shortly after the Armageddon incident with the Xul huntership. Likely it would always be under construction, as more and more of the infrastructure of Earth’s civilization moved off-planet and into space, as more and more manufactories and power stations and shipyards and planetoid mining centers and ecohabitats were wired in.

The Rings were not solid structures, of course. Human technology had not yet reached a stage where it could even contemplate the construction of a single ring- structure over seventeen billion kilometers in circumference! Like the far vaster rings of Saturn, EarthRing consisted of individual units orbiting Earth in Geosynch; an invisible web of nano- extruded diamondthread, each strand only a few carbon atoms thick, held many of the different sections together, motionless relative to one another, though others were free-orbiting. Some of the units, like Commonwealth Government Center itself, were huge, sprawling in labyrinthine complexities across hundreds of kilometers; others were the size of a single small living unit, or smaller.

Together, in their billions, their lights and reflective surfaces created EarthRing, just visible as a wispy streak of light, thread- thin where it bisected Earth, brighter—like a tightly ordered, extremely narrow Milky Way—until it seemed to double back upon itself, growing into an immense arch to connect with Government Center. Four space elevators connected the Ring with the surface, but those were too slender to be seen with the naked eye; Commonwealth Government Center was close to the orbital terminus of the Quito elevator, less than eighty kilometers away, in fact, but even at that distance the 36,000-kilometer sky-to-ground thread was quite invisible.

As always, Yarlocke was moved by the overwhelming sense of fragility presented by the vista stretched across the Deliberation Chamber’s walls. More than once, EarthRing had been called the single greatest wonder of Humankind, a summation of the richness of human civilization and technology rendered visible.

Both as a senator of the Human Commonwealth and as the Chair of the Senate Defense Appropriations Committee, Yarlocke considered human civilization to be her special and personal responsibility. The seeming delicacy of that vista, of world and far-flung gossamer Ring set against the backdrop of stars, was far more objective than most citizens were willing to admit. It was up to her, and a few of her fellow senators, to keep that fragile globe and its ecosystem safe, a charge she regarded as a sacred trust. And that meant reining in certain se nior military personnel, men and women who meant well, certainly, but who did not understand the terrible danger currently faced by all of Humankind.

The counter to that danger, she knew, was not military force, not Marines and warships . . . and certainly not blowing up distant suns as though the very stars of heaven were disposable!
No. The Xul threat could only be countered by understanding and diplomacy. Cyndi Collins Yarlocke was as certain of that one fact as she could be of anything.

“The other members of the committee are beginning to link in, Cyndi.” Harry, her personal AI, spoke within her thoughts.

“Let them wait,” she replied. She did know how to make a proper entrance.

“And Senators Armandez and Tillman are waiting outside.”
“Go ahead and let them in,” she said after a moment. She preferred having this glorious room to herself, but there would be time for rubbernecking later. Word would be coming back from the Marine expeditionary force very soon now, she knew, and she needed to make sure the other members of the Appropriations Committee knew what she was about to do.

The Senate Committee Deliberation Chamber was dominated by a long, oval table and deeply cushioned link chairs, though the whole assembly could sink back into the floor and be replaced by ranks of chairs in an auditorium setting for meetings requiring a quorum to be physically present. A door slid open, and Jon Armandez and Lester Tillman walked in. “Hello, Cyndi,” Tillman said with a grin. Armandez merely nodded, cold.

“Gentlemen,” she said. “Is anyone else going to be here in the flesh?”
“I don’t think so, Senator,” Tillman replied, shrugging. “Bad timing. Most of the committee is off-Ring right now. Summer holidays, you know.”
She made an unpleasant face. “Holidays. Our world faces utter destruction, and the people charged with her protection go off on vacation.”
“Some would say, Madam Senator,” Armandez said evenly, “that the Marines are doing a pretty fair job of that already.”
“Save it for the debating floor, Jon,” Yarlocke said. “When you have an audience that might care.”
She watched as the two senators took chairs at the table, leaning back and placing the palms of their left hands on the link pad embedded in each chair’s arm. Both men appeared to be asleep.

Armandez, she thought, could be a problem. Most of the other senators on the Appropriations Committee could be reasoned with, but Jon Armandez had a kid in the Commonwealth Marines. The guy had always been a militarist—he represented Ishtar, for God’s sake!—and had squared off against Yarlocke more than once in debates over appropriations intended to keep 1MIEF up and running, but the problem had become significantly worse since his daughter had enlisted.

Damn it, the Senate ought to enact a law excluding people with close relatives in the military from running for public office. It constituted a conflict of interest, and ought to be prohibited. She’d never get a bill like that past the pro-military clique, though. Right now, the military—especially the Marines—were pop ular. If she was going to ram her proposal through, she was going to need to get more of those people on her side, and that was going to be tough.

She wished Marie Devereaux were still here. The former senator from Quebec had been a vehemently outspoken critic of the militarists, a powerful speaker, and a persuasive advocate of the cause of peace.

Not persuasive enough, perhaps. Despite her opposition, the Senate had approved sending 1MIEF into Xul-owned space, and later cheered the news of the wholesale destruction of entire star systems. Devereaux had been voted out of office six years ago, in the elections of 2880, and had run as a candidate for Commonwealth President in both ’80 and in ’84.

As if any Québecois could ever attain that office. There were still too many sectarian divides within the patchwork of states that made up the Commonwealth. Too many citizens resident in the old United States mistrusted the Québecois and their political agendas, and too many Québecois remembered—or thought they did—the occupation of parts of Quebec by the then-U.S. back in the 21^st Century. National memories, it seemed, took a long time to die.

Still, she thought, it might be worthwhile to support Devereaux’s presidential bid in exchange for some political favors. Especially in terms of moving some of the fence-sitters in the Senate chambers over to her way of thinking. She made a mental note to arrange a virtual meeting with the woman, perhaps later, after the upcoming meeting.

Eight more senators wandered into the Deliberation Chamber, greeting her with nods or a few words, and settling into the link chairs. Durant. Hartov. Stevens. She knew them all. Many were fence-sitters, uncommitted, as yet, to either side of the debate. She needed to reach them, somehow.

Yarlocke took a last look at Earth, suspended in space in fragile glory.

She needed their votes in order to save the Earth, and all of human civilization.

It was time. She’d kept them waiting long enough. Taking one of the empty chairs, she sat down, dropped the backrest almost flat, and placed her hand over the link plate. Instantly, the vista of Earth and Ring vanished, replaced by an inner menu selection. At her mental command, Harry opened an electronic door for her and she stepped into a virtual assembly.

The assembly room appeared to be in deep space, the spiral of the Galaxy aglow with gentle light hanging in emptiness. Twenty-four senators were waiting for her, visible as a constellation of gleaming icons, each tagged with tiny windows displaying biographical data and her personal notes on each.

“Sorry I’m late, people,” Yarlocke said as she entered the icon swarm. “I was in conference, couldn’t get free.”
If any in the swarm doubted her excuse, they didn’t make it public. As she merged with the assembly, taking up a position at the swarm’s center, each of the twenty-four icons revealed itself as a single bright star surrounded by hundreds of lesser points of light.

The Senate Defense Appropriations Committee was a small government within a government, consisting now of several thousand humans and AIs, working out of their own hab physically attached to Government Center. Out of almost five hundred representatives in the Commonwealth Senate, forty-one sat on the committee. The rest of that small army was made up of aides, Senate staffers, AI secretaries, and the swelling bureaucracy that attended any organiza tion of this type. Each senator had an entourage of his or her own, from human assistants down to personal data-mining netbots, as well as communication channels, many of them self-aware, that extended throughout both EarthRing and the cities of Earth herself. Those assistants were represented here by the lesser points of light, the senators by the brighter stars.

There were also several star clusters representing non-voting members of the committee, notably General Dorrity, the senior liaison officer with Defense. Dorrity was trouble . . . another Marine, and therefore invested with an inflated sense of loyalty to Alexander and his vandals.

With all of that communications technology, Yarlocke thought, it ought to be possible to get a better showing at these meetings. The Commonwealth Senate, she knew well, tended to be a peripatetic bunch, and it could take—she smiled inwardly at the thought—an act of Congress to get them to show up for a physical vote. In fact, over half of those attending this session were present within Government Center only electronically, rather than physically. Most were elsewhere within the Ring. A few were on Earth. This was an election year, and most of the members of the Commonwealth Senate were absorbed in the necessities of getting re-elected, and that meant actually being personally present within their districts.

Yarlocke understood campaigning and the attendant demands of politics, but sometimes it was difficult to get anything constructive done. Only a relatively small minority within the Senate actually recognized the danger now threatening Humankind. It would be up to her to convince, first, the Appropriations Committee . . . and then present the full Senate with a fait accompli.

But . . . it could only be done one step at a time. At least this time she’d been able to strong- arm enough of her fellow senators to attend—electronically, at least—to comprise a quorum. Twenty-five out of forty-one was a clear majority of the voting body.

The question now, though, was how many of those other twenty-four would be siding with her this morning?
“A quorum being present,” an AI voice said within the minds gathered in the virtual chamber, “the Senate Defense Appropriations Committee, meeting this fifteenth day of June, 2886 of the Common Era, is now in session. The honorable Senator Cyndi Collins Yarlocke presiding. . . .”
“Thank you all for coming,” she said, addressing the group. “By now, most of you will have seen the initial reports from Cluster Space. General Alexander, Admiral Taggart, and the 1st MIEF are reporting another victory over the Xul.”
She sensed a stir through the gathered assembly, and smiled to herself. Only a few had seen that news item. Good. Perhaps she could use their surprise to her advantage.

“Gentlemen, ladies, fellow sentients . . . by now all of you know my position concerning the current war. It is a war we have been prosecuting now for nine years, and with little to show for the staggering investment in money, ships, and lives. It is a war, unfortunately, that has numerous supporters, thanks to misinformation and certain misconceptions. Even more unfortunately, electronic polls demonstrate conclusively that the majority of Humankind cares little one way or another about this war. They do not feel threatened by the Xul. And, indeed, why should they? The last time the Xul posed any threat to humanity whatsoever was in 2314, some six centuries ago, near enough.

“Gentlemen, ladies, fellow sentients, I submit that it is time at last to end all funding for 1MIEF. It is time to make peace with the Xul. And it is time to bring our young people home from the stars.” She paused for a moment, anticipating the storm. “The Chair will now entertain debate. . . .”
And there was a storm, as dozens of star-icons vied with one another for the Chair’s acknowledgement. Harry indicated to her that Senator James Witter, of North California, had been first off the mark, but Witter was already solidly in Yarlocke’s pocket. His constituency was nestled in between the military-heavy senatorial districts of Portseattle and South California, and he owed her a number of favors for her support in the Alameda Scandal two years ago.

Instead, she decided to get the worst over with first. “The Chair recognizes the Appropriations Committee liaison with the secretary of defense, General Dorrity.”
“Madam Chairperson,” Dorrity’s voice said. “Just how in hell do you plan on getting the Xul to sit down with us at the peace table?”
Rather than give the answer herself, she decided to let one of her supporters provide a response. That way, she could maintain the image of . . . not neutrality, not when her views on the issue were so well known . . . but of fairness. Balance. Even- handedness.

“The Chair recognizes Senator Ralston.”
“General Dorrity,” Ralston said, “how do we know they won’t talk peace until we ask them? The Xul are intelligent beings, members of an extremely old and sophisticated species, one that was star-faring before the engineering of humanity half a million years ago. As rational beings, they will surely see the advantages of peaceful coexistence, now that we have, ah, more than adequately demonstrated our ability to defend ourselves.”
“Senator, with all due respect, the Xul are not rational, not as humans define the word.”
“Racist paranoia, General.”
“If by ‘racist’ you mean I possess a human viewpoint, then I plead guilty. If there’s one thing we’ve learned about the Xul, it is that they are not human, and do not in any way think like humans. In fact, ‘racist paranoia’ is a decent description of how they think. Any intelligence not of the Xul must be exterminated. That simple concept appears to be a fundamental trope for them: non-Xul are dangerous, and must be exterminated for the survival of the race. We can not reason with someone who has such a fundamentally different way of looking at the universe than we do.”
“Again, General, we have not tried! When did we last make a genuine attempt to communicate with these people, as opposed to going in and blowing up one of their suns?”
“The Wings of Isis attempted to communicate, Senator,” Dorrity said coldly. “The Argo attempted to communicate. There have been others.”
“Ancient history, General. That was before we demonstrated that we can defend ourselves with the Euler triggerships. They know we can hurt them. Now it’s time to talk with them.”
“What passes for communication with those monsters is to reduce the person trying to talk to a pattern of electronic information inside one of their computers.”
Yarlocke listened with only half her awareness. The arguments were old, familiar, and age-worn, the continuation of a debate that had been going on for the better part of a decade. Indeed, she suspected that a search of the congressional records would turn up the same tired arguments going back five hundred years or more. The militarists, conservatives both in the government and in the military, were convinced you couldn’t reason with the Xul, that they were more programmed machine than rational and sentient lifeforms. More liberal wings of the government, the Pax Astras and others, liked to point out that even human-designed AIs, many of them, were sentient and self- aware beings, and that, except where they were deliberately restricted by their programming, often were capable of self-determination and could rewrite their own code. They could be convinced, in other words, by a rational argument, just like humans. If that was true of AI software, why wouldn’t it be true of the Xul as well?
Of course, Yarlocke had to admit that many humans in her experience, unlike the more advanced AIs, could not be convinced by rational argument. Dorrity, for instance, was driven by sentiment for his beloved Marine Corps, and by such intangibles as duty, loyalty, and honor. Not that those were bad things in and of themselves, necessarily. But they could be damned inconvenient when the person you were arguing with couldn’t let go and see the bigger picture.

Yarlocke absolutely believed in loyalty, but she never let such niceties interfere with her duty as she saw it.

Nor was she about to let someone else’s sense of duty or loyalty get in her way.

As the debate ground on, Yarlocke had one of her personal data hunters move through the network, polling current vote probabilities. Out of twenty-five voting members on the committee, ten were either committed to the Pax personally, or had promised her their vote in return for other favors. That left her three short of a majority if a vote were called now.

Eight in the assembly were solidly militarist, and five short of a majority. The swing votes would come from the seven remaining members of the committee who had not yet declared for either side. Calling up the files and voting rec ords of those seven, she studied them closely. Two, Donahue and Hernandez, were Social Democrats, with voting rec ords that tended slightly toward the liberal side. One, Raynor, was an outspoken member of the Church of Mind. While religion wasn’t supposed to enter into senatorial deliberations, Yarlocke knew that religion shaped the man. The C of M put a heavy emphasis on the unity of all thinking creatures, and on that basis alone Raynor might be open to reason.

The other four were Inde pen dents, and which way their vote would go was anyone’s guess.

The data were encouraging, though. Three of the seven might well be induced to vote her way, given the proper inducement, and that would be her majority. She could reasonably assume that two of the four Inde pen dents might vote her way simply out of chance, which gave her a decent margin.

She would not allow herself to feel complacent, however. A lot of work remained before she could declare victory in this issue.

But she did feel confident of final victory.

The 1MIEF would be brought home and disbanded. The unjust war with the Xul would be ended. Humankind would enjoy the blessings of peace for the first time in centuries.

And Senator Cyndi Collins Yarlocke would at last have her chance at her real goal. . . .

UCS Hermes Stargate
Carson Space 1445 hrs, GMT

“Congratulations, General.”
“Eh? For what, Cara?”
“On your victory, of course. The data are . . . promising.” Alexander leaned back from his desk, breaking palm contact with the battlenet link. He’d been going over the casualty and ship loss reports for three hours straight, now, and he needed a break.

Cara was the name of his primary EA, or Electronic Aide, a personal secretary responsible for sorting, manipulating, and storing the blizzard of downloaded electronic information, official and personal calls, and virtual meetings he faced each and every day. She’d been with him, through numerous upgrades, ever since his days at the Academy, when he’d been a snot-nosed j.g. with more enthusiasm than sense.

A long time ago . . .

“Thank you, Cara. That may be premature, however.” “The final tally lists fourteen Xul hunterships destroyed

by direct combat,” Cara said, a crispness to her mental voice. “Given the strength of the enemy forces, that compares very favorably with the loss of thirty-three Commonwealth and allied ships, of all types. And the probe data suggests that the enemy has withdrawn from Cluster Space.”

“Withdrawn, possibly,” Alexander replied. “But not destroyed. Nova Bloodlight was a fizzle.”
“The nova’s yield was not that of a larger main sequence star, certainly,” she told him. “But our BDA probes have picked up evidence of considerable damage in the Cluster Space system. At least two hundred Xul hunterships appear to be adrift and lifeless over there. And the others have fl e d .”
“Correction,” Alexander told her. “The others appear to have withdrawn, probably just until the local star quiets down. They will almost certainly be back.” He sighed. “Yarlocke and her jackals are gong to be all over this one.”
“I believe, General,” Cara told him, “that you are being too pessimistic.”
“Time will tell. Meanwhile, we need to get the rest of those Battle Damage Assessments turned out. I need something to show SecDef.”
“Will you be transmitting that via CQQ, sir?”
He thought about that. “No. We’ll translate Hermes back to Earth’s L-3. We can take a few of the more badly damaged fleet elements back with us, and bring back a load of supplies. Maybe take the Barton back as well, if we have serious casualties who need treatment at NMH EarthRing. And I think I’m going to want to talk to both General Dorrity and Wilson in person.”
Wilson was SecDef, the Commonwealth’s secretary of defense, and ultimately Alexander’s boss, at least underneath the supreme command of President Stiner.

The balance of political power within the Commonwealth had swung back and forth over the years. Theoretically, the legislative, executive, and judicial checks and balances were supposed to preserve that balance in a system that went back over a thousand years to the original United States of America. In practice, though, there was a constant ebb and flow of political power. During the dark years of the mid-27^th Century, the Commonwealth Presidency had evolved into the Office of the Chief Executive, with almost dictatorial powers during the first interstellar conflict with the PanEuro peanChinese Alliance. Since then, things had shifted the other way, and the President now was widely seen as a figurehead only, with the real political clout vested with the Commonwealth Senate.

Someday, Alexander reflected, things would swing back to the President . . . or to the Supreme Court . . . or even the wagging tail of the Legislative House. As a military man sworn to uphold the constitutions both of the United States and the Humankind Commonwealth, he by law could have no public opinion on the matter.

Privately, he thought the demagoguery of the Senate was a piss-poor way to prosecute a war . . . almost as poor as having the war run by one civilian with delusions of grandeur. That was why there had to be a balance, to keep any one group or individual from acquiring too much power and misusing it through misplaced ambition or ignorance or both.

The problem of the moment lay with the Senate—in partic ular with the se nior senator from Maine, Cyndi Yarlocke . . . the Warlock, as he thought of her in strict privacy. The woman hated the military, hated the Marines, and hated him. She was worse than Senator Devereaux of a few years back in her determination to shut down both 1MIEF and the Corps. Through Dorrity and the Defense Department, a fair- sized cadre of senators still supported 1MIEF’s efforts against the Xul, but Alexander knew they were fighting a constant rear-guard action against the Warlock and her misguided personality cult.

He also knew that the Warlock’s minions were going to hammer at what they would perceive as a failure out here in Cluster Space—huge losses, the less- than-complete destruction of a Xul node, and the escape of a very large number of Xul ships. They would be seeking political advantage in the outcome of Operation Clusterstrike, of that he was certain. Alexander would need to marshal every positive aspect of the op to defend himself and his people.

“It does look like we have one piece of solid and useful intel, General. From the Penetrator teams.”

“Really? What?”

Cara opened a window in his mind. Alexander found himself looking into a vista filled with stars, swarms of stars, stars gathered in teeming millions, like the inside of a globular cluster . . . no, like the Galactic Core itself. The vista was so filled with stars and a hazy, red-hued light it was difficult to make out individual details, but in the center of the vista was . . . something. Something strange, and very large.

“What the hell is that?” he asked.

“It’s the center of the Galaxy, General,” Cara told him. “The Galactic Core. And it just may be the core, the very heart, of the Xul Empire. . . .”