LITMIR.BIZ

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for the destruction of the Tabby’s Star civilization. Brought back to human space, it had been employed against the Rosette Aliens at Kapteyn’s Star, and evidently had been responsible for stopping the monumentally powerful invaders …

      … at least for now. The Rosetters hadn’t been destroyed in the encounter by any means. As far as the xenosophontologists were concerned, they’d simply been forced to halt their advance toward Earth and actually notice the humans defiantly standing in their way.

      “A copy,” Gray repeated. “Where? I mean, the Republic is going to have pretty limited running space for a full AI.”

      “In this,” one of the civilian sophontologists said. She moved her hand in the air, summoning a hologram. “We call this the Helleslicht Modul Eins.”

      Gray’s translator software told him the meaning of the German phrase: Bright Light Module One. The 3-D diagram floating in front of the woman was egg-shaped and, according to the listed dimensions, some three meters long and massing five metric tons.

      “Dr. Marsh is a member of our xenosophontological team,” Vasilyeva told him. “But her specialty is advanced AI.”

      “I see.”

      “The HM-1’s internal matrix,” Marsh explained, “is essentially computronium—solid computing matter—with quantum circuitry of sufficient complexity and power to support Nikolai with plenty of room to spare.”

      She sounded quite proud … and if she was even partly responsible for this device, she had every right to be. Artificial intelligences like Konstantin—in particular super-AIs, or “SAIs”—were resident within large computer complexes, usually underground and anything but mobile. Konstantin, for instance, had begun his existence in a subselene facility beneath Tsiolkovsky Crater, on the far side of the moon.

      Using the far-flung Global Net, they could send independent parts of themselves anywhere within cislunar space. Pared-down copies of them, subsets of the larger and more powerful original software, could be resident within the electronic networks of starships or orbital stations. A sub-clone of Konstantin had made the passage to Tabby’s Star on board the star carrier America, and even smaller copies had been used to remotely contact the alien Dysonswarm intelligence there, and the uploaded minds called the Satori.

      But that had been a fraction of what the original was capable of.

      Gray wasn’t certain how massive the Tsiolkovsky complex was, but he knew it was big. If the Europeans had managed to build a computer that could run a similar SAI in a volume amounting to a few cubic meters, that was more than impressive.

      It was a giant step forward for SAIs.

      “So why does Nikolai want to go to Deneb?” Gray asked. He hesitated, then looked up at the ceiling. “I assume you do want to go, Nikolai?”

      “Very much, Captain Gray,” Nikolai said.

      “We cannot stress the importance of this expedition too much, Captain,” Duchamp added. “It is vital—vital—that we engage the Deneban civilization peacefully, to learn about them and their abilities, and perhaps to secure their aid in our confrontation with the Rosette Aliens.”

      Gray shook his head. “I have to be honest with you, Admiral,” he said. “The Denebans may not be a good prospect for contact, let alone military aid. As best as we can determine, they utterly destroyed a technologically advanced culture at Tabby’s Star without even attempting to negotiate or open lines of communication.”

      “We know that, Captain,” Duchamp said. “It was for that reason that we approached your President Koenig to request that we be included in Project Cygni. A copy of Nikolai, working with a copy of your Konstantin, offers, we believe, our best hope of establishing peaceful contact and technological help. It is unlikely that organic humans will be able to communicate in a meaningful way with such an advanced civilization.”

      “But human oversight of the expedition is necessary,” Vasilyeva told him. “And when we learned that President Koenig was considering you as the expedition commander, we knew that there was hope.”

      “Why?” Gray asked, genuinely baffled.

      “Captain … we know too well that you can win battles, even wars. But what interests us is your ability to win peace.”

       Chapter Two

       31 January 2426

       VFA-96, Black Demons

       SupraQuito Yards

       Earth Synchorbit

       1018 hours, TFT

      Through the vista opened by his fighter’s AI in his mind, Lieutenant Donald Gregory stared out into the tangle of orbital structures spread out before him. The SupraQuito Synchorbital was the largest of the human facilities in orbit over Earth, consisting of some hundreds of major stations and facilities strung together in a long, brilliantly lit arc.

      The collection of structures was balanced on the Quito space elevator at an altitude of 37,786 kilometers, and a single orbit of the Earth took precisely twenty-four hours, which meant that the complex kept pace with the same spot on the turning Earth. From there, a slender tower reached down to its anchor point atop a mountain on Earth’s equator, and up into the black of space to the tethered asteroid that kept the whole assembly in dynamic tension. Four centuries earlier, synchorbit had been the parking zone for a swarm of unmanned communications satellites. Now it was one of three major communities in Earth orbit, with a permanent population of over sixty thousand and some thousands more each day traveling up or down the “E,” or arriving or departing on fleets of both interplanetary and interstellar ships.

      The local sky, Gregory saw, was crowded with activity. The two badly damaged star carriers, Lexington and his own—or what used to be his own—America had been towed into position off the Navy yard, along with a couple of small asteroids. The two battered carriers were now almost obscured by swarming nanorepair ’bots busily eating away at the damaged hull surfaces, while simultaneously stripping the asteroids of raw material and bringing it across to the ships in steady streams.

      We can rebuild our ships on the fly, Gregory thought. We can give them new life with this tech. But we can’t do anything for my squad mates.

      Like Meg …

      Lieutenant Meg Connor had been killed at Invictus, a frigid, ice-clad world out beyond the rim of the galaxy and 12 million years in the future. Gregory had lost his legs in that action. They’d grown those back for him … but nothing could bring back Megan.

      Or Cynthia DeHaviland, killed in the hellfire of Kapteyn’s Star just a month ago.

      “Tighten up, Demon Four!” the squadron’s CO snapped at him. “Belay the rubbernecking.” Commander Mackey sounded stressed.

      What the hell do you have to be worried about? he thought, a bit petulantly, but he bit down on the words. “Copy,” was all he said. A moment’s inattention had let his Starblade fighter drift almost imperceptibly within the seven-ship formation, and with a thought he brought himself back into line. The spacelanes above and around the SupraQuito orbital facility were indeed crowded with ships large and small, construction tugs, intrastation transports, ship’s gigs, liberty boats, space-suited personnel on EVA, mobile repair shacks, and provisioning vessels. Theoretically, a lane had been cleared for the fighter squadron, but there was near-infinite opportunity here for a mistake.

      And in space any mistake was likely to be expensive, fatal, or both.

      At least Don Gregory was no longer suicidal. For a time after Invictus he’d been thinking about that a lot. The depression, at times, was overwhelming. His own in-head circuitry had urged him more than once to seek help, but

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