Deep Time. Ian Douglas

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СКАЧАТЬ of the moral high ground … and no one outside of the innermost reaches of the USNA government appeared to realize that the entire movement was an electronic construct.

      “What I need is a physical avatar,” Koenig said ruefully, “not just the electronic version.”

      “A physical avatar,” Whitney said, thoughtful. “You mean like a touristbot?”

      “Actually—”

      “There are some pretty good TRs, sir.” The initials stood for “teleoperated robot,” and referred to simulacra that could be “ridden” long-distance by human operators.

      “That won’t be necessary, Marcus.”

      “No, really, sir. Dopplebots. We could have a stand-in made up for you that—”

      “No, Marcus. I wasn’t serious.”

      There were public figures, Koenig knew, simsex actors especially, who mentally rode robots designed to be indistinguishable from their human counterparts. And some tourists used them to explore the surface of Venus or the streets of distant cities without leaving home. He’d always found the idea of robotic public appearances gimmicky … and mildly rude. Showing up in a robot body when people thought it was you seemed deceptive, and a violation of the public trust. If the public spotted the stand-in—and no robotic replica was perfect—he’d never hear the end of it.

      He sighed. “When do I have to be there?”

      “Twelve thirty, sir. The program begins at one. A shuttle is scheduled to leave Toronto’s waterfront at twelve ten, with a twelve-minute flight.”

      The maglev tubes to Washington weren’t open yet.

      “Okay. Let’s see what we can get done before then.” He scanned again down the list of items appearing on his in-head, then projected it onto a virtual screen floating above his desk. “Tell me about this one … ‘Collapse in Geneva.’”

      “A Starlight mob stormed the offices of the Confederation Senate this morning,” Whitney told him. “The police appear to have joined the mobs, and there’s a complete breakdown of social order …”

      In Switzerland, of all places? Orderly, clean, law-abiding Switzerland? It seemed like the rankest blasphemy.

      USNS/HGF Concord

       In pursuit

       0745 hours, TFT

      By the time Concord had matched vectors with the alien and closed the range to a few hundred kilometers, Dahlquist had a real problem on his hands.

      It wasn’t a matter of betraying the United States of North America … not at all. He’d been following the news feeds while Concord had been posted out in Vesta space, and it was clear that the civil war there was all but over. The Earth Confederation’s remaining fortresses had fallen, its leaders were dead or captured, the Geneva government itself under siege by religious fanatics. If he’d been able to seize Charlie One in the name of the Confederation—and the thought had crossed his mind hours earlier—who the hell would he give it to?

      In any case, he remained loyal to the USNA. It was the Prim Sandy Gray he didn’t like, and whom he would disgrace if he possibly could. The guy never should have been promoted to flag rank so quickly—should never have been promoted past lieutenant at all. As Dahlquist saw things, Primitives never developed the same facility with in-head technology as people who’d been wired from birth. They might serve well enough in the military as enlisted personnel, but never as officers.

      He didn’t realize it, but he was recapitulating an ancient argument of military service that went back to the old United States, to the British Empire, and even before: you had to be a college graduate to be commissioned as an officer. Arguably, it was an outgrowth of feudalism, when only landed gentry—the nobles—could afford armor and a horse, leaving peasants, by default, to become foot soldiers.

      With the presumption that only the wealthy could afford formal education—and a formal education was required to teach a student the history, the tactics, and the deportment necessary for the proverbial officer and a gentleman—it was a system that had worked, and worked well, for something like two thousand years.

      There were exceptions, of course. There always had been—the mustangs who came up through the ranks, the battlefield promotions, the noncom who found himself the senior man of an embattled platoon or company. In Dahlquist’s opinion, those scarcely counted. In modern combat, it was vital that an officer have that perfect union of the organic and the machine, the balance of human mind and AI, the speed and grasp of the computer melded perfectly with the intuition and the inventiveness of the human brain.

      And upstart Prim admirals just didn’t cut it.

      Concord’s AI was painting an image of the alien now. Three of America’s search-and-rescue tugs had already rendezvoused with the ship, latched on with ultra-strong cables, and were now decelerating the alien. Four of the star carrier’s fighters were present as well, standing off somewhat as they oversaw the deceleration. The sun was a tiny, shrunken bright star in the distance, now more than five light-hours—some forty AUs—off, roughly the average distance of tiny Pluto from Sol.

      Two USNA warships—a frigate and a destroyer—were still thirty minutes away from rendezvous. That Concord had managed the feat before them was due entirely to the High Guard cutter’s beefed-up maneuvering suite. The same held true for the three SAR UTW-90s—the cutter and the tugs were designed as intercept vehicles, and thus outpaced the warships.

      Each SAR vessel carried a crew of five under the command of a lieutenant or a lieutenant commander. Dahlquist was now the senior officer present.

      Opportunity presents itself, he thought.

      “Open a channel to the lead SAR tug,” he told his own communications officer.

      “Lieutenant Commander Mitchell is on the line, sir.”

      “Commander Mitchell?” he said. “This is Commander Terrance Dahlquist of the High Guard ship Concord. I am maneuvering to board the alien.”

      “Concord,” a voice replied in his head, “this is Fly Catcher. That’s negative on rendezvous, repeat, negative. We are under orders not to board the alien under any circumstances until America has joined us.”

      “I am disregarding those orders, Fly Catcher. Maintain deceleration. We’ll take it from here.”

      The alien was growing huge in Dahlquist’s inner mind’s-eye window.

      “Wave off, Concord! Wave off!”

      “Negative,” Dahlquist replied. “We’re going in.”

      And then things began to get exciting.

       Chapter Six

       29 June, 2425

      USNS/HGF СКАЧАТЬ