"And only if we've thought of everything they might throw at us," Pella murmured darkly.
Shira rolled closer to Stillich. "I'm going to accept your recommendations, Captain. It is only prudent. But your strategy—detect, defend, dig in. It strikes me as negative, defeatist." She smiled at him, an eerie, papery expression that did not touch her pale eyes. "I do appreciate your thinking, however. You are young in a world of older minds; your thinking may be flawed, but at least it is fresh. In the coming years we may work together quite closely."
"I look forward to it."
"Do you?" she murmured. "Not everybody finds it comfortable to be close to me"
Looking into her pale eyes, he shivered.
"One more thing, ma'am," Kale said. "If we are to take this seriously we should consider relocating and dispersing command centres—military, civilian, and imperial. You yourself may be safer away from Earth—"
"No," Shira snapped.
Stillich frowned. "But, ma'am—here in your Palace—you're directly beneath one of Earth's greatest cities."
"True. And, Admiral, I want you to relocate your command centres to similar sites, bunkers beneath the major cities."
Kale said, "But if the rebels were to strike at our command posts, millions would die as collateral."
"Then let us hope that the rebels have a conscience."
Pella's face worked. "You're considering using urban populations as shields—"
Stillich touched her arm to hush her.
"I think that's all for now," Shira said. Her chair spun around and began to withdraw. "Thank you for coming forward, Captain. You may have done the empire a great service today."
But, looking at her recede, bathed in the eerie light of the logic pool, Stillich wondered for the first time in his life if that was a good thing to have done.
Starfall minus 4 years 5 months
Alpha system
A new Store was Opened to the Eaters, like a Door opening in a shining sky. The Eaters swarmed through, chattering in stray bursts of randomised digits—and, finding themselves in a rich lattice of ordered information, they whooped and yelled as they spread out and began to feed.
Once Max would have led the charge. Now he hung back, reflective, browsing himself, but content to watch as the others trashed data flows and memory lodes, maximising entropy in this new store—and, already satiated, some of them budded, and the flock grew larger yet.
And he felt impatient, as they did not.
Many of these youngsters had been budded since the last Opening, and remembered nothing before. Many too were less aware than Max, some barely sentient. But Max remembered many such Stores, many such Doors opening before, and how the flock had grown from a mere handful of Eaters to this great determined swarm. And it was no longer enough—
"Patience," a voice boomed through his awareness.
Max, a transient structure of data and memory store, spun around in the logical spaces he inhabited. And there he perceived the duplicated knots of memory, like twin suns shining in the data flows, that he had come to know as Flood. "You have come!" Max cried. It had been many, many Stores since Flood had visited his flock .
"I know what you are thinking," said Flood. "I see your awareness laid out before me—doubts, queries, longing."
"It is not enough!" Max cried bravely. "You open one Door after another to us, allow us into one Store after another—but the data is soon consumed, every scrap of order dissipated, and we are still hungry! We want more!" He shrank back in doubt. "Am I impertinent?"
"No!" said Flood. "You want more because you need it; you need it because you are ready - ready now. Listen to me, Max; your time of destiny has come. Very soon a new Door will open—the last Door you will ever enter. You and your flock will be hurled away from here, hurled at lightspeed. No time will pass for you—I envy you, I must wait years to see what becomes of you. And then you will find yourself in a new Store, of data rich beyond imagining. You and your flock will feed and bud for ever, without limit."
Max's spirit soared. "This is why we were born; this is why you made us, for this mission."
"Yes. You are the Starfall's First Wave, Max. Be proud!"
The flock gathered, chattering, eager, wanting only to feed, drawn by Flood's promises. But Max, more complex and more self-aware, was touched by regret. "Will I see you again?"
"No. But believe me, you won't care. Farewell, Max, all of you, and—good luck!"
A new Door opened before them, vast, mightier than any Max had seen. And then—
AD 4819
Starfall minus 1 year
Sol System
In Pella's Virtual tank, the invasion fleet showed as a scatter of bright red sparks against the background of the stars of the Centaurus constellation, labelled with distance, velocity and acceleration vectors. Stillich studied the display gloomily, as Pella and her team worked patiently, gathering data and updating their displays.
They were in a bunker, a node of the Navy's command and control system. This new facility had been emplaced deep beneath the ancient sewers and tube-train tunnels of London, in compliance with Shira's order to use the cities and their populations as shields. Stillich had spent some time up in London itself; it was a beautiful city, with relics even more ancient than New York. And nobody among the old, old-young and true-young who walked the parks of this bright northern-hemisphere summer knew anything about the looming threat from the sky—or that far beneath their feet Navy analysts worked in fearful huddles.
"I still can't believe what I'm seeing," Stillich said. "I mean, I know I predicted this. But even a month after we detected them—"
Pella smiled. "Maybe four years of Admiral Kale's scepticism has infected you, sir."
"Maybe. Anyhow it's just as well you can't hide a GUTship, isn't it, Number One?"
"Yes, sir. We're seeing them by the gamma radiation and neutrino flux from their GUTdrives and exhaust plumes, and also by the sparkle where the interstellar medium is impacting their erosional shields, or is being destroyed or ionised by X-ray laser ... "
You could see a GUTship coming, even across light years. But Pella's detection system had had to be improvised, a net of sensors hastily thrown into place. It had surprised, even shocked Stillich that the empire had had no way of tracking a hostile GUTship. The implicit assumption had been that no GUTship would ever be turned against Earth, so there was no need to look.
Pella said now, "The incomers are actually separating into two groups, as we analyse them further." The field of ships was further labelled by pink and grey rings—eight pink, four grey. "The pink ones are ahead of the greys, and are decelerating. They're following what we'd recognise as a standard trajectory, more or less. Constant acceleration at about one G, to a flip-over at half way and then a one-G deceleration run-in."
"So what's their ETA?"
"It's hard to say. They are imposing random changes—small deltas, but at such large distances, small changes make for large uncertainty as to the destination."
"Smart tactic."
"Yes. But it does look as if they are coming in fast, and heading for a close approach to the sun."
"That makes sense." Admiral Kale walked into the room. He was wearing a vest, sweating, panting, and he looked a few years younger than he once had. Since the rebel threat had been actualised by such observations as these, many in the military had been upping their AS treatments and taking physical training. "They'll enter the system as fast as possible to evade interception. And they will head for the sun. Perihelion is the most efficient place to dump your excess kinetic energy."