The Administrator looked like a young man, but appearances were deceptive; Paula knew from his biography that he was over three hundred years old, an early recipient of regeneration therapies. Humanity could now live longer than ever before without going into the MassMind, or becoming a Spacer and losing most of their humanity. He had light brown skin, hints of stubble on his chin and a faint smile on his mouth. His eyes focused on her sharply, suggesting that he’d been communing with the MassMind and only just come out of contact to talk to her. She supposed that she should have been flattered. The people who believed that her experiments should not go ahead lived in the MassMind.
“Paula,” Arun said. A chair flowed out of the floor and took shape in front of her. “Have a seat. We have some things to discuss.”
Disciplinary matters, surely, Paula thought, as she sat down. The chair moved slightly under her, conforming to the shape of her body. They probably know that I urged the Defence Force to consider the experiments even without the consent of the MassMind.
“You’re not actually in trouble,” Arun said. He’d probably seen her thoughts written over her face. Contacting the Defence Force directly had been a risk, but there’d been no choice, damn it! “You have, however, marked yourself out as a person suitable for an immensely dangerous mission. The Defence Force intends to capture a Killer starship.”
Paula felt her eyes go wide. She had seen countless entertainments where the Technical Faction, or a single isolated mad scientist, made a breakthrough that allowed Killer starships to be blown out of space with a single hit, but none of them had been real. She had learned to hate them rapidly; she hated them and the humans who wasted their lives dreaming of easy victories and an end to humanity’s long torment. They were nothing more than illusions.
“Seriously?” She asked, finally. “Why…?”
“You don’t need to know,” Arun said, holding up a hand. “The important detail is that it might not be possible to actually capture the ship, even if they do manage to board it, and if that’s the case we may lose the entire attack fleet. They want someone along who has an understanding of gravity technology and… well; you’re the best we have who is still mortal.”
Paula nodded, slightly dazed. Everyone else was in the MassMind. “I can’t promise you anything, but incredible danger,” Arun added. “You might be killed outright, or trapped on a Killer starship as it opens a wormhole to escape, or… we may never be able to transcribe you into the MassMind. Do you want the position?”
She touched the side of her head. There was a chip in there that recorded everything that made her herself; her thoughts, her personality, even her deepest darkest secrets. She rarely thought about it, but if she were to be killed, the chip would be uploaded into the MassMind and she would live again. The thought of losing that immortality was terrifying, yet if she went, she would be the first Technical to set foot on a Killer starship. How could she refuse?
“Of course,” she said. “Where do I go to sign up?”
“There’s a shuttle waiting for you now to transport you to Sparta,” Arun said. “The Admiral and his men will brief you there. Listen carefully to them. I don’t want them refusing other requests because you annoyed them, or acted dangerously. And Paula?”
Paula looked back at him. “Yes, sir?”
“Good luck,” Arun said. “You’re going to need it.”
Chapter Four
Sparta Asteroid was nothing remarkable, from the outside; a simple piece of rock floating in an endless free orbit around a dull red star. On the inside, it was very different. It served as one of the main hubs for the Defence Force and held part of the command staff. The Defence Force was very decentralised — no one had any illusions as to how long Sparta would survive a Killer attack — but if anywhere could be said to be the headquarters, it was Sparta.
Captain Andrew Ramage walked through the asteroid, barely aware of the security probes that checked and rechecked his identity. It had been years since he had served a team as a dispatcher on Sparta and it was rare for any Defence Force officer to be recalled to the headquarters unless he or she had an absolutely pressing reason to be there. Rumours had been flying around the various communications networks for weeks now, but nothing concrete had been said, not when the Killers might eavesdrop on the Defence Force’s communications links. Andrew privately doubted that they could — hacking into a network bound together by quantum entanglements was supposed to be impossible — or that they would, but no one questioned the requirement. The Killers weren’t the only enemy out there; there were human foes as well.
The Community, by its very nature, counted hundreds of thousands of different types of society, scattered across the stars. Andrew had seen asteroids that worked by a form of pure communism, asteroids that practiced free enterprise and universal franchise, systems based on aristocracy and meritocracy and everything else. It never ceased to astonish him how many different systems humanity could invent to govern themselves, or how often they could come to blows over political questions. The Defence Force didn’t have the muscle to reform all of the unpleasant governments — the Community would come apart at the seams if they tried — but the Defence Force did try to keep a lid on any conflicts. They might attract the attention of the Killers.
And then there were the hidden colonies, which didn’t recognise the authority of the Community and sought to remain in isolation, and the pirates, who preyed on human shipping with gleeful abandon. The Anderson Drive was a great invention — Andrew would never have denied it himself — but it gave the pirates too many advantages. They could jump in, carry out their raids, and then jump out again, escaping anyone who came in pursuit. Andrew sometimes wondered why the pirates didn’t form a Counter-Community, but that would have destroyed their secrecy. It was about as likely as them preying on the Killers and their massive starships.
His last mission had been against fanatical adherents of the Dreaming Meme. The Dreamers believed that they — and they alone — should dominate the MassMind, apparently in the belief that it would one day rise to godhood and remake the entire sorry universe. The remainder of their beliefs were so complicated that no one, short of a entire team of researchers, could make sense of them, but it hardly mattered. The Dreamers had left hundreds of people dead in their wake and, worst of all, they had mutilated their heads. The chip that would have given their victims immortality within the MassMind had been destroyed. It was the ultimate horror.
Bastards, he thought, as he stepped into the Admiral’s private office. He’d only seen it once before, back when he’d been a dispatcher, and so lowly as to pass unnoticed by the senior officers. The Defence Force recruited from the entire Community and was surprisingly egalitarian, but order and discipline had to be maintained.
“Captain Andrew Ramage, reporting as ordered, sir,” he said, saluting
“Captain,” Admiral Brent Roeder said. He was a short fireplug of a man, smoking a cigar so vigorously that he looked as if he was going to chew it in half. He was over two hundred years old and he’d been heading up the Defence Force for the last fifty of them, serving so well that no one had sought to remove him. “Stand at ease.”