‘“Should we need them”,’ she repeated.
Admiral Kale pulled his lip. ‘Ma’am, Captain Stillich is a conscientious officer. But I have to say that Navy analysts don’t concur with the case he is making here. He’s stringing together coincidences to make a case for a coming rebellion for which we have no hard evidence. After all, an interstellar war has always seemed inconceivable, at least with sublight technology. This is why we blew the interstellar wormholes decades back – a shell of empty space light years thick is our best defence against any uppity starborn. To imagine you could mount a campaign across light years, where a single transit takes years, you would be seen coming all the way, and it would take just as long even to return messages back to the home base . . .’
Shira’s chair wheeled her back and forth, an oddly restless motion, though she sat as still as ever. ‘But Stillich has been out there. He has seen these “rebellious” colonists with his own eyes. An invasion may be low risk, but given the disastrous consequences, it would be remiss of me not to listen, wouldn’t it?’ She turned back to Stillich, servomotors purring. ‘So what must we do, Captain? Shall I dispatch my Navy to Alpha System?’
‘Ma’am, it may already be too late for that. It may be the best course to keep the Navy in the Solar System to meet any threat.’
‘A threat that may already be on its way.’
‘We must prepare for the worst case, yes.’
‘So what would you have me do?’
Stillich had Pella throw up some Virtual images – schematic maps of the Solar System and its environs. ‘My strategy would be threefold, ma’am: detect, defend, dig in. We should watch for them coming. Send up or rededicate telescopes to hunt for GUTdrive emissions – gamma radiation, neutrinos. It’s a distinctive spectrum. Also, use optical telescopes to look out for solar sail craft – try to spot the rebels any way they might come.’
‘And if they do come, how do we defend ourselves?’
‘Surely Earth will be the prime target. We need to consider a layered defence. Station ships and weapons stashes across the System. Use resource nodes like Titan, Jupiter’s orbit, the Trojan asteroids—’
‘Of course,’ Kale said, ‘if they do come from Alpha System it will be from out of the ecliptic, the plane of the Solar System. That will make it harder still to defend.’
Stillich replied, ‘True. And if they do get through, Earth itself is obviously quite vulnerable. Earth has a massive population, yet almost all that sustains it comes from space. Most of Earth’s food is imported from Titan, a moon of Saturn. Even our communications links are space-based. If we were cut off from space resources—’
‘And so we dig in,’ Shira said.
‘Lay in reserves of food, clean water, medical supplies. Try to set up, or restore, power systems on the surface or underground. Communications – set up a land-based network, using hardened optical fibre links.’
Kale smiled. ‘We will be raiding the museums!’
‘The point is to make the planet independent of space resources, at least for a period of siege.’
Shira said, ‘You are conjuring up apocalyptic images, Captain.’
‘That’s not my intention,’ Stillich said firmly. ‘The invaders will be far from home, dependent on the resources they have brought with them across light years; they will be a few thousand facing a population of billions. We may be able to stop them before they get here. If they get through they will be able to land blows, for they will have the advantage of the high ground. But if we can deny them resupply, we can starve them out – it will be the Alphans under siege, not Earth. We can win this war, ma’am, if it comes, but only if we prepare.’
‘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. 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, Captain. And, Admiral, I want you to relocate your command centres to similar sites, bunkers beneath the major cities.’
Kale seemed bewildered. ‘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 service had been a good thing.
AD 4815. 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 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 were 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 virus, a transient structure of data and memory, conscious, 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. ‘Remember that I can see your awareness laid out before me, like a map – 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 light-speed. 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. A Store called the Solar System. You and your flock will feed and bud for ever, without limit.’