Deep Time. Ian Douglas

had met the Agletsch, and used one of their pidgins.

      If they were actually a part of the Sh’daar Collective, though, they would have to have a way to communicate with other Collective members.

      More than that, Charlie One had been on Earth, which meant its crew had been in touch with the Earth Commonwealth—and that meant they almost certainly spoke a language humans (or their AIs) could understand.

      Gray wondered if Charlie One was carrying an ambassador of some kind. Not that the Sh’daar had ever shown any evidence of understanding the concept of ambassadors or of the niceties of diplomatic service. Agletsch traders were the closest thing humans had encountered yet to Sh’daar diplomats. For even though those damned spiders never did anything for free, their stock-in-trade was information … and in so far as diplomacy involved an exchange of information and of understanding, they were naturals in the role.

      But, so far, at least, there were no generally accepted rules on the galactic stage as there were for human diplomats—no embassies or consulates or formal exchanges of ambassadors. It had occurred to Gray on more than one occasion that this was one reason the Sh’daar War had dragged on for so long. Even the defeat of the Sh’daar in their home time and space had led to only an informal and non-binding truce. Twenty years after Koenig had emerged victorious from the N’gai Cloud in the remote past, human space was being raided by the Slan.

      And now Charlie One was in the picture. What the hell had that ship been doing in North India?

      That was one reason for giving the order not to attempt contact until America had arrived.

      He didn’t want to hear about this one secondhand.

       Emergency Presidential Command Post

       Toronto

       United States of North America

       0725 hours, EST

      “It looks like a full day for you, sir.”

      President Koenig looked up at Marcus Whitney and scowled. “Where’s my coffee, damn it?”

      “Right here, sir,” Lana Evans said, reaching past Whitney and placing the cup on his desk. “Anything else, Mr. President?”

      “No. Thank you.” He glowered at Whitney. “What do we have?”

      “Most of it is focused on what’s happening in Europe right now, sir, and throughout the Confederation. After the battle at Verdun yesterday, the entire Confederation appears to have collapsed.”

      “And about damned time, too,” Koenig said. He was tired after far too little sleep, and he needed his coffee. He’d been up until nearly three that morning, following reports streaming in from the star carrier America. When he’d gone to bed, America was still maneuvering, trying to match course and speed with the alien. A fighter had already docked with Charlie One, and two SAR tugs had been launched, but it would be hours yet before there would be any solid information from out there, now out well beyond the orbit of Neptune.

      He sipped his coffee, made a face, then looked up at Whitney. “Okay. What else?”

      “Here you go, sir,” Whitney said, thoughtclicking on his own connection with the electronics in the presidential office. “It’s all on the Pickle.”

      He was referring to the “PICKL,” a centuries-old acronym standing for “President’s Intelligence ChecK-List.” It had first appeared in the mid-twentieth century as the CIA’s daily briefing for the U.S. president on important events that had occurred throughout the world overnight. Eventually it had vanished, world events having become too complex to be so easily distilled.

      Recently, though, the idea of the PICKL had been revived in electronic form. World events were more complex than ever, including as it did not only news from all over Earth, but from colonies across the entire solar system and out among the nearer stars as well. The ocean of information flooding in at every moment was too large and complex by far for any one man to follow, information of which the president of the USNA needed to be aware. The current PICKL was created by a metanetwork of super-AIs operating within the government, the military, and for the various national intelligence services—Konstantin, on the Moon, was a major participant—and in large part was the network responsible for boiling that ocean down to teacup size.

      Koenig ran down the list of briefings. At the top of the list was the capture of the alien starship, code-named Charlie One. It would be hours yet before America’s SAR tugs would catch the vessel and begin decelerating it. Until that happened, it was still hurtling outbound, now well past the orbit of Neptune and out into the Kuiper Belt. Details were sketchy, but evidently a fast-thinking fighter pilot off the America had used a drone to interfere with the alien’s singularity projector. Something important had clearly burned out; if it hadn’t, Charlie One would have slipped into metaspace long ago and been gone.

      I’ll have to commend that pilot later, he thought. Another urgent point on the list caught his eye. It had to do with Charlie One’s apparent destination, in the constellation Cancer. He decided to study that later, too.

      He moved to another item: closer to home there was a revolution against the Confederation government in South India, clashes between Chinese special forces and Russian troops in the Siberian maritime province, religious riots and demonstrations across the Theocracy, and massive flooding from a storm surge in the Philippines that almost certainly would foment unrest.

      It went on:

      A breakthrough in communicating with the Slan at Crisium … suspected sabotage in the Mt. Kenya space elevator … yet another formal protest by the Papess in Rome denouncing the White Covenant … government collapse in Geneva … possible Sh’daar activity at 70 Ophiuchi …

      In short, very much business as usual. With the USNA walking the proverbial knife’s edge between survival and disaster on a dozen fronts.

      “The big thing on the docket for today,” Whitney said, interrupting Koenig’s perusal of the list, “is the Washington dedication.”

      Koenig groaned. “I don’t suppose we can put that off?”

      “Not easily, sir. It’s an enormous affair, and there may be a hundred thousand people attending. It may turn out to be a lot bigger than that, as the news about Verdun moves down the Nets.”

      Koenig sighed.

      Washington, D.C., the former capital of the old United States, had been partially submerged by rising sea levels at the end of the twenty-first century. The capital had been moved to Columbus, Ohio, where it had remained for the next nearly three and a half centuries. Washington had slowly been claimed by swamp, mangroves, and forests of kudzu, which enveloped the exposed marble buildings and monuments. A part of the Periphery, it had been abandoned by the United States, then ignored by the new United States of North America. Tribes of Prims continued to hang on to a marginal existence there, fishing over what once had been the Mall, and fighting off periodic attacks by raiders out of the Virginia Periphery.

      Late the previous year, not long after the beginning of hostilities in the civil war against the Confederation, the Pan-Europeans had attempted to take over Washington and several other parts of the North American Periphery. A sharp battle with local forces had broken the Confed attack. Since then, USNA help and technology had been pouring into the area, reclaiming the swamp, clearing old buildings and growing new ones, and freeing walls, monuments, and domes from the clinging riot of greenery.

      Today, President Koenig was scheduled to fly to Washington and dedicate the reborn city, formally reinstating it as part of the USNA. Within the next six months, it was hoped, Washington would once again, after three centuries, be the North American capital. Preparations were already under way to move the physical apparatus of government from Toronto south.

      Koenig wasn’t convinced that the move was a good idea. Since most of any government now was its electronic infrastructure rather than specific buildings, one city was pretty much the same as