Star Strike. Ian Douglas

full dress, his upper left chest ablaze in luminous decorations and campaign holos. The brilliant gold Terran Sunburst, awarded for his role at the Battle of Grellsinore as a very raw lieutenant, was emblazoned on his right breast. His head and shoulders were encased within a lambent corona flammae, another social convention granted to officially designated Heroes of the Commonwealth.

      “I think we can lose the decorations,” he said. He gave a commanding thought, and the medals vanished. His uniform dwindled a bit into plain dress blacks. “And the damned light show.” The corona faded away.

      “With respect, sir,” Cara told him, “you need the bric-a-brac. The council’s chairperson is Marie Devereaux. She is impressed by proper formal presentation, and you will need to enlist her support for your plan.”

      He sighed. “Okay. Medals, yes. But not that damned glow. Makes me look like an ancient religious icon, complete with halo.”

      “The corona flammae is part of your sanctioned uniform, sir. For your service at and after the twenty-third Chinese War. And the delegation members will have their own.”

      “Fucking trappings of power. I hate this.”

      “Indeed, sir,” Cara said as the light came back on … but a trifle subdued, this time. “But how many times have you lectured me on the need to blend in with the local social environment? To do otherwise will elicit disapproval, and might well send conflicting signals or, worse, could alienate your audience.”

      Alexander looked sharply at Cara’s icon—which was presenting itself, as usual, as an attractive, dark-haired woman of indeterminate years wearing a Marine undress uniform. It was tough at times to remember that “Cara” was, in fact, an electronic artifice, an AI serving as his personal military aide and electronic office manager. A resident of the noumenon and virtual workplaces, she had no physical reality at all.

      “Okay, boss,” he said at last. “Light me. But no parade or fireworks, okay? Even heroes of the Commonwealth should be granted a little dignity.”

      “I’ll see what I can do, sir,” she told him. “But no promises!”

      And then, with Cara serving as gatekeeper and announcer, the first of the council delegates began linking in.

       5

       0507.1102

       USMC Skybase

       Paraspace

       1005 hrs GMT

      It was, Alexander decided, a bit like being in an enormous fish tank. The delegates of the Defense Advisory Council appeared in the simulation as small and relatively unobtrusive icons, until one or another spoke. At that point, the icon unfolded into what appeared to be a life-sized image, standing on emptiness and aglow with its own corona. With a swarm of golden icons surrounding him, together with a larger swarm of smaller, dimmer icons representing the group’s cloud of digital secretaries and personal electronic assistants, he felt as though he were a large and somewhat clumsy whale immersed within a school of fish.

      There was also the feeling that the entire school was studying him intently, and not a little critically. They included, Cara had reminded him, eight delegates from the Commonwealth Senate, ten senior military officers from the Bureaus of Defense, five members of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Group, and Marie Devereaux, the President’s personal advisor and representative.

      Alexander shrugged off the feeling, and continued with his presentation. They were adrift in an absolute blackness relieved only by a fuzzy circle of light surrounding them all, a ring dividing the darkness into two unequal parts. Within the smaller part, the ring shaded into blue, the leading edge. The trailing edge shaded into red.

      This was how space had looked from the point of view of Perseus, the AI commanding the colony asteroid ship Argo during her flight across the Galaxy. The luminous ring was the bizarre and beautiful relativistic compression of space as seen at near-c velocities, a three-dimensional panorama overlaid here and there by the flickering alphanumerics of Perseus’s functional displays.

      “We don’t have a lot to go on,” Alexander was telling the watching delegates. “From the time the Xul ship materialized alongside the Argo, to the moment of Argo’s destruction, less than five seconds elapsed. The AI in command of the vessel was in time-extended mode. He did not have time to fully react.”

      Artificial sentients like Perseus were designed to control their own subjective passage of time. For machine intelligences that could note the passage of millionths of a second, the passage of a truly long period of relative inactivity—such as the subjective decades necessary for interstellar flight—could literally drive the AI insane. That, it was believed, was what had happened to The Singer, the Xul huntership trapped for half a million years beneath the ice of the Europan ocean.

      Perseus had been experiencing time at roughly a thousand to one—meaning that a year was the same as roughly nine hours for a human. At that setting, though, those four and a half seconds after the appearance of the Xul ship had been the human equivalent of 4.5 thousandths of a second; it was amazing that Perseus had managed to do as much as he had.

      In Alexander’s mind, and in the minds of the watching delegates, those last seconds played out in slow motion.

      “As you see,” Alexander continued, indicating one of the numeric readouts, “the time scale has been altered so that we can experience the encounter at a ratio of about ten to one … four seconds becomes forty. Perseus would have been perceiving this about one hundred times more slowly.”

      Abruptly, a shadow appeared against the eldritch starlight. One moment there was nothing; the next, it was there, immense against the luminous ring. With its velocity matched perfectly to that of Argo, the Xul huntership appeared undistorted, a convolute and complex mountain of curves, swellings, angles, spires, and sheer mass, the whole only slightly less black than the empty space ahead and behind, forbidding and sinister.

      In fact, Alexander reminded himself, the Intruder was somewhat smaller than the Argo—perhaps 2 kilometers long and one wide, according to the data now appearing on the display, where the Argo was a potato-shaped rock over 8 kilometers thick along its long axis. But most of Argo was dead rock. The totality of her living and engineering areas, command and defense centers, storage tanks, and drive systems occupied something like three percent of the asteroid’s total bulk. The asteroid-shell of the Argo itself was invisible in the data simulation. Without the asteroid as a reference, the Intruder, slowly drifting closer, felt enormous.

      “That looks nothing like the Intruder,” Senator Dav Gannel said. “The ship that attacked Earth … and the hunterships we encountered at the Sirius Stargate, they were shaped like huge needles. That thing is … I don’t know what the hell it is, but it’s a lot fatter, more egg-shaped. How do we know it’s Xul?”

      Alexander didn’t answer. The slow-motion seconds dragged by as the monster drew closer, until it blotted out a quarter of the light ring. The flickering alphanumerics indicated that Perseus was aware of the threat, and attempting to open a communications channel.

      “They’re not responding,” another Council delegate said. “Of course they might not understand Anglic.”

      “English, Senator,” Alexander said. “When Argo was launched, the principal language of trade and government was English. Perseus is signaling on several million channels, using microwave, infrared, and optical laser wavelengths. Remember, we’ve at least partially interfaced with a number of Xul vessels, and we were able to study The Singer, the one we recovered on Europa eight centuries ago. We know the frequencies they use, and some of their linguistic conventions.