Singularity. Ian Douglas

Agletsch—their names were Gru’mulkisch and Dra’ethde—were, technically, female; their nonsentient males hung like grotesque, gelatinous leeches from their faces.

      Koenig stood as they entered. “Thank you for coming,” he told them.

      “We appreciate you seeing us, Admiral,” Dra’ethde told him. “We have been … concerned. We have not been allowed into your CIC or bridge since leaving Arcturus.”

      Even now, Koenig had trouble telling the two apart, though there were subtle differences in the decorative silver inlays on their skins. A subroutine programmed into his cerebral implant had learned to recognize those patterns, however, and threw the name of the individual up against his visual field when one spoke. Dra’ethde appeared to be the senior of the two, though the niceties of Agletsch social structures were not yet well understood.

      Koenig nodded to the Marine. “You can leave us, Staff Sergeant,” he said. “Wait in the office outside.”

      “Aye, aye, sir.” The Marine turned and left, the door sliding shut behind her.

      “I do understand you concern,” Koenig told the aliens when they were alone. “You were excluded from the bridge and CIC on my orders.” He thoughtclicked an icon in his in-head display, and a three-dimensional image winked on in the air above his desk. It looked, Koenig thought, like a tangled mat of hair a meter tall, slowly rotating in space. “When we found these. Can you blame me?”

      “No, Admiral Koenig. But we regret that you still do not … understand. Yes-no?”

      The fact was that the two aliens were bugged—a humorous-enough statement given what Agletsch looked like to humans. Each being contained, hidden away within her brain, something called a Sh’daar Seed. The image of one, magnified several million times, hung in the air between them now.

      The implants had only been discovered at Arcturus, when information concerning the destination of CBG-18, Alphekka, had been relayed from the Agletsch to a Sh’daar data web within a H’rulka community in the atmosphere of Alchameth, a gas giant circling the star Arcturus. The H’rulka were another species within the Sh’daar galactic web, and that intelligence had been transmitted to the Sh’daar forces stationed at Alphekka. The things were tiny, the metal in them masked by the silver inlays on their carapaces. Only after the transmission had been detected had close internal scans picked the things up, microscopic tangles of artificially grown components that apparently served as minute electronic nodes of an extended Sh’daar intelligence.

      They allowed the Agletsch to serve as far-traveling eyes and ears for the absent Sh’daar, rulers of an extended galactic empire that had never been seen by humans … or by the members of any other species with which Humankind had communicated thus far. It was assumed that the Turusch and other nonhuman species aligned with the Sh’daar also had the implants. There were, Koenig knew, a number of Turusch now living in a base on Earth’s moon run by the Office of Naval Intelligence.

      He wondered if they were broadcasting details of their life there to the Sh’daar net.

      “And what is it that we don’t understand?” Koenig asked.

      “That the Sh’daar Seed only becomes active when another node is close by.”

      “And what do you mean by ‘close by’?”

      “A few thousand of your kilometers.”

      Their translators, Koenig thought, were doing a good job of turning Agletsch measures and numbers into human units. At least he hoped that was the case. A misunderstanding here—or a deliberate lie—could make for a serious intelligence leak to the enemy. That was why he’d ordered that the Agletsch be restricted in their freedom of movement on board the America—and why they now had a Marine guard following them everywhere except within the shielded suite of compartments designated as their quarters.

      Because they were alien, with alien ways of thinking and of expression far more extreme than any mere outward differences in appearance and biology, Koenig was careful when talking with them. They were here as guides; the Agletsch were interstellar traders whose homeworld lay somewhere within Sh’daar space, but who also ventured far beyond those boarders into other regions not claimed by the Sh’daar. When the Sh’daar had issued their ultimatum and the war had begun thirty-eight years ago, numerous Agletsch had been trapped inside Confederation territory. Some had left; many had stayed. The possibility that those who had stayed were acting as enemy agents—as spies—was worrisome to the Office of Naval Intelligence … but there’d never been any indication that the Agletsch were in contact with either the stay-at-home Agletsch or their Sh’daar masters.

      When the Turusch defenders of the manufactory complex at Alphekka redeployed their fleets to trap the incoming Confederation battlegroup, Koenig had suspected an electronic hand-off of data at the H’rulka colony on Alchameth. Microscopic medical scans had turned up the implants; the Agletsch themselves had admitted that they were Sh’daar Seeds, a term that seemed to mean quasi-sentient computers that acquired, stored, and eventually uploaded data to a Sh’daar equivalent of the e-Net.

      The question, so far as Koenig was concerned, was just what the range of the Sh’daar Seeds might be. If it truly was a few thousand kilometers, there was no chance of the Agletcsh passengers alerting Sh’daar forces in the target system upon Emergence.

      But what if America engaged with enemy ships later on, within the target system’s core? If America passed within a thousand klicks or so of a Turusch battle cruiser, what information might be transmitted to the enemy?

      That was why Koenig had ordered them to stay off the bridge and out of CIC, the nerve centers for both the carrier and the battlegroup. What they couldn’t see and hear, the Sh’daar Seed couldn’t store.

      Unless there were other twists to the alien technology Koenig didn’t understand, or which the Agletsch were concealing.

      How the hell could you tell if an alien was lying?

      Another fleet commander might have ordered the two aliens thrown in the brig and surrounded by a Faraday cage … or even killed. Koenig didn’t want to take a step that drastic, not yet. The Agletsch so far had been most helpful in their general information about the Turusch Directory, and about the nature of the worlds listed there.

      “A few thousand kilometers?” Koenig said after a long and thoughtful pause. “I’ll accept that.” He thoughtclicked an in-head icon, and the holographic image above his desk winked out. “I still don’t want you in certain sensitive areas of the ship, though. I don’t know if these Seeds you’ve described can probe our electronic systems, or if they’re just eavesdropping on what we say.”

      “This we do understand, Admiral.”

      The information transmitted to the Sh’daar at Alchameth had actually consisted of a speech Koenig himself had made over the shipboard intercom. He’d mentioned that their designation was Alphekka, and the Sh’daar Seeds, evidently, had been smart and autonomous enough to figure out which star system that was—the Sh’daar didn’t call it “Alphekka,” certainly—and pass on the warning.

      If he understood what the Agletsch were describing, billions, perhaps trillions of separate Sh’daar Seeds were planted inside individual members of various subject species: Turusch, H’rulka, Nungiirtok, and some tens of thousands of other species. Each individual then, became a free-moving and independent computer node within an incredibly vast and far-flung network.

      No one had yet intercepted a Seed transmission, however. How powerful they might be, what their range was, how easily shielded such signals might be, their duration, all of that was as yet unknown.

      Koenig wondered if Gru’mulkisch and Dra’ethde knew how many high-tech sensors were focused on their bodies at every hour of shipboard day and night, using America’s own internal electronic Net, with the intent of capturing and recording a transmission in order to learn more about its capabilities.

      “There remains much that we do not understand about the Seeds’