If the offer was rejected, the new species were forced; Humankind had received the Sh’daar Ultimatum, as it was known, in 2367, through the recently contacted Agletsch. A steady, grinding series of wars had been waged with various va Sh’daar races for the following thirty-eight years.
Then, twenty years ago, the Sh’daar were beaten . . . or, at least, so it had appeared. America’s battlegroup had passed through a TRGA cylinder and emerged at the heart of the N’gai Cloud 876 million years in the past—a temporal end run that seemed to have panicked the Sh’daar more than the possibility of a new technic singularity. The resulting truce engineered by Admiral Koenig had promised an end to hostilities, and had actually held for two decades. But recently, Sh’daar client species had been testing human resolve once again. The Confederation insisted that Humankind could not long hold out against superior alien technology and numbers; better to surrender now, Geneva insisted, before Earth was obliterated.
The difference in cultural philosophies between Old World and New, differences between two alternative and mutually contradictory views of Humankind’s future in the galaxy, had, along with other more mundane problems, resulted in the current civil war back home.
“The Alcubierre bubble is stable,” Captain Gutierrez reported, jerking Gray’s full awareness back to America’s flag bridge. “We are currently ’cubing at five point three. We should reach the local TRGA in eight hours.”
“Very well,” Gray replied, and he smiled. ’Cubing was naval slang for traveling under Alcubierre Drive. The number was how many light years America was now crossing in a day.
The Sh’daar, with their distinct advantages in technology over what humans were capable of right now, had obviously missed an important point. That series of wars between their clients and Humankind had put considerable pressure on the Confederation for more than half a century . . . but what the Sh’daar seemed to have missed was the fact that human technology tended to advance much more rapidly during times of war than during peace. Intelligence believed that they were avoiding launching an all-out attack that might easily drive humanity into extinction; they wanted another pliant and cooperative va Sh’daar client, not a glassed-over cinder that once had been an inhabited world. Obviously, a galactic culture capable of merging old stars to create new would have no trouble at all annihilating Sol if they so chose. Forcing a stubborn Homo sapiens to accept Sh’daar dictates on permissible levels of technology, evidently, was a lot harder.
When forced to fight, however, Humankind was always tinkering, trying to come up with a better hand ax . . . a better spear . . . a better high-energy laser. The Alcubierre Drive was a case in point. Theoretically, there was no upper limit to a starship’s pseudovelocity, but in practical terms everything depended on how much energy a starship could generate and direct to the artificial singularities that served to pull space in on itself. When Columbia, the first human starship, had ’cubed to Alpha Centauri in 2138, she’d managed the passage in six and a half months . . . a pseudovelocity of 0.095 light years per day. Until recently, most naval vessels had managed an Alcubierre rate of around 1.8 light years per day, though high-velocity message couriers could manage better than 5 light years per day.
Late in 2424, new developments in the quantum power taps used on board starships had greatly boosted the energy available for FTL transitions, drastically cutting travel times between the stars. Moving as swiftly as the old HAMP-20 Sleipnir-class mail packets, and by taking advantage of the shortcut afforded by the TRGA gate at Texaghu Resh, America and her entourage could cross the 16,000 light years from Omega Centauri to Sol in just forty-four days.
Of course, the march of technological advancement involved other measures of progress than mere speed, and implementing some of those changes—the introduction of new and more powerful weapons, for instance—could take time. Engineering was not the same as mere technological understanding. The important thing was that human military technology was in an all-out race, now, to develop faster ships and more potent weapons before the Sh’daar could overwhelm Earth’s interstellar polity.
It was, he thought, the one bright side of the human tragedy of war. In-head circuitry had begun as high-tech communications devices for elite troops—Marines and Special Forces. Global Net had evolved from the old Internet, itself an outgrowth of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, or DARPANET. Singularity generators, used now both to generate zero-point energy and to warp space for high-velocity travel, had started off as microscopic black holes projected into enemy ships or structures as a weapon.
Gray just wished that Humankind could get occasional stretches of peace in which to enjoy the non-military benefits of those advances.
But that golden era, if it was even possible in the first place, would have to wait a while longer. The Sh’daar . . . the Confederation . . . and now, just possibly, if things went very wrong, the Rosette Aliens . . .
Humankind was going to have some scrambling to do to catch up.
And if they failed, the consequences might well be the final peace, the peace that would come with the extinction of the human species.
York Plaza
Toronto
United States of North America
1953 hours, EST
President Koenig, too, had been thinking about the threat presented by the Sh’daar. Just how had humans been able to hold off the onslaught of the Sh’daar client species for so long, despite the fact that human technology couldn’t match that of the H’rulka, the Turusch, the Slan, or any of the other enemies encountered so far?
And he thought that he just might know the answer.
“You guys are busted,” he said, his voice mild. He took a sip from his drink. “I think I know why your masters can’t get their act together.”
“You mean the Sh’daar, yes-no?” one of the two small beings in front of him said through the small, silver-badge translation device adhering to her leathery skin just beneath her four weirdly stalked eyes. “We no longer refer to them as masters. . . .”
Koenig was standing with the two Agletsch representatives within a mostly human crowd filling Toronto’s outdoor York Plaza. Thousands of people were in attendance, and many thousands more were present virtually, linked in from home through small robotic drones or teleoperated androids. The function was a diplomatic reception for the Hegemony and Theocracy ambassadors and their staffs, a grand celebration of the new alliance. The Office of Presidential Security had just about gone hyperbolic with collective fits when they’d heard; what, his security chief had demanded, was to stop the Confederation from launching another nano-D strike? If they hit Toronto tonight, they could vaporize most of the USNA government leadership with one precisely placed shot.
The answer had been to redouble both space and atmospheric patrols over North America to make sure nothing got in. USNA High Guard ships were positioned as far out as Lunar Orbit, and Marines were manning long-range planetary defense batteries up at SupraQuito. This reception tonight was important, a means of showing the entire planet that the USNA’s refusal to bow to Confederation tyranny was shared by a majority of Humankind—that it was not simply the squeak of a small and disgruntled minority.
Besides, global popular reaction to the Confederation’s nano strike on Columbus had been overwhelmingly negative. There was a reason weapons of mass destruction had been banned by the Geneva Protocols of 2150, and nano-dissassemblers were especially nasty, taking apart everything they touched—buildings, dirt, trees, children—literally molecule by molecule, then atom by atom. Another nano-D strike by the Europeans might cause wholesale defections from the Confederation.
The Agletsch, Koenig was glad to see, appeared to have sided with the USNA cause . . . though it was always difficult figuring out what the spidery aliens were actually thinking.
“I still don’t understand that, Gru’mulkisch,” Koenig said. “You both carry Sh’daar Seeds. Seems to me that means you’re working for them . . . at least some of the time.”
After twenty years,