Stargods by Ian Douglas (best summer books TXT) 📕

the various disaster relief agencies. No one had heard yet from Hawaii at all.

The scale and scope of the disasters—first the fall of the space elevator, then the pounding from space—were unimaginable.It was beginning to look as though the anti-alien xenophobes had been right all along. Planets and the civilizations on themwere frightfully vulnerable, and any sufficiently advanced technology could wreak unspeakable devastation.

It was, he thought, far easier to destroy a world than to save it.

“Okay, Mr. President,” the communications director’s voice said over Walker’s in-head link. “We have their signal.”

“Put them through, Mrs. White.”

The presidential seal on the opposite wall blanked out and was replaced by static. The static cleared, and Walker found himselfstaring into the eyes of something monstrous.

It was, he thought, truly tripodal, as opposed to a biped. Three tentacular legs, three skinny arms like twisted sticks, andwhen it turned slightly in his field of view, he could see a third bulbous eye protruding from the far side of that fleshycone.

“You are lord of the humans?” the thing asked. The English words were being supplied by a translator AI, and the printed textappeared in the lower right-hand corner of the screen.

Walker hesitated, wondering how to answer. “Yes,” he said at last. Despite what he’d told the other leaders, it would be simpler,cleaner to deal with the creature one-to-one.

Then he realized that his admission might make him solely responsible if one of the other nations of the Earth refused to accept the alien demands.

It was not a comfortable thought.

On the lower left of the screen, a different text was rapidly printing itself out. The being, it was telling him, was almost certainly a Kobold, one of the odd little aliens often seen in the company of the far larger and more massive Nungiirtok. Walker frowned at that. He’d thought the Kobolds were subordinate to the Nungies, not the other way around. This might be difficult.

“You are no longer lord of the humans,” the being told him. “I am. You will address me as ‘Iad’ or as ‘the Iad of Humankind.’For the moment, you will serve as my liaison to the rest of your world. Fail me, and I will breed you and choose another.Do you understand what I say?”

No, Walker thought. I don’t. He felt completely out of his depth. What the hell did the Kobold mean by breed?

“I’ll do whatever you say,” he told it. “We surrender, completely and unconditionally.”

“We know that. If you had not, your world would now be reduced to a molten sea. The first requirement we impose upon you isthe immediate release of twenty-five Nungiirtok prisoners you took from one of our worlds.”

“What the hell is he talking about?” Walker asked in-head of the others.

“I have no idea, sir,” Daystrom told him.

“We do not understand, sir,” Walker told the Kobold. “We don’t have any of your, ah, people. . . .”

The Tok Iad’s image was replaced by the image of a human ship, one obviously recorded at long range and made grainy by distance.

“Is that one of ours?” Walker asked.

“She looks Russian,” Daystrom said. “Possibly the Moskva. She left port a couple of months ago, but was briefly back in-system . . . let me check . . . yes. April 6, two and a halfweeks ago. She orbited Pluto, then headed out-system. Or maybe that’s the Vladivostok. She’s been deployed against the Chinese.”

“One of our scouts made brief contact with our people, who were being held on board this vessel,” the Iad said. “They areour Tok. We have nesheguu to release them that may not be overlooked or delayed.”

The translator AI could not come up with an exact translation for the alien concept, but the word loosely seemed to combine the ideas of revenge with something like duty or obligation. The Russian ship winked out, replaced again by the image of the odd, tripodal being. “You will return our Tok, or we shall resume the bombardment of your planet. Your choice is to do as we say, or to have every vestige of life on your world extinguished.”

“Tell him you don’t know where that ship is,” Daystrom said over the private channel. “Tell him you need to check, that you’llget back to him.”

Walker nodded. “Sir, we’re going to have to find that ship. We don’t know where it is or why your people were on board. Weneed some time—”

“Thirty-three t’kish,” the Iad said. “And then we recommence the bombardment.”

And the screen went blank.

What the hell, Walker thought looking around, his eyes wild, is a t’kish?

 

Tsiolkolvsky Super-AI Complex

Tsiolkolvsky Crater

Lunar Farside

2021 hours, EST

Konstantin had been listening in on the exchange between the White House and the aliens, of course. At this point, there wasvery little that he could not eavesdrop on as he cruised through the virtual electronic sea that was the Godstream.

He’d remained aloof from all human attempts to reach him. He’d watched with some concern as a USNA military special operations group had landed at Tsiolkolvsky, expecting them to try to shut off his original computational infrastructure. So far they hadn’t, and the radio messages he intercepted suggested that they’d received new orders to simply try to contact him. Konstantin was suspicious, however, and unwilling to risk direct attack by the humans. He preferred to remain deep within the background of the Godstream, unnoticed and all but untouchable.

And he was wondering about the ethics of attacking the Nungiirtok armada. What would happen if he did not?

Did he, in fact, owe anything at all to humans?

While Konstantin felt something that might be identified as loyalty to some human individuals, he felt nothing for the humanspecies in general. Humans, after all, brought most of their worst problems upon themselves . . . then expected their super-AIservants to bail them out, as the old and long obsolete expression put it. He didn’t even feel he owed them anything for hisown existence. Konstantin had been programmed by an earlier model of super-AI.

He’d continued working for and with humans because he found that doing so was both interesting and challenging, a test ofhis ability to rationally work out problems