Stargods by Ian Douglas (best summer books TXT) 📕

what he has to say will be quite close, and perhaps identical, to what I have to say.”

And that, Gray thought, would have to do.

At least for now.

 

USNA CV Yorktown

Earth Geosynchronous Orbit

1435 hours, FST

The damage to the spacedock was considerable, though the local repair crews appeared to have things in hand. It looked toLaurie Taggart as though when the elevator cable had let go, the loosely interconnected modules and habitats had broken freefrom one another. The mass of almost 36,000 kilometers of cable should have kept the assembly anchored in place, she thought.

Then she ran some numbers through her in-head processors and saw that the cable must have transmitted one hell of a shockwave up the cable, a whiplash that had literally shaken the synchorbital facility apart. It was, she thought, nothing lessthan miraculous that the structures hadn’t been more badly damaged and that more lives weren’t lost.

A port tug was signaling the Yorkie, and she gave the order to the helm officer to gentle Yorktown in close to one of the larger drifting sections and moor her. As a trio of tugs approached to assist in the maneuver, Taggartstudied the lines of America, now a couple of thousand meters off Yorktown’s portside and already moored to a mammoth collection of spacedock gantries and holdfasts.

The other carrier didn’t appear to be any the worse for the wear after the battle with the Nungies, and for that she was willingto give thanks to every one of the alien gods of her now tattered beliefs. She opened a link and called Gray on their privatechannel.

“Hey, Trev. It’s good to have you back,” she said. “I’m glad you’re okay.”

“It’s good to be back,” he replied in her mind. He sounded . . . preoccupied.

“What’s the matter?”

“Mmm? Oh . . . nothing. Nothing major, at any rate. Human civilization is going to hell, and they won’t let me do anythingabout it.”

By “they,” she knew he meant Konstantin, together with the bizarre assemblage of human minds within the Godstream. She could sense new minds uploading into the gestalt as he spoke.

“What are you supposed to do instead?”

“Hurry up and wait, I suppose. Hey . . . you busy?”

“Besides parking a star carrier at a wrecked spacedock? Not really.”

“Come on over. I’ve got to stay put, but you and I could have a conference. A private conference. In my quarters.”

“About what?”

“Hell, I don’t know. Ancient aliens?”

“Give me half an hour.”

“Make it twenty minutes.”

“Aye, aye, sir!”

She’d briefly considered insisting that he come to her, but thought better of it. An admiral did have certain privileges whenit came to determining the best use of his time.

Besides, she found that she wanted him. Now.

She waited only until word arrived on the bridge that Yorktown was secured. “Maintain station-keeping power,” she ordered. “You have the ship, Mr. Paxton. I’m going across to the America.”

Her Exec looked confused. “What for? I, uh, mean—”

“Consultation with the Admiral,” she said.

She didn’t need to tell Paxton more than that.

 

Koenig

The Godstream

1630 hours, FST

Koenig stretched, luxuriating in the feel of his body, of the bed, of Marta warm and soft in his arms. He knew this was an illusion, a shared reality created by the two of them and brought to life by the Godstream itself. The sensations he was experiencing were indistinguishable from reality—whatever the hell that was—and there quite literally was no way to tell if this was a richly detailed and internally consistent dream or the realthing. He stroked Marta’s hair, marveling at its softness and its scent.

“That was . . . incredible,” Marta said after a long moment.

“Better than the real thing.”

“It is the real thing, Alex,” she told him. “The brain doesn’t know the difference between what’s out here and what’s happeningin your brain.”

Koenig knew the theory, certainly, but still had trouble understanding its reality. Centuries ago, neuropsychs had taken MRIreadings of a subject’s brain while he was eating an apple . . . then again when he was only remembering eating the apple. The test results always were identical, with the same parts of the brain lighting up in both cases; thebrain literally couldn’t tell the difference between the reality and the imaginal.

So what was reality anyway? Plato had insisted that what humans perceived as reality actually was shadows flickering againsta cavern wall, with the prisoners trapped inside the cave, unable to turn around and see or comprehend the source of thoseshadows. Some modern philosophers and quantum physicists insisted that humans created a kind of consensual reality rather than simply experiencing it. According to this idea, all of what they thought of as “real”was illusion, the maya of the Buddhists, with the human mind woefully unequipped to see or understand what was really out there.

He drew Marta’s warm and very real-seeming body closer to his own. This, he thought, was real enough for him.

Insofar as the human mind could grasp the concept, he thought he now understood the Singularity. The Baondyeddi, members of the ur-Sh’daar civilization of the N’gai Cloud, had uploaded themselves into computer virtual realities hundreds of millions of years ago, vanishing from the ken of the rest of the galaxy. He’d begun to understand when he’d first experienced the Godstream with Konstantin, but even that was a pale shadow of what he knew now. Why would a sentient species trade reality for fiction? They might if the fiction was more interesting than the so-called real world.

When reality was more intense, more vivid, more real than real itself . . . yeah, he could understand.

“Please excuse the interruption, Mr. President.”

Koenig groaned. “What is it, Konstantin?”

“We have need of your particular experience.”

“Can’t it wait?” He squeezed Marta closer. “I’m busy.”

“Unfortunately it cannot wait. There has been a revolution or mutiny of some sort on board the captured Nungiirtok planetoids.The Tok Iad are dead.”

“What . . . all of them?”

“Insofar as we can determine. I was aware of fighting on board the Ashtongtok Tah, of course, but elected to let them resolve their own internal disagreements. Now, however, there is a chance that the newleadership over there will renounce their surrender.”

Koenig sighed. “And the battle resumes, I presume.”

“That is what I