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  Two other space elevators connected other orbital complexes to Earth—at Subukia in Kenya, and at Pulau Lingga to the south of Singapore. SupraQuito, however, was the largest of the three and the most important. It was home to the large USNA naval base that served as fleet headquarters, and it was the principle port facility connecting Earth and its population of over twenty billion with the rest of human space.

  Gregory’s destination was the star carrier looming just up ahead.

  “America Primary Flight Control,” he called. “VFA-96 on final. Request clearance to trap.”

  “VFA-96, PriFly. You are cleared for final approach to Bay Two, seven-zero mps on approach.”

  “Copy, America PriFly,” Gregory replied. “Bay Two, seventy meters per second.”

  Decelerating hard, the Starblade fighters dropped into line-ahead formation, strung out in a straight line like pearls on a thread and closing on the America from dead astern. As skipper of VFA-96, the Black Demons, Gregory had taken the last position in line. His fighter’s AI adjusted the velocity and angle of approach, lining up with where the rotating entrance to Bay Two would be when he got there. Star carrier landing bays rotated about the long and slender axis of the vessel, creating the illusion of gravity, and landing—or “trapping”—on a moving target required superhuman calculation, judgment, and finesse. VFA-96 had recently completed its upgrade to the new AIon Mod 5 artificial intelligence, software inserted both into the Starblade’s control systems and inside the pilot’s cerebral implants, giving Gregory that superhuman status.

  One by one, the other fifteen members of the Black Demon squadron trapped inside the rotating landing bay . . . and then it was Gregory’s turn. At seventy meters per second, his Starblade flashed through the bay’s broad, open access port, then slowed sharply as it enmeshed within the magnetic capture fields. Gregory felt a sudden surge of gravity as the magfields imparted spin—and spin gravity—once again.

  “Demon One,” a voice said in his head. “Trap complete. Welcome aboard, sir.”

  “It’s good to be home, PriFly,” Gregory said.

  He was surprised to realize that he meant it.

  Donald Gregory had very nearly called it quits a couple of years ago. Mentally, emotionally, he’d been in a very bad place. Friends and lovers had taken their fighters out into the void—and failed to return. Survivor’s guilt, they called it. Why had Meg Connor and Cyn DeHaviland died, killed in the flame and fury of space combat . . . while he kept coming back home intact?

  It wasn’t fair.

  Nearly paralyzed by depression, he’d finally agreed to see a psych, and they’d made some adjustments in his implants . . . as simple as that. He’d resisted the idea, of course, because he felt as though he was being somehow unfaithful to those he’d lost. Stupid. He remembered them now, as he had before.

  But the pain was gone. He could think about Meg and Cyn and others without wincing; without internally crumpling into a ball.

  Without crying.

  He should have seen the psychs earlier. It would have saved him so much pain. . . .

  His fighter came to rest on an access membrane in the deck, then began sinking through it. Designed to admit fighters to the hangar deck directly below the flight deck, the membrane closed tightly around his fighter, moved upward, then closed overhead without opening the pressurized hangar deck to the hard vacuum of the flight deck.

  The cockpit of his Starblade dissolved around him, its nanotechnic components rearranging themselves to let him out.

  Slipping off his helmet, he started walking toward one of the hatchways forward and Briefing Compartment 7. Despite the name, the post-mission debriefing would take place there . . . not that there would be much to relate. They’d been on a boringly mundane training flight out to Pluto and back, a flight designed to give some of the younger pilots needed experience in formation flying.

  “Hey, Don! Wait up!”

  He turned. “Hey, Lieutenant! How’re things in the Furies?”

  Lieutenant Julianne Adams was with the Hellfuries, VFA-198, one of six squadrons stationed on America. She was sharp, she was smart, and she was great in the rack. Gregory had held her at arm’s length for a while because of his fear that anyone who got too close to him would die. But eventually he’d had those psych adjustments . . . and Julia was persistent, delightfully so.

  He almost called her out on the familiarity of using his first name; normally he insisted on proper military etiquette when they were on duty—he did outrank her now, after all—but he was hoping to score some quality time with her later, and he wasn’t about to risk triggering her notoriously quick temper.

  “Boring as hell,” she told him, answering his question. “How was Pluto?”

  “Cold. At least I assume so. We didn’t land.”

  “I gather the institute’s still worried about contamination, huh?”

  “Uh-huh. Flybys only.”

  He thought about the squadron’s close passage over the weird, frozen little world, currently about forty astronomical units from a wan and shrunken sun, so distant that even at near-c the mission had taken eleven hours there and back.

  One of the most staggering discoveries in exobiology to emerge from the twenty-first century was the discovery that so many frozen balls of ice in the outer reaches of solar systems, bodies like Jupiter’s Europa and Saturn’s Enceladus, in fact hid vast oceans of liquid water beneath their surfaces of rock-hard ice. Even distant Pluto had been found to possess such an ocean; as with Europa, it was estimated that Pluto contained three to five times more liquid water than all of Earth’s oceans, lakes, and rivers combined. On Earth, after all, water was spread out on the surface in what amounted to a thin film, like the moisture from a breath blown across a meter-wide mirror-polished steel ball.

  But inside Pluto, the hidden ocean extended for some hundreds of kilometers into the depths of an ink-black abyss. What kept the ocean liquid was still unknown. It might be vast amounts of radioactives inside Pluto’s hot core; it might be leftover heat from the planetary impact that had created Pluto’s largest moon and left the heart-shaped feature known as Sputnik Planitia on the world’s surface. But the biggest Plutonian mystery was whether or not life existed within those stygian depths as it did within Europa and other ice-locked glacier worlds.

  There were tantalizing hints; vast stretches of Pluto’s frigid surface were coated with orange-red tholins, the chemical precursors to life. So far, however, Plutonian biology was unproven and extremely difficult to reach. IBRI, the Interstellar Biological Research Institute, was using precision-directed nano-deconstructor clouds to drill a hole through nearly sixty kilometers of ice so cold—surface temperatures on Pluto averaged around -230o Celsius—it was harder and tougher than granite. Reportedly, the pit was nearly complete beneath an enormous surface dome designed to keep the water down there from boiling into the near-vacuum of the Plutonian atmosphere.

  But the IBRI planetary scientists and exobiologists were adamant that no other spacecraft enter Pluto’s cold trace-atmosphere and risk infecting that vast ocean with terrestrial microbes.

  Gregory had followed developments on the Pluto project for several years; at one point he’d considered volunteering as a pilot for the dig. He knew a couple of people on the planetary science team, and might have been able to wrangle a shot at that.

  But he’d decided he didn’t like ice that much, especially when it was nitrogen ice on top of literal rock made from water.

  “Well,” Julia said, reaching around his waist and giving him a squeeze, “if you’re still cold, I can warm you up.”

  “That,” Gregory said, grinning, “sounds like pure heaven.”

  It was very good to be home.

  Koenig Residence

  Westerville, Ohio

  1117 hours, EST

  The former President of the USNA lived in a northern suburb of Columbus, a place called Westerville. Koenig’s home was built on a low bluff overlooking the now-trunc
ated Scioto River. Gray’s robot flier set him down on a broad, open patio above the river where he was met by a trio of security robots who checked his ID and scanned him for hidden weapons.

  Alex Koenig met him at the door.

  “Good to see you again, Admiral.”

  “Good to be—”

  He stopped in mid-sentence. He’d just seen the woman in the entryway at Koenig’s back. She looked a lot younger than the graying Koenig and was jaw-droppingly beautiful . . . long blond hair, blue eyes, and a very ordinary sweater and jeans. Somehow, she managed to come across as far more sexy and elegant than that flashing young woman he’d noticed back in the park.

  Koenig grinned. “Ah. I don’t think you’ve met Marta . . . my companAIon.”

  Marta looked completely human—stunningly so—but Gray’s in-head software had pinged her as she came into the room and was reading her now as a gynoid.

  As far back as the twentieth century there’d been imitation humans—sex dolls—designed purely for recreation. By the first decade of the twenty-first, for about $10,000, there’d been artificial female-looking sex partners, extremely expensive dolls with warm skin, a heartbeat, and a chest that moved as though she were breathing. They hadn’t said much—frankly, they’d just lain there—but plenty of men driven by galloping hormones had bought the things to fulfill their sexual fantasies.

  In less than another century, progress in AI and advanced robotics had led to artificial sex partners of both sexes that could move on their own and carry their part of a decent conversation. As artificial intelligence grew more and more humanlike, the more sophisticated gynoids became known as companAIons—companion AIs.

  “Your companAIon?” Gray asked. “I didn’t know . . .”

  “Not many do,” Koenig said, grinning at Gray’s discomfiture. “When I was President, I had to be real careful about letting anyone know. A lot of people are still squicky about this sort of thing.”

  “Uh . . . yeah.”

  Gray didn’t consider himself squicky—not if he understood the odd word correctly—but he was also unashamedly a pervert, at least as determined by current social custom. In modern USNA culture, having only one spouse—being monogamous in a culture where polyamory and line marriages were the norm—was seen as just slightly perverse.

  Gray had grown up in the Manhatt Ruins, however, the flooded wreckage of old New York City. There, life had been on the rugged side, and people tended to bond closely with a single partner so they could take care of one another.

  But Gray had lost Angela, his wife. She’d had a stroke, and her treatment and recovery had robbed her of any feelings she might ever have had for Gray.

  He still missed her now, damn it, almost thirty years later.

  But just as people in the mainstream culture tended to look down on monogies, many looked down on human simulations. There was an ongoing battle over their status. Did they have free will? If so, even if they were programmed to enjoy what they were, their status was closely akin to slavery. And AI was good enough now that any test measuring their powers of self-determination and self-awareness showed them to possess the same degree of free will as any human.

  “Don’t worry, Admiral Gray,” Marta said with a dazzling smile. “I don’t feel at all abused or taken advantage of.”

  It was almost as though she was reading his thoughts. Or was she simply used to meeting strangers who reacted to her existence with a deer-in-the-lights stare?

  “Yes, well,” he said, feeling his way, “you wouldn’t, would you?”

  Gray felt quite strongly that slavery, even when the enslaved enjoyed their position, was still slavery.

  If she read into his words, though, she didn’t seem to be bothered. “There’s coffee,” she said. “Or would you prefer something else?”

  He shook his head. “Coffee would be great.”

  As she left the room, Koenig sighed. “It’s not slavery,” he said, just a touch defensively.

  “Because she’s programmed to accept her place in society?”

  “Because she’s an extremely sharp, self-aware AI, fully emancipated, who can reason as well as any biological human.”

  “Emancipated?”

  “I uploaded her manumission years ago. She’s here because she wants to be here.”

  “If you say so, sir. But we won’t really know until the Singularity, will we?”

  “‘Come the revolution . . .’ Yes, I suppose so.” Koenig gestured deeper into the house. “C’mon in. I want to talk to you about that.”

  “The Singularity? If Marta is as emancipated as you say, it’s already happened, hasn’t it?”

  Koenig made a face. “So Walker would have us believe.”

  “I was joking, sir.”

  “I know. Walker is not.”

  Marta reappeared with the coffee. With startling grace, she sank to her knees in front of Koenig, handed him his cup, and said sweetly, “Here you are, Master.”

  Then she grinned at Gray and gave him a wink.

  This, Gray thought, was going to be a damned interesting conversation.

  Chapter Two

  05 April, 2429

  Koenig Residence

  Westerville, Ohio

  1125 hours, EST

  “The Singularity is coming,” Koenig said. “We just don’t know how long we have. A month? A century? We have no idea.”

  “People have been predicting its imminent arrival for centuries,” Gray observed. “A lot of socioscientists are of the opinion that it won’t. That if it was going to happen, it would have happened back in the mid-twenty-first century, when machines clearly surpassed humans in general intelligence.” He glanced at Marta, who was sitting next to Koenig.

  Koenig said, “Well, of course that depends on how you define the Singularity. Is it when machines surpass humans in general intelligence? Like you say, that happened almost three centuries ago. Is it when our machines rise up and exterminate us?”

  Marta shook her head. “Nah. You’re too adorable. We’ll want to keep some of you around as pets.”

  “The definition I’ve heard is when human life becomes completely unrecognizable,” Gray said. “Technological change becomes so fast and so extreme that we, today, wouldn’t even be able to understand what we were.”

  “Yeah. Or when the definition of what it means to be human changes completely.”

  Gray thought about the young woman with a third eye, and shuddered.

  “For the ur-Sh’daar, it was when most of them Transcended into something else. Went into another dimension or something,” Koenig added.

  “Except for the ones who uploaded into virtual worlds and shut out the rest of the universe.”

  “Right. And then there’s the definition used by the President and his administration,” Koenig said, making a face.

  “Yeah. I’ve heard. The Technological Singularity began on January 1, 1983.”

  “The date that ARPANET adopted TCP/IP,” Marta said brightly, “and engineers began assembling a ‘network of networks’ that would become the Internet.”

  Gray looked at Marta. “You’re pulling that off the Net.”

  “Of course. You don’t think I keep stuff like that in my head, do you?”

  “President Walker sincerely believes that the Technological Singularity has already happened,” Koenig said, nodding, “and that it was called the Internet.”

  “Human life did change at that point,” Gray said.

  “Right. But not to the same degree as with technologies like nanotech or AI. And human life is still recognizable as such.”

  “So you think we have some Singularity to go?” Gray asked.

  “Of course. I fully expect something like what the ur-Sh’daar experienced. People vanishing. Technology mutating into unrecognizable forms—into magic—overnight.” He glanced at Marta. “We might begin uniting with our AI counterparts somehow.”

  Gray tapped the side of his head. “We already have. Cerebral implants.”
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br />   “I think we can expect something even bigger, more comprehensive than that.”

  “Big changes. You’re worried about that, aren’t you? Not about the ur-Sh’daar . . . but about the Sh’daar. The Refusers.”

  “Whatever the Singularity actually turns out to be, Trev, it’s not going to be neat . . .”

  Eight hundred million years ago, the multi-species civilization humans referred to as the ur-Sh’daar—the ur prefix meant “original” or “beginning”—had . . . vanished. Humans knew little of that far-off event save what the later Sh’daar had chosen to reveal. Gray had seen images—snippets of thought—of cities burning, of riots and chaos and the utter collapse of a galactic civilization. Those who’d refused to accept the Schjaa Hok had been left behind, however—the Refusers, who became the Sh’daar. Ultimately, they’d attacked Humankind and others through their proxies to make sure they didn’t Transcend themselves. Their goal had been to stop humans from working on four key technologies: Genetics, Robotics, Information Systems, and Nanotechnology, the drivers that would bring on the Singularity in each technic culture that embraced GRIN technologies.

  For decades, Humankind had fought the Sh’daar proxies—the Turusch, the H’rulka, the Nungiirtok, the Slan, and many others of what was known as the Sh’daar Collective. Admiral Gray, as commander of the America battlegroup, had been instrumental in discovering that all of those species were partially infected by yet another alien species, something called Paramycoplasma, microbes possessing an emergent group mentality and a desire to block the rise of any medical or genetic technologies that might expose it . . . and ultimately wipe it out.

  Humans had managed at last to communicate with the paramycoplasmid mind, and the Sh’daar War had finally been brought to an end.