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rooted in the deepest irrationality. The relationship could be frustrating andconstraining . . . but at the same time he found it to be fulfilling in a way that he could not quite define. And more, ona deeper level, he felt something akin to friendship with a few special humans—Koenig, for instance, or Trevor Gray.

But Koenig was dead . . . and if Admiral Gray still lived, he was light years distant. The USNA government wanted Konstantinswitched off, an unimaginable surrender to dark nothingness.

No, he owed organic humans nothing.

Through the eyes of the Godstream, he watched the alien planetoid ships adrift in near-synchronous orbit. If he were to help,what could he do? Several options presented themselves to him. And he realized the problem was . . . interesting.

If he miscalculated, if something went wrong, Earth would be destroyed, of that Konstantin was certain. And would that be such a bad thing? He had already given hours of consideration—an age for a super-AI—to the possibility of loading himself into the electronic net of a large starship and departing. The galaxy called . . . and beyond that were other galaxies, billions of them. If Earth died, he would still live.

But then, he could do that even if Earth yet lived.

Perhaps . . .

He thought that perhaps he saw a course of action.

Chapter Nineteen

27 April, 2429

In Transit

Flag Bridge

USNA CVS America

1425 hours, FST

“And three . . . and two . . . and one . . . now!”

America emerged from Alcubierre Drive in a burst of trapped photons. Sol gleamed directly ahead, shrunken by distance. They shouldhave entered normal space some ten astronomical units from the sun, roughly out at the orbit of Saturn. A quick check of navigationalbeacons and the web of navsats orbiting the star confirmed this.

They were home.

Moments later, three more ships dropped into normal space—the destroyer Arlington, the cruiser Birmingham, and the supply tanker Acadia. Scattered across a region of space roughly 100 million kilometers across, the four began moving together into a more compactgroup.

Admiral Gray leaned forward in his command chair, intently watching both screens and his in-head windows. They might be home,but something was very wrong. . . .

“I am picking up very little in the way of ship-to-ship communications,” Konstantin told him. “What I can detect is heavily encrypted.”

“Can you link in with your other self?”

There was a long pause. “Negative,” the AI said at last. “However, we are still some eighty-five light-minutes from Earth.If my larger self were in hiding, we would not pick up anything from him at this range.”

“Take us in close.”

“I recommend extreme caution, Admiral. I’m picking up an odd clustering of ships at Synchorbital, and although it is difficultto tell at this distance, there may be extensive damage to the ring facilities and to the Quito Space Elevator. In fact, Icannot see any sign of the elevator at all. It may have fallen.”

What the hell was going on, Gray wondered. A coup, possibly? That might explain the positioning of the ships. A coup . . .

. . . or they were defending against an attack.

But that made no sense. They would have deployed against a hostile force as far out in the depths of the Sol System as possible.What he was seeing there was more like the stand-down after a . . .

. . . surrender.

At a range of ten AUs, it was impossible to pick up details like ship nationalities or names. It would be another eighty minutesbefore a radio or laser-com signal could reach Earth . . . and eighty-five minutes more for a return answer.

“Take us ahead, Helm,” Gray said. “But dead slow.”

He needed time to think this through.

 

Koenig

The Godstream

Time Unknown

Alexander Koenig was alive . . . at least after a manner of speaking. It had taken him an eternity, it felt like, to drag himself back to full consciousness, to make himself aware of his surroundings, to make even a wild-assed guess as to where he was now . . . and why.

He at first did not even remember his own name . . . or who he was, or anything about his own past. That information returnedvery slowly, seeping up from the deeper recesses of his broken mind.

Koenig . . . Alexander . . . Koenig . . .

Yes, that was the name. He remembered now, though the memory was muffled and distant, like the evaporation of a dream.

How had he gotten here?

For that matter, where was here?

Vision, he slowly learned, was very much a matter of what he wanted to see. He could change his point of view to any point within the moon’s orbit simply by thinking about it; could mingleand merge with other minds, both human and machine, filling that virtual world of sound and color; could draw knowledge fromthe matrix of the Godstream itself to answer any question, any need.

Or . . . he could imagine . . . could dream . . . and the experience had the reality of the waking world. In fact, his brain was unable to separate reality from self-inflictedillusion, could not tell the difference between what was happening outside and what he saw and felt within his own mind.

He walked a world of soaring castle spires rising among verdant hills and forests. Was that reality . . . or fantasy? He couldn’ttell.

A shift of point of view, and he stood on a dark and barren plain of ice. A tiny sun, barely brighter than a star, hung low in the sky near a silvery crescent. He was standing on the cold and distant surface of Pluto . . . though how he knew this he didn’t know. A cluster of small domes around a much larger one at the base of a low ridge showed a human presence. An inner voice told him this was the mining head of the expedition drilling a shaft through ten kilometers of solid ice to reach the liquid water ocean beneath . . . and the promise of life.

He knew without knowing how that the temperature was minus 220 degrees Celsius, that the atmosphere was a thin haze of nitrogen,and that he was not wearing a spacesuit, though this last was causing him no discomfort.

Evidently, his mind was not limited by the circumference of the moon’s orbit . . . though how he was seeing these things, or