President Jackson sat with his back to the towering windows, gold curtains pulled tightly closed, with only the wall-mounted candelabras adorning the cream-colored slices of wall that separated them. He glanced around at his national security staff seated in the burgundy leather chairs around the great table that filled the bulk of the White House Cabinet Room.
Today’s meeting only involved the central core of the NSS: Vice President Bob Bethard, Secretary of State Beth McKee, Secretary of Defense Gary Blake, Director of National Intelligence Cory Mayfield, National Security Advisor James Nobles, Director of Homeland Security Thane Evans, and the president’s chief of staff, Carol Owens.
In addition to the core team, Carl Rheiner, the director of central intelligence, occupied a seat to the president’s left. It was going to be his show. Just a couple of hours earlier, Rheiner had informed the president that President Chekov of the Russian Federation, in a surprise move, had held a hastily assembled press conference to announce that Russia had developed its own version of the nanite serum.
The president’s first response had been unprintable, but Rheiner had had worse news.
“Apparently, they’re set to begin mass production at several manufacturing facilities. They’ve already begun inoculating military personnel and plan to roll it out for the general population over the coming months—before making it available for sale on the international market.”
It was why he’d now assembled the whole national security brain trust. President Jackson spread his hands in a gesture of inclusiveness. “Well I guess we’re all in. The Chinese, French, and others can’t be far behind the Russians. The real question is, what are we going to do in response? Before I hear your thoughts, I’ve asked the DCI to give us a quick rundown from the CIA point of view.”
All eyes turned toward the CIA director.
“Thank you, Mr. President.” Carl Rheiner opened a leather portfolio, moving its contents into three small stacks in front of him. “I’ll start with the nanite situation since that is the most directly affected by President Chekov’s announcement.”
The president hoped this presentation wouldn’t be as grim as he expected.
“As you all know, central intelligence has focused a large effort these last several months toward analyzing the consequences of our own nanite formula rollout, starting with the African continent, since they had already received the initial distribution. The results of that initial distribution are a mixed bag, mostly bad. In countries decimated by AIDS, malnutrition, and other diseases, it is hardly surprising that desperation for a cure has led to fighting between those who received the first doses and those who had to wait. Violent gangs began kidnapping nanite recipients, bleeding them into plasma bags for resale along with acts of superstitious barbarism.
“While Jack Gregory’s GPS broadcast shut down most of those nanites, there were significant numbers of people that were shielded from that signal and they still have active nano-serum in their blood. I don’t need to tell you the jeopardy in which they’ve found themselves. Most of them tried, with varying degrees of success, to pretend their nanites were deactivated like all the rest. But it only takes one public injury to put the lie to those pretenses.
“Mix that with gangs of nanite-augmented young men, drunk with the power of virtual invulnerability, and you get the effect we’re seeing on African societies, a drastic increase in tribalism. By this I mean that groups have grown more homogeneous, either for protection or for aggression.
“I won’t belabor the details, but this analysis, combined with worries about the possible long-term negative impact of nanite dependence on people’s natural immune systems, has led to the president’s meticulously planned nanite redistribution. Although we all knew that the day would come when other governments were able to duplicate the formula, I think we all hoped we’d have time to test our delivery strategy first, establishing a measure of control over these types of negative consequences. That’s no longer an option.”
“So what do you recommend we do about it?” President Jackson’s lips had tightened into a thin line during Rheiner’s summary. He sensed that, unfortunately, Rheiner had saved the worst news for last.
“Before I give you my recommendation, I need to reference two other areas that critically impact the situation.”
Carl Rheiner spread several papers from his second stack across the table in front of him. “The first is the other alien technology that was released to the public, cold fusion. Although it’s been widely hailed as a home run for our planet, it carries parallel dangers. Every scientist and energy expert I’ve talked to has been stunned with the speed with which industry has implemented increasingly efficient versions of this technology, dropping the price to where it will soon be available to power automobiles. Machinery that uses fossil fuels is about to become as outdated as the ancient plants and animals that compose those fuels. It has happened so fast that OPEC finds itself with its monetary spigot rotating into the off position.
“Islamic radicalism is ramping up with the rise in Muslim rage and frustration. Since Islam is composed of a number of sects, primarily Sunni and Shiite, they are being driven into the same tight tribal groupings. It’s reached the point that regional war is a near-term certainty.”
Rheiner paused to let his words take effect. Everyone in this room had already known this information. But the silence and grim expressions indicated that his words had driven it home like a stake in the heart.
“We’ve seen the same type of radicalization taking hold here at home,” Thane Evans interrupted. “Starting with a lot of militia folks in the Northwest and South, even spreading to groups like the Sierra Club. Hell, Native American tribes are going off the energy grid at a pace that indicates they’re working from a central playbook.”
As the buzz in the room started to rise, President Jackson held up a hand, immediately quieting the gathered officials. “Let Carl finish, then we’ll all get a chance at this.” And they would, too—he’d work them half to death if he had to. This was too important.
Rheiner continued as if the interruption hadn’t happened. “That brings me to the ultimate point, the executioner’s axe hanging over this planet in Switzerland. Mr. President, as soon as you and our allies in Europe make the joint announcement that a black hole is forming at the heart of the LHC, these global and local pressures are going to explode. It’s a miracle that the secrecy around the November Anomaly has held up this long, but that can only last a couple more weeks. As soon as the world’s richest nations start building Dr. Stephenson’s monstrous new Rho Project device, there won’t be any more denying the scope of our problem.
“Two weeks, tops. That’s what we’ve got to get a plan put together and coordinated with our major allies. In order of priority, we need a plan to protect this new Stephenson Rho Project, a plan to protect our government and key population centers, a plan to gradually reestablish order where we aren’t able to maintain it initially, and a plan to keep our enemies from blowing us to hell before we can get all those other things done.”
Rheiner replaced the stacks of notes to which he’d been referring in the leather portfolio and closed it. “Mr. President, that’s how the CIA sees the world situation.”
The president took a long slow drink from the Waterford Crystal glass at his elbow. He nodded at Rheiner. “Thanks, Carl. Excellent rundown.”
President Jackson had once heard a quote from one of the helicopter pilots who had flown Special Forces into Afghanistan through thick mountain fog. After returning from the mission, when his colonel asked him how he felt, the pilot had responded that he couldn’t drive a toothpick up his ass with a jackhammer. It pretty accurately described the president’s own feelings at this moment.
Turning his attention to his chief of staff, President Jackson said, “Carol, how about sticking your head out and getting someone to round us up some pizzas? Looks like it’s going to be a long night.”
Heather slid the alien headset over her temples, feeling the warmth of its massaging pulse slide through her brain. Sitting together with her in a loose triangle on the Frazier veranda, Mark and Jennifer echoed her action. Cloaked in twilight shadows, Jack leaned back in his own chair, his booted feet propped on a coffee table as he watched them. No pressure.
Heather entered the Bandolier Ship’s computer on point, Jennifer following her lead as Mark took up a virtual overwatch position, alert for any sign of the artificial intelligence that had attacked them on their last visit. Heather calculated the odds of another hostile encounter with the AI at less than 7.3642 percent, but that was still a long way from zero.
The announcement from Russia that it had already begun inoculating Russian soldiers with its own nanite formula hadn’t come as a great surprise, but it had narrowed their timeline, another sign that training days here at the Frazier hacienda were rapidly coming to an end. Despite their best efforts, the nanite genie was now out of the bottle for good. Earth’s population was going to have to learn to come to terms with that new reality or face a very bitter future.
Of greater concern was what they had discovered about Dr. Stephenson’s activities at the Large Hadron Collider. So far the governments of the United States and the European Union had managed to keep a lid on that secret, but that wouldn’t last much longer. Heather didn’t care to think about what was likely to happen as soon as the world learned about the November Anomaly. Her visions hadn’t left her with a warm cozy feeling on that one.
Returning to the matter at hand, Heather traversed the fractal data map with a speed that defied its incredible complexity, ignoring data paths that offered stunning revelations in physics and mathematics, despite their strong tugs on her curiosity. She knew what she was after and it was critical that she maintain a tight focus on that mission.
Within five minutes Heather identified a key nexus, a point at which several related paths branched. A shared thought released Jennifer along one of those paths as Heather’s mind opened itself to another.
The world she had known melted away as she found herself hurled from the Milky Way’s familiar spiral arm. A third of the way toward the galaxy’s core, she swept toward the fifth planet of eighteen that circled a dull orange star. The planet was a gas giant twice Jupiter’s size, one of its thirteen moons slightly larger than Earth. Her view shifted, swooping in on the moon, decelerating until she hung above it like a high-performance reconnaissance drone.
That wasn’t quite right. She found she could spin the globe in any direction, although what was really happening was a repositioning of her virtual camera location. For several seconds she found herself so fascinated by the amazing control she enjoyed over the system that she failed to recognize the significance of the scene unfolding below her.
Forty-eight percent of the moon’s surface was covered in water, the rest occupied by five continents, each considerably larger than Asia. Tied into the computer as deeply as she now was, Heather merely had to think about a topic and her brain immediately found itself immersed in relevant data. Some things, like the names assigned to this particular solar system and its planets, were merely lengthy alphanumeric representations that, although useful for cataloguing, didn’t exactly roll off the tongue. Heather decided to assign the huge gas giant the name Jupiter2, tagging its populated moon as Zeta.
Zeta’s atmosphere was an oxygen-nitrogen mixture, although the increased oxygen content and atmospheric density would have given humans a continuous high. The oceans teemed with sea life, although very few species bore any resemblance to fish, the majority looking much more like some of the odd creatures found at extreme depths in Earth’s oceans.
But it was something else entirely that took Heather aback.
The land masses were covered in cityscapes, advanced so far beyond Earth technology that they looked more like CPUs viewed through an electron microscope. The continent-cities teemed with activity, although little ground space had been allocated to vehicular traffic. Vehicles moved up and through the air to their appointed destinations.
The indigenous population was an amalgam of species, varied in physical form, but working in a unison that implied shared thoughts, vaguely resembling the kind of mental sharing that she, Mark, and Jennifer experienced through the alien headsets. Her mental link to the Bandolier Ship’s computer supplied a name. The Kasari Collective.
Another oddity attracted her attention. The vast majority of the people on this planet were soldiers, perhaps all of them. Unlike the military organizations of Earth, in which the soldiers were backed by huge logistics tails, this organizational structure seemed to be mostly composed of teeth. The beans-and-bullets part of the operation was supported mostly by autonomous machines that delivered what was needed at the specified place and time.
Although these beings tended to be larger than humans, many of the species looked distinctly humanoid, walking upright on two legs, some with multiple pairs of arms. Everywhere she looked Heather observed males and females of military age. Clearly the actual ages of these people differed from Earth ages by a factor of several lifetimes, but she had expected to observe children and the aged. But there just weren’t any. Not on Zeta.
Not one sentient being on this Earth-sized moon with its population of eighteen billion actually came from Zeta. The entire moon was nothing but a giant interconnected hub of military bases, one of many worlds that served a similar purpose for the Kasari.
Each base formed a wheel around a central debarkation center, manned to maintain readiness for the moment when that particular center would go active. From an engineering perspective, it was an extremely effective system.
Heather was reminded of one of her history lessons. In Israel, the once-mighty fortress of Masada sits atop an escarpment, its walls dropping away in sheer cliffs. In Roman times, it was stocked with years of supplies, absolutely impregnable. But the Romans crushed Masada in typical Roman fashion by applying an engineering solution. They built a huge ramp to the top of the cliff walls and used human shields from the local population to stop the defenders from raining down arrows and hot oil, using the resulting road to overwhelm their enemies in the castle.
The Kasari seemed to be familiar with similar modes of military thought. Of course, even the mighty Romans had ultimately been defeated.
Heather shifted her virtual position to inside the massive central facility at one of these hubs. A huge machine occupied the center of the stadium-size room, a great ring structure that rose up like a mighty wheel. A gateway. The technology that made the gateways possible was uniquely that of the Kasari. It was their strength, but it was also their weakness.
To generate gravitational forces great enough to form wormhole gateways required extraordinary matter-to-energy conversion, the process consuming resources on a scale that bled planetary systems dry in just a few hundred years. That was problem number one. The second problem was that no one had ever come up with a solution that allowed a wormhole spawned from just one gateway to be stable enough to allow a living being to survive the trip through it. To damp the inertial forces enough for someone to survive the trip, you needed a gateway at each end.
Once again the Kasari had come up with an engineering solution. Find a world with intelligent life that had acquired nuclear technology. Then send a robot ship through a one-ended wormhole to seduce its population with the offer of wondrous technologies, the ultimate being the construction of a gateway. Once the gateway was complete and came online, the Kasari would connect a matching gateway and the waiting army would pour through.
But the system wasn’t perfect. Many of the robot ships were destroyed by the Bandolier Ship’s makers, the Altreians, another name supplied by her newfound computer access. Some worlds never succumbed to the technological temptations provided by the robot ships. Even in the best scenario, large numbers of soldiers had to be kept at the ready for many years as they waited for the far-gate to activate. But when it did activate, there was no stopping the invading Kasari force. They poured through, securing the immediate area around the far gateway, methodically extending their control until another world’s population had been absorbed into the collective.
On the other hand, the Altreians had advanced technologies of their own, including a mastery of subspace that allowed faster-than-light transport of their own starships, and these could carry living crews. But starships were expensive things and couldn’t compete with gateways when it came to rapidly moving large numbers of soldiers to new worlds. And though the Altreians experienced frequent victories, every loss extended the Kasari empire. The Kasari had been spreading for centuries, with no sign of slowing down.
As Heather stared at the alien soldiers going about their tasks near the dormant gateway, she suddenly froze. She knew what Dr. Stephenson was up to in Switzerland.
Suddenly the prospect of a world overrun with nanites seemed the least of their worries.