“That looks nothing like the Intruder,” Senator Dav Gannel said. “The ship that attacked Earth … and the hunterships we encountered at the Sirius Stargate, they were shaped like huge needles. That thing is … I don’t know what the hell it is, but it’s a lot fatter, more egg-shaped. How do we know it’s Xul?”
Alexander didn’t answer. The slow-motion seconds dragged by as the monster drew closer, until it blotted out a quarter of the light ring. The flickering alphanumerics indicated that Perseus was aware of the threat, and attempting to open a communications channel.
“They’re not responding,” another Council delegate said. “Of course they might not understand Anglic.”
“English, Senator,” Alexander said. “When Argo was launched, the principal language of trade and government was English. Perseus is signaling on several million channels, using microwave, infrared, and optical laser wavelengths. Remember, we’ve at least partially interfaced with a number of Xul vessels, and we were able to study The Singer, the one we recovered on Europa eight centuries ago. We know the frequencies they use, and some of their linguistic conventions. You can be sure the Intruder hears, and it understands enough to know Argo is trying to communicate. It’s just not listening.”
“Shouldn’t the Argo be trying to get away?” Devereaux asked.
“Madam Devereaux, the Argo is traveling at within a tenth of a percent of the speed of light. At that velocity, it would take a staggering amount of additional power to increase speed by even one kilometer per hour. She could decelerate or try moving laterally, adding a new vector to her current course and speed, but that means rotating the entire asteroid, and that would take time. And … the Intruder clearly possesses some type of faster-than-light drive, to have been able to overtake Argo so easily. No, Madam Chairman, there’s not a whole lot Perseus can do right now but try to talk.”
“Does she have any weapons at all?”
“A few. Beam weapons, for the most part, designed to reduce stray rocks and bits of debris in her path to charged plasmas that can be swept aside by the vessel’s protective mag fields. But if any of you have seen the recordings of the defense of Earth in 2314, you know that huntership shrugged off that kind of weaponry without giving it a thought. It took whole batteries of deep-space anti-asteroid laser cannons just to damage the Intruder, plus a Marine combat boarding party to go in and destroy it from the inside.”
“At the Battle of Sirius Gate,” General Regin Samuels pointed out, “the Earth forces used the thrusters from their capital ships as huge plasma cannons. What if—”
“No,” Alexander said. “Argo is employing a magnetic field drive we picked up from the N’mah, not plasma thrusters.” He didn’t add the obvious—that this wasn’t a problem-solving exercise, damn it, and it wasn’t happening in real time. What was revealed by this data sim had already happened.
The government delegates, he reflected, were a little too used to, and perhaps a little too reliant on, instantaneous communications.
There was no indication that the alien vessel even heard Perseus’ communications attempts. One point seven three seconds after the Intruder appeared, large portions of the AI’s circuitry began to fail—or, rather, it appeared to begin working for another system, as though it had been massively compromised by a computer virus.
“At this point,” Alexander explained, “the Argo is being penetrated by the alien’s computer network. It is very fast, and apparently evolving microsecond to microsecond, adapting in order to mesh with Perseus’s operating system. The pattern is identical to that employed by Xul hunterships in other engagements.”
It was as though the alien virus could trace the layout of Perseus’ myriad circuits, memory fields, and get a feel for the programs running there, to sense the overall pattern of the operating system before beginning to change it.
Beams and missiles stabbed out from the Argo, focusing on a relatively small region within the huge Intruder’s midship area. So far as those watching could tell, the result was exactly zero. Beams and missiles alike seemed to vanish into that monster structure without visible effect.
More alphanumerics appeared, detailing massive failures in the Argo’s cybe-hibe capsules. The Intruder was now infecting the colony ship’s sleeping passengers by way of their cybernetic interfaces.
“We’re not sure yet how the Xul manage this trick,” Alexander went on, “but we’ve seen them do it before. The first time was with an explorer vessel, Wings of Isis, at the Sirius Stargate in 2148. It apparently patterns or replicates human minds and memories, storing them as computer data. We believe the Xul are able to utilize this data to create patterned humans as virtual sentients or sims.”
Three point one seconds after the attack had begun, Perseus realized that all of its electronic barriers and defenses were failing, that electronic agents spawned by the Intruder’s operating system were spilling in over, around, and through every firewall and defensive program Perseus could bring into play. Perseus immediately released a highly compressed burst of data—a complete record of everything stored thus far—through Argo’s QCC, the FTL Quantum-Coupled Comm system that kept Argo in real-time contact with Earth.
Abruptly, the record froze, the alphanumeric columns and data blocks halted in mid-flicker.
“Four point zero one seconds,” Alexander said. “At this point, Perseus flashed the recording of Argo’s log back to Earth.”
“But … but everyone has been assuming that the Argo was destroyed,” Senator Kalin said, a mental sputter. “We don’t know that. They could still all be alive. …”
“Unlikely, Senator,” Alexander replied dryly. “First of all, of course, there’s been no further contact with the Argo during the past three days. There is also this. …”
Mentally, he highlighted one data block set off by itself—an indication of Argo’s physical status. Two lines in particular stood out—velocity and temperature. The asteroid starship’s velocity had abruptly plummeted by nearly point one c, and its temperature had risen inexplicably by some 1,500 degrees.
“When Perseus sent off the burst transmission, these two indicators had begun changing during the previous one one-thousandth of a second. We’re not sure, but what the physicists who’ve studied this believe is happening is that Argo’s forward velocity was somehow being directly transformed into kinetic energy. A very great deal of kinetic energy. And liberated as heat. A very great deal of heat.”
“These data show Argo is still completely intact,” Marie Devereaux noted. She sounded puzzled. “Senator Kalin is right. That doesn’t prove that the Argo was destroyed.”
“Look here, and here,” Alexander said, indicating two other inset data blocks. “The temperature increase is still confined to a relatively small area—a few hundred meters across, it looks like … but the temperature there in that one spot has risen 1,500 degrees Kelvin in less than a thousandth of a second. The physics people think the Xul simply stopped the Argo in mid-flight—and released all of that kinetic energy, the energy of a multi-billion-ton asteroid moving at near-c, as heat in one brief, intense blast. Believe me, Senator. That much energy all liberated at once would have turned the Argo into something resembling a pocket-sized supernova.”
“But why?” Kalin wanted to know.
“Evidently because the Xul had copied all of the data they felt they needed. They’re not known, remember, for taking physical