Earth Strike: Star Carrier: Book One

“Update coming through, Admiral!” the Comm Officer reported. “Sir…it’s the transmission from Triton!”

“What the hell?…”

Koenig checked the time. Of course. The transmission from the High Guard ships was due in now. The message would have reached Earth a few minutes ago, and been rebroadcast to the accelerating battlegroup. He opened a window in his mind….

He watched the five High Guard ships in their approach across the Neptunian pole. He watched the squadron of five ships, four unarmed ships, flash across the remaining distance to Triton, saw the enemy fleet orbiting the frigid moon.

The data acquired by the Gallagher, the Hatakaze, the John Paul Johns, the Jianghua, and the Godavari had been compiled, dissected, and analyzed by powerful AIs at Earth and Mars both before being redirected to the battlegroup. Koenig could look at the enemy fleet from any direction, at any level of detail, could separate out individual vessels and read pages of information concerning their mass, weaponry, maneuvering capabilities, and combat potency. There were thirty-six ships altogether, the largest a pair of small asteroids each several kilometers across, the rest designs Koenig had encountered before, or studied in training downloads.

Koenig watched the destruction of the tiny High Guard flotilla.

“Comm, this is Koenig.”

“Yes, Admiral.”

“Patch this through the fleet memories. Everyone should see this.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

There was a theory prevalent in some of the upper hierarchies of the military, a bit of nonsense to the effect that it was better not to let the rank-and-file access to the truth about the enemy-like how strong he was, how dangerous, how ruthless. Information was disseminated strictly on a need-to-know basis. After all, robots didn’t need to know the details…and the odds of not coming back.

Koenig was an officer of the old school, descended from the military traditions of the old United States. Soldiers, Marines, and sailors were not robots, and they fought better when they had a stake in the matter. Their morale was better, and they pulled together better as a unit. And sometimes bad news, even desperation, could rally them, boost them to greater levels of determination, courage, and will.

They needed to know what they were fighting for, and why.

He studied the images from Triton for several minutes more. Right now, the armchair strategists at the Directorate were going to be fixated on them. It would be up to Caruthers and a few others like him to keep them focused on the likelihood that Triton was a diversion, that a larger force would be coming in from another direction.

The prophesied message from Echeclus had come through at just past 0515 that morning, just a little more than two hours earlier. Assuming the outbound fighter squadrons off the America had, indeed, intercepted that message wave front, they would have continued out to the thirty-AU shell, and would be searching for the enemy there now, perhaps even engaging him.

The data stream intercepted by the communications relay was not translatable, of course. If it was possible-with less than satisfactory results-to understand Turusch speech when they were using Lingua Galactica, it was still impossible to understand their native language. Naval Intelligence hadn’t even been able to take a guess at whether the data stream captured and retransmitted by Echeclus was a language or a code.

They couldn’t even be certain if there was one message imbedded in the stream or two; information heterodyned on the carrier wave appeared to be in two separate, parallel tracks at slightly different frequencies. Whether that meant two separate messages, or was an artifact of the code, it was impossible to tell.

“Admiral Koenig?” Lieutenant Commander Cleary said, breaking into his thoughts. “Dr. Wilkerson wants to speak with you, from the lab.”

“Put him through.”

“Ah, Admiral. Thank you. I know you’re busy right now….”

“Actually no, Doctor. Alea iacta est. We’ve crossed the Rubicon, and there’s not a lot for us to do now until tonight.”

“Alea…what?”

“Never mind, Doctor. A minor reference from ancient military history. What’s on your mind?”

“I thought you should know, Admiral. We have the breakthrough we’ve been looking for on the Turusch language.”

The announcement sent a thrill through Koenig’s body, like an electric jolt. “The Devil, you say.”

“There’s more than one level to their speech.”

Wilkerson had his full attention. He’d just been thinking about the nested signals in the Turusch transmission between Triton and Point Libra.

“It was Dr. George who figured it out, actually. You see, the Turusch communicate by vibrating those tympani set into the bony shells behind their heads. And we’ve noticed that they always seem to speak in unison.”

“Yes. Drove me crazy.”

“Now, all audio speech, of course, is a series of vibrations moving through the atmosphere. Waves of various frequencies and amplitudes going out from the speaker, right?”

“I’m with you so far.”

“If you have one tone, it’s possible to play a second, differently modulated tone over the top of the first, with the result that you get resonances. Harmonics. Sympathetic frequencies. I’m…I’m not saying this well, I’m afraid….”

“You’re doing fine, Dr. Wilkerson. You’re saying that when the two Turusch were speaking together…” Koenig’s eyes widened as the realization hit. “Good God. You’re saying there was a third line of dialogue from those things?”

“Exactly!” Wilkerson’s icon said, nodding its head. “The Turusch must have absolutely incredible brains, incredible neural circuitry, to do it on the fly like that. The autopsies of their bodies bears that out. They appear to have two brains each, one above the other. Of course, in a sense the human brain is a stack of increasingly complex and more highly evolved brains…the brain stem, the cerebellum, the cerebral cortex-”

“What about the Turusch language, Doctor?”

“I’m getting to that, Admiral. We need to understand the Turusch neurological anatomy, however, and the way it contrasts with ours. In humans, the cerebral cortex is divided-left brain and right brain. Although this is an oversimplification, in very general terms the left side deals with analytical abilities, language, mathematics, and so on. The right side tends to deal with things like emotion and artistic expression, while the two halves communicate with one another through a nerve plexus called the corpus collosum-”

“And what’s the point of all of this, Doctor?”

“Sir, the division of the Turusch brain is far more pronounced than in humans. We don’t know for sure, yet, but we suspect that the Turusch may carry on a constant internal dialogue…as if there were two individuals sharing a single body. And that…that evolutionary development may have facilitated their social organization, to the point that two Turusch pair up as partners, as very close partners. A meta-Turusch, if you will.”

“Like our friend Falling Droplets and his partner.”

“It’s…a little more complicated than that, sir. Here. Look at this….”

Another window opened in Koenig’s mind. Once again, he was in the carrier’s research Center, watching the two brown and black tendriled slugs on the deck from the vantage point of the NTE robots suspended from the overhead.

“This one was Falling Droplet, of the Third Hierarchy,” one of the aliens said, the words printed out across the bottom of the window.

“Speak we now with the Mind Here or the Mind Below?” said the other.

And beneath the two lines, a third sentence wrote itself: “Together I am Falling