Galaxy Raiders: Abyss

Book 1: Galaxy Raiders

by Ian Douglas

Genres: Hard Science Fiction; Space Exploration; Space Marines

Synopsis

The riveting and deeply immersive first installment in a new military sci-fi series—pitting amortal humans against a mystifying alien intelligence in a galaxy-spanning conflict—from New York Times bestselling author Ian Douglas.

Centuries in the future, the Galactic Authority reigns over millions of advanced civilizations throughout the cosmos. From deep within the Galactic Core, the Authority’s principal Mind has won the allegiance of myriad nations, offering security, connection, and access to a network of interstellar Gates in exchange for compliance.

While technological advancement has brought interstellar travel and life-extending procedures to Earth, humans are struggling to maintain their sovereignty and cultural identity. The Galactic Authority’s presence and technological prowess looms large, eliciting both awe and apprehension from a human society that finds itself at a crossroads: yield to the allure of advanced alien technologies, or preserve their autonomy in an increasingly fractious cosmic landscape.

Naval captain Alexandra Morrigan has little trust for the Authority, and by all accounts, war is brewing. When the extrasolar colony at Sirius goes silent, suspicions arise that Galactic forces or their proxies are pressuring humankind into submission. To preserve any hope of Earth’s future, Morrigan and the forces she commands will do the unthinkable: travel through the Abyss gate, and make one last stand against the Galactic forces, whose powers may defy comprehension.

Release date: February 4, 2025

Publisher: HarperCollins

Print pages: 400

Sample

Prologue

The Galaxy was already ancient a billion years ago when the Authority established itself as the dominant voice of some millions of high-technic civilizations. A true empire in all but a few quibbling details, the Authority had no emperor and only rarely intervened in any individual species’ governance. Those civilizations within its ancient folds gave their allegiance, in myriad forms, to the Authority’s principal Mind deep within the hellish depths of the Galactic Core. In theory, at least, that Mind was aware of all its teeming quadrillions of dependents.

In fact, and of course, it took time—often a great deal of time—for information to pass through the tangled network of interstellar gates from the Galaxy’s outer spiral arms into its shining heart, and just as long for the Mind’s judgments and commands to make the journey back. The Galactic Empire was very powerful . . . but it was also very slow.

The Authority did establish rules, demand compliance, and pass judgment. Subject races obeyed, or they passed into extinction. Any given species could send their ships through the ancient gate rings, or they could use relativistic intersystem travel in order to establish colonies within uninhabited systems, but engaging in wars of conquest or extermination was forbidden.

These were privileges reserved for the Authority.

And now the Minds of the Galactic Authority deep within the fastness of the Core might have to exercise that privilege once again with the noisily upstart inhabitants of a minor star system twenty-six thousand light-years away.

Human civilization, so-called, would obey the Authority, or it would very soon now pass into extinction. 

 

Chapter One

“That’s it, Dek,” Alexandra Morrigan said, shaking her head. “No more! I’m sick of it. I just want to die and get it over with.”

Her massive companion seated in the flier’s cabin regarded her through glittering lenses. “Get what over with?” it asked. “Life?”

“Life,” she agreed. “Endless interactions with idiots. Round after round of the same political nonsense. Self-serving narcissists playing games I simply don’t want to play. Having to attend vapid social functions . . . like this one.” She snorted. “Homo superioris! What bullshit!”

“True. A better taxonomic classification would be Homo sapiens superioris. Do you intend to kill yourself?”

Was there a hint of concern behind the robot’s words? Type 40s weren’t supposed to develop emotions, but AI minds did change and they did evolve. More than aide, valet, and bodyguard, Dek had been her companion for the better part of this lifetime.

“No, Dek,” she said. “Don’t worry. I’ll live this one out. But no more new lives. No more rejuvenations . . .”

“It seems a waste, Alex.”

She actually laughed. “Dek, there’s no law that says I have to live forever!”

“I don’t understand your desire for . . . oblivion, presumably. Do I understand that you simply dislike your fellow humans?”

“Not all of them, Dek. I suppose there are a few of them out there with both brains and common sense.” She considered the question for a moment as the flier cruised north through a darkening late-evening sky.

Morrigan was 398 years old and bore the physical features and bearing of someone in her sixties. In what amounted to a series of eight lifetimes—with seven rejuvenations—she had picked her way through dozens of careers. At one time or another, she’d been an artist, an amortality consultant, a software engineer, a network memegineer, a genegineer, and an AI designer. For twelve years around 2300, a century and a half ago, she’d been in the U.S. Marines, rising to the exalted rank of gunnery sergeant but resigning her commission. Then ninety years ago she’d signed on again.

She was a Navy captain now. She’d tried hard to make a long-term go of this one, but . . .

She closed her eyes. Almost four hundred years old, she thought, and I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up!

The flier’s chime alerted Morrigan that the craft was on final approach to Aurora Tower. “Almost there,” she told Dek, then swiveled her seat to face the control nest. “Unfortunately.”

“Indeed,” her sleekly molded companion replied. “You are aware that machine AI is far better able to handle a landing than any organic brain.”

“You would say that, Dek.” She wrinkled her nose as she brought up the holographic heads-up display. It was an old piece of verbal byplay. “You’re an AI, after all.” Her finger dragged through an illuminated touchfield. “I have control.”

“You have control, Captain Morrigan,” the flier’s AI agreed. “Altitude one-four-zero-seven meters, velocity one-five-nine, heading zero-one-eight. Hold steady on five-degree slope.”

She sighed. “Yes, Mother.”

The flier dropped through the night, stars and a first-quarter moon visible through the bubble canopy, with the sprawling blue-white glare of ground lights below: the Denver

Megapolis sprawling to the west, all the way to the mountains of the Front Range, and the Denver Spaceport dead ahead. Morrigan’s destination, however, was to her left—one of the kilometer-high arcologies clustered within the megapolis proper.

Directions flickered within her visual field, fed to her brain by her corona, which in turn was linked now to the flier’s AI. Her hand moved within a field and she thought her intention. The flier banked sharply to the left, and Aurora Tower slid across the canopy until it was directly ahead and just below. From here, it looked like an enormous mushroom with a three-hundred-meter cap shaped like a dinner plate. The upper surface was dominated by the Logan manse and outbuildings, but there was plenty of room left for parks, patches of wooded land, a large pond with a central, illuminated rainbow fountain, and a private landing pad.

“Aurora traffic control is overriding our approach,” the flier told her.

“Damn,” she said. “Okay . . . tower has control.”

“I don’t think they trust you, Alex,” Dek told her. “You being org and all.”

“Aw, they just don’t want us to have any fun.”

Under Aurora Flight Control, the flier descended smoothly across the rim of the plate, hovered briefly above the glare of the landing pad, then drifted to a perfect touchdown. The flier’s doors gulled open, and Morrigan turned her seat. “Well,” she said. “Into the furnace.”

“Do you want me to stay with you?” Dek asked. He was already out the door, unfolding to his full two-meter height of gleaming blue-black metal.

“Don’t be silly.”

“We are about to enter one of those ‘vapid social functions’ you mentioned. I have no wish to see you harmed by ennui or by frustration.”

“I’m a big girl, Dek. I can handle it.” She reached up to adjust her corona—a smoothly shaped horseshoe of what looked like liquid metal reaching from the back of her head around to points just behind the corner of each eye. It was securely in place—part adornment, part IT network connection, part personal secretary.

“I know, Alex. You’ll be fine.”

She faced the Logan manse as the flier sealed up and lifted off behind them, wafting off to a holding garage beneath the plate. Welcome, Captain Morrigan! a bright, female voice said through Morrigan’s corona, the words forming inside her head. A green light winked on within her visual field. Follow the guide and come on in. We’re delighted you could make it!

Morrigan couldn’t tell if the voice was human or AI. It didn’t matter, of course. Artificial intelligences often served as avatars for their owners. “It’s good to be here,” she lied, and followed the light. As if I had a choice.

Her looming, robotic

 companion followed.

The party in the manse and within the surrounding grounds was already well under way, a warm and brightly erotic swirl of life and color and outright hedonism. The Logan family, she’d heard, sometimes threw parties like this that lasted for a week. They could afford the lifestyle, certainly. The clan matriarch, Daphne Logan, had inherited a few trillion centuries ago from the legendary Troidertrust. Her family had been among the very first asteroid miners, and they’d made their first few fortunes by trashing most of the rare elements markets on Earth.

That had been a long time ago, but Morrigan remembered all the excitement on the news feeds.

I’m online if you need me, Alex. That was Pixie, the AI component of her coronal intelligence and the voice of her electronic alter ego.

“Watcher mode, Pixie,” Morrigan said. “I won’t be needing you.”

Her guide light winked out as she stepped into the entryway, and Morrigan stopped, looking around, not certain where to go. Several dozen people were engaged in conversation and senshares just within the broad atrium at the end of the walk, a partially enclosed space opening both into the building proper and the decks and gardens outside. Social nudity was common for all sexes, though there was a glowing, flashing array of gowns, suits, animated tattoos, and ostentatious jewelry. Morrigan had neither dressed nor undressed for the evening; the invitation had explicitly told her “come as you wish,” so she was wearing her Navy dress blacks, a uniform deemed proper attire for any and all social occasions.

Around her, pairs and threesomes cuddled in sheltering pods, while other guests stood on the deck or lounged or coupled in adaptive furniture that grew and shifted to accommodate moving bodies. Architecture and furnishings both tended toward the abstract, with soft lighting, large sculpted plants, and plenty of softly rounded walls and surfaces beneath an open night sky or under vaulted ceilings lost in darkness. Sometimes it was difficult to tell whether you were inside or out.

“Mist?” a man’s voice said at her side. She turned to face a small man offering her what looked like a crystal ball on an ornate platter. Morrigan’s corona seemed at a loss to identify him and could only tag him with the word servant floating within her visual field. He was old—shockingly so in this glittering crowd of young, athletic, and, above all, wealthy humans . . . people so wealthy they could afford to have human servants. He wore a plain dark jumpsuit that made him all but invisible within this setting.

She didn’t normally indulge, but something inside wouldn’t let her refuse the old man. “Thank you,” she said, and lifted the crystal from its stand. “You . . . work for Lady Logan?” 

“No, miss. Not usually. I’m with the catering service.”

“What’s your name?”

But another voice interrupted inside her own mind. Captain Morrigan! So nice of you to come!

Morrigan turned to face a young woman wearing a full sensory helm that covered her face save for her lips and chin. A dazzling spray of silver filaments spread out and down from her crown, framing her in glittering light; that and the silver wrappings on her arms were all that she wore.

But Morrigan’s corona was cranking out data, ID’ing the woman as lady daphne logan, with a cascade of biographical and genealogical data spilling down the right side of her visual field. Morrigan knew that Lady Daphne had been born well over 250 years ago; this person looked to be no more than fifteen.

Ah, the miracle of ENS . . .

“Don’t bother the servants, dear,” Lady Daphne told her, speaking out loud now. The voice was that of a teenage girl; the will behind it was mature and implacably unyielding. An emotil appeared beneath her name reading [mild irritation]. “They have so much work to do.”

“My apologies, Lady Daphne.” She wasn’t going to argue social ideologies now, especially not with the function’s hostess. “Thank you for having me.”

“Of course, dear. My . . . you do look so fetching in your uniform!”

Morrigan gave the woman a quick helmet-to-toe-and-back glance. “At the moment I think I’m overdressed.”

Nonsense, my dear. The words sounded once more in her head, placed there through her corona. Whatever makes you comfortable.

Social nudity didn’t make Morrigan uncomfortable in the least. It was, after all, more or less the norm throughout what passed for Earth’s tangled principal culture and had been for centuries, with clothing worn only for comfort or protection or to broadcast a particular social message. What irritated her was the blatant display of bare flesh simply to showcase the owner’s use of ENS and gene edits, a kind of genetic one-upmanship.

“There’s someone over here I’m sure you’d like to see, dear,” Lady Daphne told her, taking her by the arm.

Morrigan grudgingly permitted the unwanted familiarity and allowed herself to be led inside the manse. Beyond the entryway was a large sitting room, its ceiling invisible in the shadows somewhere overhead. A man in the gold-heavy uniform of a Navy admiral sat on a low, comfortable dais, the center of a conversational group of women, men, neuts, genmanips, and robots. Several were other fleet officers, like her wearing dress blacks. Dek, she saw, was already there. She’d wondered where he’d gotten to.

Rear Admiral Jaime Koehler looked forty but had been born in 2185, giving him a truage of 263. He was on . . . what? His fourth lifetime? His fifth? She honestly wasn’t sure.

Not that it mattered. 

He turned to face Morrigan with a large smile, his emotil flashing [pleasure]. “Ah! Here’s my esteemed flag captain now!” he said, saluting her by raising his mist crystal. “Alex! Get yourself over here!”

“Hello, Admiral,” she said, ignoring this familiarity as well. “I didn’t know you would be here.”

Her invitation had arrived that morning as an attachment to electronic orders from the Admiralty. The Navy, she knew well, was at pains not to cross the oligarchic plutocracy that was the Terran government . . . and that meant the social strata forming the political base for that government, the Illiminati—the Latin meant, roughly, “those without limits.”

Koehler grinned. “The Logans are throwing this fest for us, didn’t you know? For the superiors of the Grand Fleet before our heroic embarkation for Abyss!”

“No, I didn’t.”

“It’s all politics,” Captain Harrison said, smiling. He was big, heavyset, and the current commanding officer of the cruiser Endymion. “Senator Martin is afraid we’re going to make the Galactics angry. And Brandt here is terrified of something upsetting his negotiations with them.”

“Hardly terrified, Captain,” a nude man standing nearby said. He wore a complex filigree of silver down his left arm, and his elaborately coiffed corona ID’ed him as Dr. Feodor Brandt of the UE Foreign Service. Like the rest, he looked no older than thirty, but his electronic credentials suggested an age of several centuries. “The Dr’kleh faction possesses minds that are brilliant . . . brilliant. They’re so intelligent they grasp every side of a problem at once, without emotion or prejudice. Our talks with them are already bearing fruit.” He smiled at Morrigan, lifting his crystal in salute.

“Senator Martin may be right,” Captain Jobert, of the fleet monitor Erebus, added. “I’d hate to be on the wrong side of those . . . people.”

“Senator Martin,” yet another fleet captain, Ellen Carter, chimed in, “is an idiot. Peace at any price . . . and to hell with our extrasolar colonies.”

Carter, Morrigan knew, was from Pavo, an Earth colony almost twenty light-years from Earth. The undeclared war with some of the Galactics’ clients had consumed Delta Pavonis IV twenty-three years ago, and she would not be happy with the rumors circulating about the Joining. Currently, she was CO of the light cruiser Invincible.

Koehler patted the cushion next to him. “Here, pet. Sit yourself down!”

She sidestepped the invitation, blocking her corona from broadcasting her annoyance. The admiral’s words hadn’t exactly been a direct order . . .

She and Koehler had been lovers on and off for the past century. They’d met while she’d been a civilian consultant in D.C. and he’d been the XO of the Port Diego, a fleet escort carrier. They’d been close . . . very close, close enough that they’d discussed a formal long-term union. More, Koehler

 had been responsible for getting her to reenlist in the Navy after an extended sabbatical, a service hiatus of some fifty-four years. Twenty years ago his patronage had nailed down her promotion to captain.

She knew she should be grateful. Usually she was.

But she was not his “pet.” She was 135 years older than Koehler and well on in her eighth lifetime. She was older than most of the people here, including sweet little Lady Daphne. They, all of them, could take their righteous Homo superioris attitudes and stuff them up their condescendingly righteous asses. Illiminati indeed . . .

“Tell me, Captain,” Brandt asked her. “What do you think we’ll find out beyond Abyss?”

Foreign Service meant diplomat, which in turn meant patrician. Obviously wealthy, obviously superior. That could scarcely ingratiate him to Morrigan.

“The Sirius star system, of course,” she replied. “What else?”

Was he testing her? Brandt’s emotil simply said [interested], but if he was prying or trying to goad her, she doubted that his corona would give that away. To hide her nervousness, she lifted her mist close to her face. Sensing the movement, the crystal sphere split across its top, emitting a curling cloudlet of pale gas; as she inhaled it, she felt a heady surge of pleasure sweep up her spine and across her scalp, a ripple of pleasant gratification, of a cheerful confidence edging out her self-doubt.

She also realized with a tingling rush how much she still wanted Koehler, and in that realization she noted an alarming fading of her inhibitions. Whoa! Not too much of that!

She surreptitiously placed the globe in the planter of a bright red-orange tropical shrub beside her—Canna coccinea, according to her corona. Voluptastims like mist, fog, and feelgood all were perfectly acceptable, both socially and legally, but she wanted a clear head tonight—a clear head and no pre-mission entanglements.

“Actually,” Brandt was saying, “I was thinking about the Galactics. They’ve offered us a chance to join their community. The Joining, right? It’s what Humankind has been dreaming of for centuries.”

“Exactly, Feodor,” a young, lanky genmanip said, lifting eir crystal of mist. Eir only adornment besides the corona encircling eir hairless head was a glowing spiral, a representation of the Galaxy, hovering above eir smooth-skinned chest. “The

Galactics are here to usher us all into paradise.”

“The Galactics,” Koehler said with distaste, “are not gods.”

The manip gave a dismissive wave of eir free hand. “They might as well be. Think of what we shall learn . . . and of what we shall become!”

“Dala’s right!” a young woman gushed. She, too, wore the galactic spiral of the Joining, hovering between her bare breasts. “According to the Church, they will transfigure us all. Caterpillars becoming butterflies!”

“Maybe,” Brandt said, [skeptical]. “Thus sayeth the Church of the Joining, but what’s important is our transformation into a mature species.”

“Well spoken,” Lady Logan said. She joined the group with something odd and technological floating beside her.

“Ladies, gentlemen, mannies,” she said, gesturing at her silently hovering companion, “this is why I invited all of you here tonight. We have a very special guest with us, a representative from the Galactics. May I present One of the Galactic Central Authority. Some of you know him, ah, know em already.”

“Oh, yes,” Brandt said, toasting the object with his mist crystal. “How are you, One?”

“Well, Mr. Brandt. I trust you are well also.”

The voice emanating from the Galactic was smooth and articulate, natural, and with a tone somewhere between a light male and a deeper-than-average female voice—perfectly gender neutral, in other words. One’s body was obviously a machine of extremely advanced design, a meter-tall mass floating just at eye level on silent gravs. It was roughly ovoid but with a gleaming silver surface constantly shifting and changing, as though it were made of liquid mercury, an alien analogue to the coronas present in the room. Morrigan suspected that it represented some type of advanced nanotechnology—trillions of cell-sized machines held together by a magnetic or gravitic magic far beyond current human technology.

The thing had eyes—she assumed they were eyes—a dozen deep red cabochons of different sizes, like rubies, floating in the silvery liquid surface. It appeared to have at least one of the crystals watching each of the humans there.

Morrigan was surprised to find that her corona couldn’t identify One, that it didn’t even seem to recognize that the Galactic was floating right there in front of her. Were her corona’s sensors somehow being blocked? Or was One representative of a technology completely beyond the corona’s grasp?

“So why are you here, One?” she asked. She’d downloaded reports on the arrival of a number of the machines—Floaters or Glitters, as the media had tagged them. She knew what the news feeds had said about them: “technological liaisons from the Galactic Core, here to guide Humankind into a new and peaceful relationship with the rest of the Galaxy.” It was better, she thought, to get her information when possible straight from the source.

All twelve of the being’s eyes drifted together onto one side of the hovering egg, studying her. “To spy on you, of course,” One told her. “Yours is a fascinating species, and we have been

 interested in your development for some time now.”

One’s answer generated a nervous murmur of laughter through the group. “Oh, come now, One!” Lady Logan said. “You’re here for other reasons than that.”

“The Authority’s message, One!” Brandt said, his voice just barely touched by urgency.

“What message would that be, One?” Captain Harrison asked.

“Why, our invitation, of course. An invitation to your species to join the Galactic community. Dr. Brandt is quite right. Many on your world have been yearning for contact with a Galactic civilization you felt certain must exist. For thousands of years, your religions have sought final union with an agency, with a being, far greater and more powerful than you. And now, at long last, that time has come. We are here to invite you into the Galactic community.”

“The Galactic Empire, you mean,” Captain Carter said. Her corona tagged her as [hostile].

“Translate it as you will,” One said with an indifferent air. “The Authority has no emperor as you think of the term. We represent some millions of advanced civilizations working together for the common good while seeking to help emerging cultures like your own. The closest thing we have to a ruling government is a congeries of . . . call them extended intellects. Fifth Singularity, highly evolved, noncorporeal. In fact, they actually have very little in common with lesser minds. They guide the rest of us but rarely issue edicts or demand obedience.”

“How admirable,” Carter said. She was still [hostile].

“I’ve heard, One,” Morrigan said carefully, “that acceptance of your offer comes with a rather high price.”

“We expect certain standards of behavior within our association, Captain, yes. But the abundance of technological and material prosperity open to you through your acceptance is, I think you must agree, worth any small sacrifices asked of you.”

“As I understand it,” Koehler said, “the cost is a lot higher if we don’t agree . . . isn’t that right, One?”

“Nonsense,” a young-looking woman, a civilian tagged simply as Nessa, said. She was wearing a wisp of gown that was all shimmering light and rainbows. “We should do what the gods tell us to, right? For our own good!”

Nessa appeared programmed to speak in ejaculatives, stressing every few words for . . . what? For effect? To make people believe she knew what she was talking about?

“I mean,” she rattled on, “if we become part of their . . . their community, we can use the gates freely, right? And . . . and just think! They’re billions of years older than we are! Just think how smart they are! They’ll be able to help us with all our problems, I’m sure!”

“True,” Brandt said, perhaps trying to derail Nessa before she strained something. “A highly evolved civilization will have highly evolved moral and ethical standards.”

“I don’t know about that,” Koehler said, [amused]. “They haven’t exactly

been brimming over with altruistic warm fuzzies, have they?”

“An alien society,” Morrigan pointed out, “will by definition have alien goals and alien ideals.”

“Probably,” Koehler said. “My bet is that if they have answers to our problems, we’re going to have to pay for them.”

“What you should consider, Admiral,” One told him, “is the cost you will pay for not joining the interstellar community.”

And there it was, Morrigan thought—the iron fist hidden within the velvet glove, as Napoleon once had put it. The teeth behind the smile. As she understood it, the Galactics’ invitation could be refused; they would not force Earth to join if humanity wished to be left alone.

But if Humankind refused the invitation, the door to the stars would slam shut.

For centuries, Earth had been experimenting with several designs of gravitic FTL drives. That research would have to be abandoned. Over the past few centuries, Earth had established some seven extrasolar colonies among nearby stars using near-c relativistic travel. Those colonies would have to be evacuated, their populations repatriated to Earth. Humans might have their colonies on Mars or the Jovian satellites, but their reach and their grasp would be bounded by the limits of their own solar system.

And humans would forgo all use of the enigmatic gates far out in the Kuiper Belt—Abyss, Void, and Stardeep. As members of the community they could freely use those stargates to leave the Sol System and explore the Galaxy. Refuse the Galactics’ offer, and Humankind would forever be restricted to its own system, isolated and alone.

Quarantined.

The representatives of the community had never discussed just how the Galactics would enforce their demands. But the general assumption was that the community was very old and would possess technologies—and weapons—utterly beyond the ken of human civilization; technologies, as one historical philosopher had put it, indistinguishable from magic.

“How about it, One?” Koehler asked. “Will the Galactics help Earth with its problems?”

“Which problems?”

“Population, for one.”

“For a start, Admiral, I suggest that your species either give up Engineered Negligible Senescence or stop all reproductive activity. Whichever you prefer.”

“What, give up sex?” Morrigan said sweetly, facetiously. “What kind of choice is that?” A few in the group dared to laugh—nervously.

“Lower your species’ death rate,” One told them, “and you must lower your birthrate, or choke in your own garbage as you devour

every scrap of available resources and inevitably die smothered in your own wastes. There is no other solution.”

“Of course there are other solutions, One,” Koehler said. “There are always solutions. We’ve come a long way with practical nanotechnology, which lets us transform waste into anything else we wish. We have begun building off-world colonies—”

“Surely none of you imagine that you’ll be able to ship your excess population off-world to other systems,” One said.

Well, that much was obvious, Morrigan thought. And Jaime was not stupid, so she assumed he’d been testing the Galactic, or perhaps goading em. Earth’s current population hovered at fifty-two billion. Humans would never be able to build enough ships—ships big enough, ships fast enough—to more than nibble at that number. Whether Jaime was talking about colonizing other worlds or building deep-space orbital colonies, the creation of new places to live would never keep pace with Humankind’s birthrate.

The global human population had once stabilized at ten billion in the twenty-first century and even declined for a while, but with the introduction of ENS treatments it had been steadily and swiftly rising again. People seemed unwilling to forgo children. Laws limiting the numbers of children were deemed draconian.

“Our civilization is still seeking a balance,” Koehler told the Floater. “Medical technology gives us ample means for reducing the birthrate. But we still have some problems with the necessary . . . ah . . . social engineering.”

“He means,” Nessa said knowingly, “that the Sapies breed like rabbits.”

Did this creature have a brain? Morrigan wanted to punch her.

Sapies . . . Homo sapiens. While people who’d received ENS treatments were not, in fact, a new species of humanity, many had begun referring somewhat disingenuously to clinical amortals as members of one: Homo superioris. Sapies and Supers—the two new faces of Humankind. The assumption of the ruling class was that eventually the Sapies would die out, leaving Homo superioris as the only remaining representative of Humankind.

Morrigan deeply resented the artificial distinction and had to block her corona’s broadcast of her emotional response. If someone commented on her emotil, she would end up telling the whole group how she really felt, and that would be undiplomatic, to say the least.

“We need time, One,” Koehler told the Floater. “I admit that our technology has rather outpaced our ability to cope with it, but we’re working at it. No, we can’t ship our excess population off-world, of course not. But our off-world colonies at least offer a measure of hope to those who have to stay here. Colonization is a kind of pressure release valve for us, you see?”

Not to mention, Morrigan thought, a guarantee that some humans will survive if . . . when . . . Earth’s civilization collapses. 

“Your best option,” One replied, “is to join the Galactic community. We don’t promise to help every species with its internal problems, but you at least will have access to thousands of other biological species like yourselves, as well as tens of thousands of post-Singularity species, all of whom have faced similar issues in their pasts . . . and solved them. You need only sacrifice a modicum of your independence in order to receive abundant stability, order, and security. I would think that the choice is obvious.”

“And what about Delta Pavonis?” Carter demanded. “Thirty thousand colonists, slaughtered!”

And among them, Morrigan thought, the young woman who’d been Ellen Carter’s wife. The news of the attack had reached Earth only three years ago; Carter had been CO of the Wayfarer, one of the near-c vessels that had brought news and a few survivors back to the Sol System. And the Pavos weren’t alone. There’d been other raids, in other systems, with other refugees. Galactic representatives so far had been dismissive of such “minor border incidents.”

“I am sorry, Captain Carter,” the Floater told her. “The fact of the matter is that the Delta Pavo system has been set aside for colonization by another species, the Veykaar—the Crabs, as I believe you call them. Earth had no right to appropriate those worlds.”

“The Crabs hunted us down like vermin!” Carter replied. “You had no right—”

“We had every right,” One replied, “as arbiters of Galactic civilization.”

“You have the unmitigated gall to call yourselves civilized?” Carter’s emotil was rapidly cycling now between [furious], [horror], and [grief].

Morrigan stepped closer to Carter and touched her arm. Easy, Ellen, she told her over a coronal mind-to-mind link. This isn’t the time . . .

“Then when is it fucking time?” Carter demanded, turning and shouting into her face. “When they’ve hunted us down and murdered us all?”

“Take her outside, Alex,” Koehler told Morrigan.

“Come on, Ellen,” she told the woman. “We can’t start a war here.”

“The war,” Carter said, “has already been started. By them.” ...