They had literally nothing to go back to. An overcrowded Earth that would become far worse now as fear of the enemy transformed itself into fear of Gates and Flux. Almost forty percent of them were young people, born on New Eden, and they knew no place else. The rest were older, settled, and remembered why they had volunteered to come and saw what they had built. Being cut off from their parent cultures and the world of their origins bothered them, but their roots were no longer anyplace but on New Eden, their nations the Anchors in which they lived.
“Mommy, will we have to leave?” Christine had asked Micki after hearing the broadcasts and the debate. She was turning into quite a beautiful young woman now, at very close to fourteen, and she was extremely bright, but she had led a comfortable, almost spoiled, sheltered life.
“No, darling,” Micki had answered, not even hesitating, although she was fearful for the future every time she looked at the children. “More than anyone else, the Hallers are natives of New Eden.” Besides, as she and Toby had determined, if the Gates could be sealed shut here, and the intervening automated relay stations breached, they would run only to face the enemy on soil not their own later on. If they couldn’t be stopped at Fourteen, they could not eventually be stopped from Earth itself.
Except for maintaining and monitoring communications with the Soviets, the New Eden computers virtually ignored anything except the local problem. The Hispanics had been surprised without warning, and were a minor force at that point anyway. The Chinese had attempted a more or less traditional defense of the Gates, and lost. As the Soviets realized, the key to a successful containment was to hold the Anchors. As long as the twenty-eight Kagan 7800’s were preserved, even if the network were disrupted, any enemy would be forced into a trek of eighteen hundred kilometers of Flux in four directions to reach those Anchors, and would then have to battle in overland, without the advantage of Flux manipulation—and their fancy force field.
Nor, the computers agreed, could the force field be extended with any effectiveness for nearly the distance from Gate to Anchor, fed as it was from the single power source of the ship. Without access to the master computers, the maintenance programs could not be tampered with, which gave them a very limited amount of Flux to use, the same amount the computers themselves had. Clearly, the invaders had amplification devices strong enough to overcome an array of big amps, but it was highly dubious that they could overcome all twenty-eight Kagans working together through the network. Certainly the network could be locally disrupted, but only locally. The communications net ran between the clusters as well as within them.
The invaders had another weakness. They had to land in the Gates; there was no other way in as far as was known, and so far they had obeyed all the laws, indicating that they had to obey them. The tunnel the invaders had used to grab control of the master computers could be turned against them. A flush—the sterilization procedure used before an incoming ship was admitted to ensure against any contamination of the signal—could be made to trigger should anyone move from the Gate itself down the tunnel. The flush could be manually triggered to go either way, but if Anchor could reach the tunnel but the enemy could not go down it, then the underbelly of the ships, which were almost certain to contain airlocks and other exposed points and might also contain the ships’ computers, would be exposed to attack.
Without being able to seize the master maintenance computers, the enemy would not dare draw in a lot of additional Flux through the Borelli Points. To do so would risk burning out the regulators on the Points, and their own ships and personnel would be consumed. Using only the excess bleed available, the computers estimated that a force field of impenetrable strength could not be maintained beyond six hundred and forty kilometers from the Gates. The nature of the void would prevent air support for either side. The enemy would have to reach the Anchors and their vital computers, which meant control of the world overland, through the void, then into Anchor itself.
Still, no one knew their nature, strength, skills, or weaponry, nor just how much cost they were willing to bear to take an objective. The defenders of their New Eden would fight desperately because it was their own homes being invaded and because they had no place in which to retreat. Still, the computers believed that in the end, while it would be costly, the invaders had the edge because they knew what they were doing and had units designed to conquer. They would pay dearly, but estimating a full-scale attack from all Gates simultaneously by the enemy, that enemy had a better than seventy-eight percent chance of ultimate victory.
It was, in fact, better odds that Cockburn, Ryan, Coydt, and the other commanders expected, but it was far too thin to risk a real fight. Worse, the kind of army they had, officers and enlisted alike, was a technological army. They could fight small skirmishes or guard actions, such as fighting off dugger raids, but they were totally untrained and equipped for a traditional land battle. Only Ryan had really had any ground combat experience at all, and that was on totally different turf, with totally different rules, and as a young officer in charge of a small corps of engineers.
The computers themselves drew up elaborate plans for their own part in the fight, insulating themselves, trying to determine how their cousins outbound had been taken and covering those possibilities, and working with their own defensive programs in both Flux and Anchor. It was soon decided that the 7800’s could easily monitor the entire situation, and handle communications as well as manage defenses along the grid, but were ill suited for the kind of warfare that might be waged in Anchor. That was turned over to the Guard computers, who could easily switch between the 7240 series maintenance computers and the 7800 master computers. Because they were specifically designed to monitor other computer systems, they were ideally situated to pull whatever knowledge they needed from the vast 7800 memory banks and send it wherever it was most effective.
To Rembrandt van Haas, however, these changes and this massive buildup were in themselves serious dangers. The director had been feeling like the odd man out since this all began. From a position of near absolute authority, he had in a few paragraphs been stripped of power and position and reduced to an outsider looking in. Because of his previous position, however, he retained access to his personal 7800 interface and, if need be, he was certain he could get to see Cockburn.
Although theoretically the headquarters 7800 was merely Computer One, its own human interface had a pleasant female voice and had come to be called Alpha. Otherwise, she differed very little from Seventeen.
Van Haas hooked himself up in the Overrider position. “Alpha, I need some extrapolative information, sociological in nature.”
“I will do what I can.” the computer assured him. He sometimes wondered about something that could be so friendly and patient, yet probably was holding a thousand different conversations at once as well as talking to its other computers and the whole network.
“On whose authority can the emergency military programs be activated?”
“Access is by personal code of the commander or authorization by the three highest surviving military officers in concurrence.”
“I see. But what if they cannot get to an interface in time? If we are under attack or under imminent danger of attack, it might not be possible, particularly if they jammed communications. Surely you’ve all thought of this.”
“Such questions are being addressed,” Alpha admitted cagily.
“I realize you can’t give me specifics, but can you tell me if conditions exist that would allow independent noninterfaced action by you and/or the network?”
“Only on an individual, direct-response basis. Not networked or planetwide except for communications and data exchange.”
“Have you been instructed to establish means and grounds for such independent action as a network?”
“No.”
“Have you been instructed to show how this might be done?” He was an old hand at computers and even older at skirting security limitations.
“Yes.”
“Have you come up with a working plan acceptable to the military?”
“No.”
“Could you?”
The computer seemed to hesitate. “It is possible,” she finally said.
He sighed. That was all he was going to get on that line and he knew it without trying.
“Alpha, can you accomplish the same effect as a Gate closure and seal without destroying either machinery or programs?”
“Not with one-hundred-percent effectiveness.”
“With what percentage, then?”
“Ninety-nine point seven two.”
“Alpha—could you guarantee that destroying the machinery and erasing the programs involved would keep the enemy out? Absolutely guarantee it?”
“No.”
He sighed and logged off. At least he now had the ammunition to throw at Cockburn that would at least give them a chance of one day reopening the Gates and resuming normal contacts. He did not, however, like the idea of the autonomous military programs, and he liked the idea that they could be invoked by the military authorities, with or without Tom Cockburn. Once they were sealed off, away from all the rest, he could see nothing but the admiral’s faith keeping those programs from being turned against the population itself. He wanted to stay. He wanted everyone to stay. But he wanted to live in a growing society, not an endless military dictatorship.
He began a series of seemingly endless rounds of discussions with the admiral and his aides. Cockburn was furiously busy, but, oddly, he seemed younger, more invigorated, than he had been in years. For the first time, really, since the project began, Tom Cockburn was in his element and he clearly enjoyed it, even if he didn’t enjoy the cause.
Still, the admiral liked the idea even if Security was very slightly compromised. “All right, Van,” he told the director, “I don’t like the idea of blowing up all the bridges along with all the knowledge of how to build bridges any more than you do. I’ve set a team to work with the computers and they’ve come up with a solution of sorts. It’s based on an assumption that they have to follow the same rules we do, which is a proper gamble on the basis of the evidence. We’re sending a code down to the Defense Ministry and only to the Defense Ministry. Seven codes for seven Gates. They may be triggered only by outbound traffic, so even if our friends had the codes, they couldn’t use them inbound. Those seven codes will open the Gates. However, I’m not taking anything for granted. There are always ways to have codes figured out or leaked or just plain discovered later, and we need codes in case we have to open them from this side. All seven codes will have to be given even if it’s only one Gate that needs opening. All seven, on site, at each Gate. They must be sent to arrive outbound within one minute. They must be sent from here within the same period. And they must be sent manually. That means seven individuals must agree and any one could stop it. Agreed?”
Van Haas nodded. “Agreed. At least it doesn’t lock us in forever. We just don’t know about the future.”
Cockburn stared at him. “Van, tell me straight. You’re not one of those folks who wants to try to negotiate with ’em, are you? Even after all they’ve done so far?”
“I honestly don’t know,” he answered truthfully. It was a fact that several of the scientific leaders and even a majority of the board was urging just that. He, himself, had more direct concerns with what was happening to his colony. They had nothing left to do but consider scientific advances and the big picture. Of course, they were also all scared shitless, just as he was. All of them had run worst-case scenarios through their computers at one point or another just as he had and had come up with very little. There simply wasn’t enough known about this new science of Flux to predict what some civilization would do that did have all the knowledge and experience. All military and computer projections were based on the supposition that the alien force had to do things in generally the same way as humans did. Nothing had contradicted that so far, but, then, the aliens hadn’t had to contradict it. No one to this point, however, had ever sealed against the aliens. There was really no way of knowing if it would work, or whether a force sufficiently confident to assault another race’s worlds and win didn’t have a way around such eventualities.
Such problems could not concern Cockburn; he could not defend against weaponry and technology far beyond our own. Such problems concerned the scientists very much. No one who worked with the new physics of Flux could be certain of anything.
For the moment he would remain content to do what he could to minimize damage here and also minimize future damage in case they could be sealed off and find themselves under military control. As much as he would love to see and contact an alien race capable of this level of intelligence and technology, the fact was that he wasn’t crazy. The way they had cold-bloodedly attacked and then sealed off those worlds was nothing he wanted to experience.