The Year's Best Military & Adventure SF 2015 by David Afsharirad

Author:David Afsharirad
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781476781778
Publisher: Baen
Published: 2016-06-07T04:00:00+00:00

nagari 8/10

By now it’s clear that the Federation will surrender. No conventional military action can defeat Steele’s war logic, his simulation farm, his psychological pressure, his willingness to dive past ethical crush depth.

So NAGARI plans to make contact with Nemesis.

“Send me in first,” Laporte says.

Consider semiosis—the assignment of symbols to things, and the manipulation of those symbols to communicate and predict change. That’s how intelligent life works. Build a model of the universe, test your ideas in the model, and find the best way to change the world.

Only the Nemesis don’t have any recognizable semiosis. They’re a whirlwind traversing the Lacanian desert, a fatal mirage, recognizable only by the ruin of its passage.

Until Admiral Haywain van Aken sacrificed himself. Until he somehow convinced the Nemesis to take him in.

And ever since, the Nemesis have been speaking. Or attacking. It’s hard to know.

For more than a decade the Nemesis have been broadcasting the apparition of Admiral Haywain van Aken into human minds. The Nemesis organisms communicate by direct nerve induction at a distance. Particles wormholed into the tissue of the target. (There is, of course, no possibility that the Nemesis are a product of natural evolution.)

“If they can do that,” Laporte protests, “they can just murder us all. Cook our skulls from light-years away.” Or read the brainstates of human commanders, predict everything they do, the way Laporte and Simms could predict each other.

“No. Not without van Aken.” Al-Alimah lays out NAGARI’s hypothesis: the Nemesis have no mentality. They cannot conceive of other minds to predict or destroy. Their war is algorithmic, a procedure of matter against matter, spawning tactics by mutation and chance and iterating them in the field. They never leap straight to the optimal strategy, because a smart foe predicts the optimal. Their war logic is hardened by chaos. Noise.

Van Aken is their beachhead in the land of human thought.

“He wants you,” al-Alimah says, her long fingers on Laporte’s wrist again. “You in particular are valuable to him. We want you to serve as an ambassador.”

“That’s stupid.” Laporte may be a monster but she is not some other monster’s spawn. “Are you saying I was purpose-built?”

“No. Far more likely that you were selected because you’re somehow amenable to the Nemesis.” Al-Alimah leans forward with her lips parted as if to admit her own monster secret. “Laporte, the third Nemesis incursion is already underway. Not with warships and weapons, not this time, nothing so crude. The Nemesis are attacking the command and control systems behind those assets.”

Language. Plans. People.

“What are the mission parameters?” The Alliance has control of the Sol-Serpentis wormhole. Laporte can’t just fly out to Capella. “How do we use this to save the Federation?”

Al-Alimah stands and her gown whips in the rising wind. “We drug you and mate your brain to a computer network. You will enter a traumatic dream state and communicate with van Aken—with Ken. We keep dosing you until you learn how to trigger a Nemesis attack on the Alliance. Or until you go mad.

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