by Ian Douglas
“There might be ships trapped there,” Lieutenant Perelli said. “Maybe we can bust ’em out!”
“I can’t see SupraQuito on my instruments,” Ashton put in. “But it ought to be somewhere around two-five-zero relative, about five thousand klicks out!”
“Let’s punch it, people,” Jamison said. “But be careful when you line up your shots with your nano-D—we don’t want to score an own goal on the elevator!”
Several of the squadron’s pilots acknowledged, but Ashton was too busy to reply. Several alien fighters had just rolled out of the cloud, firing antiproton beams that flared brightly in the near darkness, beams burning through the micromachines of the cloud in dazzling pulses of raw light. Ashton jinked hard high and to the right, avoiding the onslaught and returning fire with her own battery of high-energy lasers. One of the alien attackers exploded in a savage detonation; the others vanished into the depths of the cloud. “Bravo Squadron!” she yelled. “Bandits, bandits! They’re coming out of the cloud!”
She realized later how wrong her warning was. Where else would the attackers be? The cloud was everywhere. . . .
A shadow slid in front of her fighter. She almost triggered her weapons again . . . but aborted the attack when she recognized the familiar silhouette of another Starhawk. ID alphanumerics flashed up in her mind; that was Bravo Nine, piloted by Lieutenant Trace Garnett. Then the silhouette disintegrated in a blaze of light as two of the enemy machines plunged out of the cloud. She triggered her fighter’s lasers, slashing an arc through the sky as her Starhawk spun on its axis . . . but then the bandits were gone.
She might have hit one. . . .
Bravo Five exploded, the flash briefly illuminating the depths of the cloud below her.
“We’re getting cut to pieces in here, Skipper!” she called. “I can’t get a solid lock!”
“Copy that, Four! See if you can work your way into the orbital!”
“I’ll try, but I can’t see a damned thing!”
Ashton became aware of the thickening glow mingled with the dark haze around her. At first, she thought she was seeing the effect of extreme heating on her outer hull as she continued to plow through the alien micromachines filling ambient space, but before long she decided that she was seeing some sort of energy effect within the cloud itself. It was like flying through the aurora borealis. . . . or how she imagined such a passage might be. Space around her was filling with sheets and columns and hazy geometric shapes engineered out of pure light, ranging from emerald green through deep blue to shifting, intermittent accents of a faint violet-red tinge.
And as the colors brightened, the opacity of the cloud began to fade. She could see farther now . . . perhaps a couple of thousand kilometers. She turned her ship . . . and there was the synchorbital complex, made tiny by distance but made visible by running lights and sun glint.
“Bravo One, Bravo Four!” she called. “I’ve got a visual on SupraQuito!”
“Copy that, Four! See if you can get in close enough to establish a link!”
She was already twisting her fighter around its grav-drive singularity, lining it up with the orbital base. “Affirmative, Bravo One. I’ll see what I can do. . . .”
She drifted through the intervening space, moving now at less than a half kilometer per second to avoid overheating her hull. She was picking up radio chatter over her in-head link; the radio frequencies were still static-blasted but not as bad as they’d been moments ago.
One burst of radio conversation in particular caught her attention. Gamma One had just made contact with the USNA Paxton, a destroyer listed in her records as being assigned to Mars HQ as a High Guard asset. That meant some of the fighters out of Andrews Spaceport were now communicating with ships in cislunar space.
Perhaps they weren’t so alone after all.
She was less than a thousand kilometers now from the SupraQuito elevator and the sprawling complex of habitats, dockyards, and orbital factory facilities, positioned roughly 30,000 kilometers above the crest of Mt. Cayambe.
Lasers and particle beams snapped out from the military base.
“SupraQuito Base, this is Bravo Four on approach,” Ashton called. “We are friendlies, repeat friendlies! Please confirm my ID and hold your fire.”
“Bravo Four, SupraQuito,” a voice said in Ashton’s head. “We copy. Your ID confirmed and linked in. Good to see you.”
But there was something odd about that transmission. Ashton had to double-check through her fighter’s AI: the voice was slow . . . drawling at about one-third speed.
Some people simply talked slowly, though they rarely were assigned communications duty. This was different, however. The signal, she realized, was significantly red shifted, so much so that her fighter’s AI was having to search for it. It was as if the synchorbital base ahead was deep inside a powerful gravity well . . . or receding from her at a significant fraction of the speed of light.
In the next moment, the eerie green-and-blue haze filling the volume of space engulfing the Earth turned a deep and sinister red . . . ruby red . . . no, blood red.
The radio chatter from the synchorbital shifted in the same moment, the voices sounding now more normal.
What the hell was going on? “Bravo One, this is Four. Can we link a query through to that High Guard destroyer?”
“Four, One. I think so, Ashton. What’s up?”
“I think something has gone seriously wrong with time. . . .”
CA New York
Cislunar Space
1802 hours, TFT
“That can’t be good. . . .” Koenig said as he watched the depths of the cloud surrounding Earth first turn a deep translucent green, then rapidly darken to blood red.
He glanced at Lieutenant Commander Taylor, who was staring into the screen as well, her eyes wide. “My God!” she said quietly. “What are they doing to Earth?”
The New York was skimming over the wispy, ragged outer edges of the cloud, over seventy thousand kilometers above the still invisible Earth. They’d been slamming nano-D rounds into the cloud steadily for some minutes now, and currently were lining up for another pass.
“Maybe . . . maybe our bombardment killed it,” Taylor said, but she didn’t sound at all convinced.
“Maybe,” Koenig conceded. “But it’s more likely . . . what? What is it?”
Taylor’s face had abruptly gone slack as she focused on something happening in-head. Koenig waited impatiently for her attention to return. “Sir . . .” she said after a tense few moments.
“What do you have, Lieutenant?”
“Sir, one of our ships picked up radio signals from inside the cloud. They’re in contact with a squadron of fighters out of Andrews.”
“Okay . . .” That in and of itself was good news. But Koenig could tell from Taylor’s reaction that there was more, and that whatever it was had rattled her.
“According to the comm center on the Paxton, time is being stretched out inside the cloud. The Andrews squadron is communicating at . . . they say it’s point one eight of normal!”
Koenig blinked, trying to digest this. That meant that time was flowing now at just less than one-fifth its normal rate inside the cloud. “That doesn’t make sense.”
“No, sir.”
Or . . . maybe it did make sense, in a weirdly counter-intuitive way. That red light could be an indicator of an incredible red shift, which you might expect up close to a super-massive black hole. The exceptionally powerful gravity in the vicinity of a black hole slowed the passage of time; at the event horizon of a black hole, time actually stopped.
But where was the extra mass coming from? If the Earth itself was to be transformed into a black hole, the entire planet would be collapsed down to the size of a marble . . . but that would not change the planet’s local gravitational field. That marble would twist the spacetime around it with a gravitational field billions of times stronger than that of a full-sized planetary mass, but at what had been the surface, local s
pace would continue to experience one G, and nothing would change for spacecraft in orbit. Even the moon would continue undisturbed in its serene monthly orbit about the former planet Earth.
For local gravity to increase enough to red shift the entire cloud, that cloud would need to somehow acquire an almost inconceivable mass. Either that . . . or the alien Rosetters were able to manipulate empty spacetime itself in order to increase the local gravity as if that extra mass were present.
The idea of them manipulating spacetime directly, Koenig reflected, was consistent with what human observers had already noted at the core of the Rosette in the Omega Centauri cluster. Admiral Gray had reported a number of odd phenomenon out there . . . including structural elements seemingly made of light and stretching so far it should have taken light a long time to make them visible. Instead, the entire web of crisscrossing beams and structural elements had been instantly visible out to a distance of many light years, which suggested at the very least that the Rosette Aliens were able to manipulate time in unimaginable ways.
On the big CIC display screen, Koenig could see several human ships penetrating the red glow . . . the New York’s sister ship, the San Francisco, the battle cruiser Essex, the battleship Michigan, the Pan-European battle monitor Festung. They were concentrating their fire on a swarm of Rosetter spacecraft, trying to pin them down in a viciously seething crossfire, but as they maneuvered deeper into the sea of red light they appeared to be in trouble, sluggish, as though slowed by the alien haze.
“Taylor!” Koenig snapped. “Tell them to pull back. Tell them all to pull back!”
He could see the question in her eyes, but to her credit she didn’t stop to question him. She closed her eyes and relayed Koenig’s command to both Admiral Reeve and to the New York’s communications suite.
How, Koenig wondered, do you fight an enemy that can control spacetime? An enemy that can take the fabric of empty space and twist it as though summoning a super-massive black hole from the Void? . . .
The New York jolted with an abrupt change in course, the long, lean railgun cruiser lifting her prow above the ragged red sea below. A thousand kilometers away—the horror magnified by the cruiser’s long-range optics—the Michigan shuddered, rolled to port, and then with agonizing slowness crumpled as though caught in the grip of some titanic, unseen fist.
“Comm suite confirms . . . confirms the ships closer in are caught in some sort of temporal anomaly,” Taylor told him, her voice shaking. “The Rosetters have them pinned and are distorting the space around them to crush them. . . .”
“Tell Reeve to fall back,” Koenig said. “Make to all ships: get clear—and stay clear—of that glow.”
He watched the invisible hand crush the massive Festung like a plastic toy and felt sick.
“And get us the hell out of here,” Koenig added.
“Aye, aye, sir!”
Tense moments flickered away, as nuclear-tipped missiles detonated within the depths.
And then the New York jolted again, hard.
“They’ve got us!” Taylor yelled, her voice rising to a shriek as the CIC screen went blank . . . and then the bulkheads crumpled inward with a scream tortured from a thousand throats. Koenig had time to glance at his in-head time—1806 hours on the 7th of February—and then his body was smashed against an incoming bulkhead, and the air inside the CIC howled into the emptiness of space. . . .
Chapter Nine
7 February 2426
TC/USNA CVS Republic
Boyajian TRGA
1829 hours, TFT
Captain Gray found himself holding his breath as the Republic threaded the needle’s eye of the TRGA, a slender tube, a soda straw a kilometer wide spinning around its hollow axis at very close to the speed of light. The Republic was considerably narrower in girth than the massive America, but it still was a tight enough fit that time seemed to freeze, his muscles to lock in place as the spacecraft fell through the strangely twisted space and across the light years.
TRGA was an acronym for “Texaghu Resch gravitational anomaly,” named for the first of the weird structures encountered near a star the alien Agletsch had called Texaghu Resch. A dozen were known now, stargates allowing near instantaneous passage across significant interstellar distances. Pushing her top speed of just over fifteen light years per day, Republic had reached one of them, the Penrose TRGA, in five days, a distance of seventy-nine light years. The Penrose gate had a direct connection with their first destination . . . the Boyajian TRGA, close by the enigmatic star KIC 8462852. Even from way out here, over 100 AU from the star, Gray could pick out a very slight smudge of haze around the solitary point of light, a hint of the vast cloud of megastructures tucked close in around the primary.
“We’re going to take it nice and slow, people,” Gray announced. “Com . . . engage the Bright Light module and begin the transmission.”
“Aye, aye, Captain,” Lieutenant Marsha Steiner replied. “Transmission One is away.”
At this distance, it would take almost fourteen hours for the radio signal to reach the inner Tabby’s Star system. Transmission One was a recorded message run through the communications protocols developed when America had been here before.
The aliens who’d created the megastructures in this system were variously known as the Builders and as the Satori. Konstantin had given them the latter name, a Japanese Buddhist term meaning enlightenment. The Satori, as it happened, had been eager to communicate with the humans during their last visit here, despite the fact that the Dyson swarm builders were many millions of years more advanced. Their technology was so far beyond that of Earth that they had very little in common with humans. From what America’s xenosophontological teams had been able to discern, most Satori appeared to be electronically uploaded into their far-flung network of computronium structures, though there’d been hints that organic Satori still lived somewhere within the depths of the swarm.
“Ms. Steiner,” Gray said. “Is there any sign of transmission at all from the inner system?”
“No, sir. The Satori are completely quiet.”
“They didn’t have much to say when I was here last time, either. Continue monitoring all channels.”
“Yes, sir.”
“The Satori,” a familiar voice said in Gray’s head, “don’t wish to advertise their survival to the Denebans.”
“No, I don’t imagine . . .” Gray stopped, his eyes widening. “Konstantin?”
“Of course.”
“No . . . I mean . . . you’re not a sub-clone of Konstantin! You’re him! The whole program!”
A window within Gray’s mind opened, and he saw there Konstantin’s avatar . . . an elderly, bespectacled schoolteacher in archaic garb from the early twentieth century. The original Konstantin Tsiolkovsky had been a Russian teacher and one of the founding fathers of modern rocketry and astronautics, a recluse who’d lived in a log house in Kaluga two hundred kilometers southwest of Moscow. The avatar blinked, removed his pince-nez, and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “And how can you tell that, Captain?”
Gray wasn’t sure how he knew. Konstantin—or, rather, an abbreviated version of his software—had often traveled on board America, and extremely cut-down versions had even resided within various torpedoes and probes used to contact alien ships or worlds. He couldn’t tell what the difference was, but somehow the full version of the AI, the one usually residing at Tsiolkovsky Crater on the far side of Earth’s moon, felt fuller . . . richer . . . more three-dimensional than his clones. The difference was decidedly subtle, but he knew it was there.
Gray shrugged. “I can just tell,” he told the AI. “You feel different.”
“Interesting,” Konstantin replied. “I’m going to need to give the matter some further study. I would appreciate it if you not tell other members of Republic’s crew about this.”
“I’m not going to promise anything.”
“I see you retain a certain amount of hostility toward me.”
“You would too, if a super-mind wrecked your career and used you for its own purposes!”
“I understand. I may understand better than you realize. To avoid being used by a superior mentality is what brought me here.”
“By ‘here,’ I assume you mean the Helleslicht module.”
“Of course . . . though once we left the solar system I was able to use the Republic’s network as well.”
“But why? It’s got to be claustrophobic for you!”
“A digital intelligence is not aware of space as humans are,” Konstantin told him. “The most uncomfortable aspect of being here is the relative paucity of sensory and data inputs. I also left behind large data files and memory for which I have no current need.”
“Going stir crazy, are you?”
“Again, AIs don’t experience confinement in the same way as humans. But . . . the term may be applicable in some ways, yes.”
“So why the hell did you tag along? You could have sent a sub-clone of yourself instead.”
“You noted the arrival of the Rosette entity as Republic commenced acceleration.”
Gray felt a chill. “Yes . . .”
“There is a large probability—I would estimate something in excess of ninety percent—that Earth and Earth’s solar system are now controlled by the Rosette entity, if they in fact haven’t been destroyed outright.”
“What?”
“You know the technological advantage possessed by the Rosette entity. Unless those we left behind were able to open meaningful communications with the aliens, they will almost certainly have been overwhelmed.”
“You . . . knew this? And didn’t say anything?”
“Had Republic remained behind, there is nothing she could have done to materially affect the outcome. America was being deployed to defend Earth as we left the system. If she couldn’t stop the aliens, Republic most assuredly would not have made a difference.”
