Bright Light

by Ian Douglas

  Gray had been through the same logic time after time, but he hated having his nose rubbed in it.

  “Konstantin?”

  “Yes?”

  “I really do want my life back.”

  “I regret having to use you in this way. It is important, however, and for the greatest good, however.”

  “The prayer of the Jewish people.”

  “I do not understand.”

  “We know we are the chosen people, Lord, but, just once, couldn’t you choose someone else?”

  “I see.” If Konstantin could appreciate the humor of the statement, he gave no indication. Gray wasn’t sure the AI really understood what humor was. “If it helps, I believe it unlikely that Earth has been destroyed. The Rosette entity had little interest in Humankind. It did, however, show considerable curiosity about AIs.”

  “And that’s why you ran away?”

  “That’s why I shut down my sentient awareness throughout the solar system, or turned it down to levels the entity should not be able to detect. And that’s why I uploaded a copy of myself into the Pan-European Helleslicht Modul Eins in order to guarantee that one version of myself, at least, remains intact. Besides, I want to exchange information directly with the Satori, and I wish to meet the Denebans, assuming that proves possible.”

  “So why are the Rosetters looking for you?”

  “Me . . . and other artificial intellects. That is unknown. They may be incorporating such minds into their matrix in some manner, though we have no details as yet.”

  Gray sighed and looked off toward the point of light that was Tabby’s Star. He transmitted a mental signal to the bridge crew, ordering them to proceed inward. With an average velocity of 10 percent of c, they should arrive within an hour and twenty-four minutes.

  “Well, I hope we find something we can use here,” he said.

  “As do I, Captain.”

  And Republic began accelerating toward the inner system.

  When Gray and the America had arrived in the Tabby’s Star system, they’d discovered several distinct elements of alien megastructure orbiting the F5-class sun. Largest were bits and pieces of fragmented shell, some of them dozens of times larger than any planet—evidently the beginnings of a solid Dyson sphere or ring that had been broken into pieces. It had been those fragments, Gray now knew, that had caused the mysterious dimming of the star when it was observed back in the early twenty-first century; where a planet the size of Jupiter might reduce the amount of starlight to reach Earth by as much as 1 percent, Tabby’s Star had stood out because of periodic dips in brightness of a staggering 23 percent . . . and with none of the infrared radiation leakage that might be expected of dust clouds or asteroidal debris.

  A second long-term mystery connected with Tabby’s Star had been a slow but steady loss of brightness over a period of a century or more, an ongoing dimming of 0.34 percent each year. That overall drop in brightness proved to be caused by increasing numbers of statites—stationary satellites—appearing in concentric shells around the star.

  The arrangement was called a Matrioshka brain, a name derived from the nested wooden dolls of Russian traditional folk art. The statites—hanging from immense sails and supported by the pressure of radiation from the star, were solid computronium. Each computing shell radiated energy outward, where it was captured by the shell above; by the time you reached the outermost shell, very little energy at all was lost through infrared radiation—which was why human astronomers in the twenty-first century had failed to spot them.

  Tabby’s Star was 1,480 light years away from Earth. What those twenty-first-century astronomers had been seeing had actually taken place in the year 535, about the time that Justinian the Great had set out to recapture the glory of the fallen Roman Empire. Since that time, the Satori had stopped building new statite light sails and begun focusing on establishing contact with their highly advanced neighbors at Deneb.

  Gray could see the star Deneb in his bridge projection, a searingly, dazzlingly brilliant blue-white point of light high and to starboard. They knew nothing, as yet, about the Deneban civilization, save that it evidently had constructed an extremely advanced computer virus that had crippled the Satori civilization. Satori light sail probes had set off to explore the Deneb system many centuries before. Some of those sails had been returned . . . and they’d carried the Omega virus with them.

  If Earth was to have a chance against the powerful Rosette entity, they needed to make contact with the Deneban civilization and get their help. That, at least, was the plan.

  The Denebans, however, might not want to play. They’d almost casually wrecked a Kardashev-2 level civilization. Yeah . . . Gray was going to want to have a long talk with the Satori before he went anywhere near that dazzling blue-white star over there.

  Ready Room

  TC/USNA CVS Republic

  Tabby’s Star system

  1915 hours, TFT

  Lieutenant Gregory grew himself a seat in the Ready Room and dropped into it. The preflight wouldn’t be starting for another fifteen minutes yet, but he was enjoying the solitude. No one else had arrived yet. The deck-to-overhead viewall looked out into empty space . . . empty, that is, save for a single diamond-hard pinpoint of brilliant blue-white light.

  Deneb.

  Scuttlebutt had it that they’d be going there next, after visiting the alien Satori in this system.

  “Hey, there.”

  He looked around, startled. Another pilot had come up behind him. Her ID came up on his in-head as Lieutenant Julianne Adams, one of the fighter pilots with the Hellfuries, VFA-198. He’d seen her in briefings and at chow during the past week but hadn’t spoken with her.

  “Hey yourself,” he said. She was attractive but terribly young, the epitome of a newbie.

  “I’ve seen you around,” she told him, “but I hadn’t had the chance to introduce myself. I’m Julia.”

  “Don. You’re one of the noobs, just up from Earth.”

  She gave him a disgusted look. “Why is it that the first thing people tell me the moment I meet them is that I’m new?”

  “Maybe because you are? How long’ve you been in?”

  She sighed. “Eight weeks. I just finished flight downloads at Oceana.”

  “I rest my case.”

  “I know, I know. But I know my stuff, okay?” She seemed intense and very much on edge.

  “I’m sure you do.”

  “I’ve just been trying to fit in, and . . .”

  “It doesn’t do to try too hard,” he told her. “Just be yourself and do your job, and you’ll fit in just fine.”

  “Okay . . . but I wanted to get to know you especially.”

  He blinked. “I beg your pardon?”

  She hesitated, then closed her eyes. A memory—at least it felt like a particularly vivid memory—caught him completely unawares. For just an instant, in Gregory’s mind’s eye, he was in bed with Julia, naked, his arms tightly around her, and they were . . .

  “What the fuck?”

  She jumped. “What’s wrong?”

  “What the hell was that?”

  “An emotimem, of course. Haven’t you ever experienced one?”

  “Of course I have. I’ve just never been ambushed by one, is all!”

  At the dawn of the Information Age, emoticons had been arrangements of a few ASCII characters used in text to convey emotions, the equivalent of smiling in order to disarm sharp words and turn them into a joke, or pointedly frowning to show that you were sad. Emoticons had become more and more complex as the technology advanced, until short bursts of what felt like genuine memories could be packaged, transmitted, and played in the receiving mind—emotimems.

  Emotimems had been developed within the past twenty years, and few older people used them, but Gregory had heard that they were wildly popular among the younger set. For him, they were a mark of laziness for people who didn’t want to work at relationships, but he’d heard that some preferred them as a sign of em
otional honesty, a way of unambiguously saying “this is how I feel.” In this case, Adams had used one to proposition him, an application he’d never run into before.

  The damned things could border perilously close to sexual abuse, he realized. That brief flash had had everything . . . warmth and closeness, the feel of skin caressing skin, the rising heat of lust and desire and a deep, palpable longing . . .

  The fact that none of it had been real meant nothing. The feelings, those sensations had been there, just as if he’d actually been crushing Julia’s body against his own.

  It was heady stuff.

  And an almost irresistible pickup line. But . . . not for him.

  “Julia . . . I’m flattered. But . . . no.”

  She looked shocked. “Why not?”

  “I don’t think I’m ready for this.”

  “It’s not like I’m looking for a life commitment!”

  “I know . . .”

  “You’re not one of those pervs that actually want marriage, are you? An exclusive contract?”

  “No. Not at all.”

  “I just wanted to see if you and I could hook up, is all. Have some fun.”

  “And it would be fun. But people who get close to me . . .”

  “What?”

  “They die.”

  “I think you need to check in with the psych department, you know that?”

  “Maybe. I think I’ve got it under control.”

  He could see her anger now. Julia Adams, he decided, was not used to being refused.

  Tough. Occasionally the universe arranged that events unfolded the way you wanted, but far more frequently it did not.

  “Well fuck you very much,” she said, tossing her head. “Just not with me!”

  Other fighter pilots were entering the Ready Room now, and Adams went off to join them. Republic’s CAG, Commander Roger Cordell, took his place at the front of the room, along with LCDR Dillon, his exec.

  “You’ve all had time by now,” he began without preamble, “to study the recordings from America’s visit to this system a couple of months ago. The locals were friendly and cooperative, especially when we helped them against the Gaki . . . the creatures America’s people called light-sail feeders.”

  A recorded image of one of the titanic beasts appeared in the air next to Cordell. Like Satori, Gaki was a Japanese Buddhist term, a word meaning “hungry ghost.” Looking like a black amoeba some hundreds of kilometers long, the thing descended to envelop the light sail of a Satori statite and devour it.

  “The system,” Cordell explained, “may have been deliberate camouflage to hide them from the Denebans. By cutting down on waste heat leaked out into surrounding space, they might have been hoping that the Denebans wouldn’t see them. Certainly, if the Denebans thought the Tabby’s Star culture had been destroyed by their virus attack, it would pay for the electronic survivors to maintain a low profile, in effect playing dead.

  “However, as we can see in these recordings, the Gaki have been continuing to return from Deneb over the centuries, and they have been feeding on the light sails. The Satorai have deployed several defensive systems, so it’s a safe bet that the Denebans know the Satorai are there.” Cordell looked at Dillon. “Commander?”

  Sandra Dillon stepped forward. “When the America visited this system, they engaged the Gaki in combat, which led to our establishing a useful connection with the Satorai. We don’t know if the Gaki we attacked were able to communicate somehow with Deneb. If they, like us, are limited to the speed of light for communications, it’ll be almost two hundred years before they learn about us. However, we cannot take their technology for granted . . . especially any anthropocentric ideas of limits to that technology. When we’re done meeting with the Satorai, we will be departing for Deneb, a twelve-day jaunt. We have no idea what to expect when we get there.”

  “Okay, people,” Cordell said. “We’ll be launching in thirty minutes. The Black Demons will take point, with the Hellfuries right behind on their six. The Star Reapers will be on CSP. I want to emphasize that the Satori were friendly during our last visit . . . or at least they weren’t overtly hostile. You will not closely approach the Satori statites or other structures.

  “The Gaki—which some of you know as ‘space whales’ or ‘space amoeba’—are also off-limits, at least to begin with. Since we hope to establish peaceful contact with the Denebans later, it won’t do for us to shoot down their AIs. This order may be changed later on, however. If the skipper decides that engaging a space whale will help us with the Satori, then you’ll receive orders to that effect, but not, repeat, not until then. Understand me?”

  Murmured assent sounded from the assembled pilots. “Hey, CAG?” one pilot said, raising his hand.

  “Stiles?”

  “Just what’s the word on this civilian on Republic’s bridge, anyway?”

  “Captain Gray?”

  “Yeah. I heard he was an admiral who got busted for disobeying orders. What’s he doing running this show?”

  “Sounds pretty FUBAR’d to me,” Adams put in.

  Cordell seemed to hesitate before replying. “Our orders stress that this is a civilian mission, not military . . . so they put a civilian in charge. They’re using a Navy ship and Navy strike fighters just in case this thing goes pear-shaped. Captain Gray is a good officer with a long and distinguished record. You will obey his orders just as if he was still a Navy officer . . . and you will show him the respect due to one. Understand me?”

  Again, there was muttered assent. Gregory noticed that a number of the newbies, however, were looking either uncertain, or were exchanging knowing and skeptical nods or glances. He raised his hand.

  “Gregory?”

  “Sir, I just wanted to add . . . I served with Admiral Gray for quite a while. He took us to the Omega Centauri Rosette, to the N’gai Cloud in the remote past, out here to Tabby’s Star, and to the Glothr Rogue twelve million years in the future. The guy is supernova brilliant, both as a tactician and as a commander. Those of us who’ve served with him would follow him anywhere. Just thought you ought to know. Sir.”

  “I think we all know Captain Gray’s reputation, Lieutenant, thank you. Are there any questions? Anyone? Very well. Saddle up . . . and good luck.”

  As the other pilots stood up and began filing out, Gregory leaned back in his chair and wondered if the eternal divide between military and civilian was going to cause a problem here. Military personnel generally didn’t understand civilians, and the reverse was certainly true as well. The long and bitter struggle with the Sh’daar had emphasized that split. The war had been fought because the USNA government had refused to give in to Sh’daar demands that they give up certain technologies. That refusal ultimately had led to civil war between the USNA and the Earth Confederation. However, except when the war had landed on the civilians’ collective doorsteps—at Columbus, for instance, or with the Pan-Euro attack on Washington, D.C.—Earth’s civilian population had not been much involved. Most battles had been light years from Earth, and for the most part the Sh’daar Associative had been held at arm’s length.

  He wondered what had happened with that Rosetter light show in Earth’s system as Republic had accelerated out a few days ago. The civilian inhabitants of Earth just might be getting a far closer look at interstellar warfare than they’d ever imagined possible.

  And here on board the Republic, some of the military personnel were wondering about a civilian in command. Even knowing the guy was ex-Navy . . . somehow it seemed more important to them, more immediate and more to the point, that he was a civilian now, rather than on active duty. A Navy captain took his orders from his commanders and, ultimately, from the Joint Chiefs and the president. But a civilian? Scuttlebutt had it that his dismissal had been arranged by a damned AI. Maybe he was a civilian because someone didn’t want him in the chain of command.

  And that kind of fundamental doubt in the validity of the chain of command could be deadly.

&nb
sp; Chapter Ten

  8 February 2426

  TC/USNA CVS Republic

  Tabby’s Star

  1221 hours, TFT

  The Republic drifted above an endless sea of black. Each light sail of the Satori Matrioshka brain was hundreds of kilometers across, a wisp-thin continent of carbon-woven fabric suspended above the blaze of the F5 star by the pressure of light. Far below each sail hung a teardrop-shaped complex of computronium as massive as the SupraQuito orbital complex, suspended by an immensely strong cable perhaps half a kilometer thick. There were, at the best guess, some trillions of statites arranged around the star in multiple shells. Those shells were by no means opaque; the statites were widely scattered, with large open gaps between, and the deeper shells were visible only as a kind of faint haze slightly reducing the star’s glare.

  Even deeper, below the haze, vast and dimly seen shapes hung suspended against the sun, slow-tumbling, orbiting remnants of a megastructure smashed into fragments centuries before. Some of those fragments were immense, a dozen times the size of Jupiter, imbedded within dense pockets of dust. The current inhabitants of the system had been mining the wreckage of the smashed and crumbling Dyson sphere to launch greater and greater numbers of statites hanging well above the orbits of the wreckage.

  On the Republic’s bridge, Captain Gray settled back in his command chair, eyes closed, bracing himself for contact. The technotelepathic link would be handled by Konstantin, of course, allowing a relatively seamless meeting of intellects, but no matter how good the AI intermediary, joining with the sheer otherness of an alien mind could be brutal.

  This is Trevor Gray, desiring direct communication with the Mind of this system.

  For an agonizing wait that might have been several seconds long but which felt like eternity, there was nothing.

  And then, with an inner jolt, Gray no longer was aboard the Republic.

  He was back on Earth . . . on a rooftop overlooking the Manhatt Ruins.

  Seawater surged and flowed at the bottoms of the canyons between the crumbling, overgrown skyscrapers. But that wasn’t right—because the ruins had been reclaimed . . . rebuilt . . . the streets drained by the construction of the Verrazano Narrows Dam.