by Ian Douglas
He looked again at the atmosphere readout . . . and at the data already coming back from the remotes.
Odd. Damned odd. He pulled up and accelerated, blasting free of the atmosphere and entering open space once more. “Hey, Skipper?”
“Whatcha got, Gregory?”
“I just pulled an atmosphere sample.”
“And?”
“Nitrogen, seventy-eight percent. Oxygen, twenty-point-nine-five percent. Argon, point nine-five percent. Carbon dioxide, four hundred fifty parts per million. Trace amounts of neon, helium, ozone—”
“What’s your point, Gregory?”
“Sir, the planet’s atmosphere is close—very close—to Earth’s. Almost identical, in fact, right down the line. The seawater has a salinity of about three-point-five percent, mostly sodium and chloride ions, with a mean density of one point zero two five kilos per liter. Temperature at the surface is eighteen Celsius. Pressure at sea level is one oh one point three kilo-Pascals.”
“Okay, okay, so we can breathe down there. . . .”
“No, sir. I don’t mean that. It’s . . . it’s like the place is a deliberate, perfect copy. You couldn’t get an atmosphere duplicating Earth’s that precisely, not by chance, and not under a star that much hotter than Sol!”
“You’re saying the place was made to order? For us?”
“I’m thinking that’s the only explanation, sir. I’m thinking that big mirror ball scanned us somehow, read our atmosphere on board the Republic, and then scooted back here to crank out an environment where we could walk around without pressure suits.”
“Lieutenant, that’s flat-out crazy.”
“Yes, sir.”
“It also means they’re friendly.”
“Maybe. Or maybe it’s a damned trap.”
“Let’s not borrow trouble, okay?”
“Not my intent, Commander. I—hold on.”
“What do you have?”
Gregory boosted his optical feed. There was something hanging above the ocean a hundred kilometers ahead. He closed with it.
“Demon Four, Demon Leader. Report, Gregory. What do you see?”
“I . . . I’m not entirely sure, sir. Probably a natural phenomenon. Looks like a kind of tower or pillar of mist rising from the ocean’s surface.”
“Are you recording it?”
“Affirmative, sir. It could be steam, maybe from a volcanic vent just below the surface. Or something like a swarm of insects.” He’d seen vids of swarms of midges rising from lakes back on Earth. The cloud seemed more silvery than the brownish swarms he’d seen before, but they had that same organic feel to them. The damned thing was acting like a living organism, condensing to near solidity in one spot, dispersing into nothing at others, expanding, contracting, slowly drifting above the sea.
Then Gregory checked the range and realized that the cloud must be ten kilometers high and made up of trillions or even hundreds of trillions of individual components.
If this was a sample of Enigma’s native life, it was damned strange.
He angled his Starblade slightly, shaping his trajectory to take him closer to the cloud. “Gimme a complete analysis of this stuff,” he told his fighter’s AI. “Let’s see what it’s made of.”
His instrumentation showed that his fighter was curving past the outer boundary of the cloud, but a sudden roar from outside his hull proved that the cloud’s boundary was not sharp or well-defined. The drive singularity out in front of his fighter flared to a dazzling blue-white as he plowed through whatever made up the cloud’s swirling volume.
Then he was through and climbing.
“All Demons, this is Demon Leader,” Mackey called. “Rejoin the flight, and we’ll hightail it back to the Republic and report. Anyone see any cities or signs of habitation?”
“Negative.”
“No, sir.”
“Not a thing, Skipper. Not even any animals.”
Gregory said nothing. He didn’t know how to classify his brief sighting.
“That is weird,” Mackey said. “Okay, everyone rendezvous on my beacon. . . .”
Gregory clawed for orbit, swiftly closing with the rest of the abbreviated squadron as they all rejoined Mackey at the two-hundred-kilometer line.
Above them, the vast and humbling shapes of megastructures far larger than worlds cast eerie shadows across the otherwise too-familiar landscape below.
Conference Room,
TC/USNA CVS Republic
1055 hours, TFT
“Talk to me, people,” Gray said. “What do we know about the Denebans so far?”
He was standing in front of twenty-five men and women gathered about a large conference table. Most were civilians, though there were a few naval personnel in the room as well. Some were the heads of Republic’s various science departments, including cosmology and planetology, exobiology, xenolinguistics, and artificial intelligence, among others, and the audience was filled out with their senior people and research assistants.
Elena Vasilyeva was technically present as an observer but was in fact sharing Republic’s xenosophontology department with Dr. Jeffry Mercer. That, Gray knew, would sooner or later lead to trouble. He had received some reports over the past weeks of some bitter arguments and ongoing turf wars between Vasilyeva and Mercer. Dr. Bradon Ferris was there as the ship’s senior xenotechnology expert, and Gray expected some sparks from that corner as well. Xenosophontology—the study of alien intelligence—and xenotechnology—the study of alien science and technology—overlapped in many areas.
The department heads were gathered around a long conference table grown just for this occasion, while the room’s overhead had been set to display the panorama outside of Republic’s hull. Maybe, Gray thought, that incredible and humbling view of alien technologies big enough to dwarf whole planets would defuse the interdepartmental rivalries.
Maybe . . . but he was inclined to doubt it.
Gray hated having to deal with civilians. Unlike military personnel, there was no way to order them to shut up and have it stick.
He reminded himself that now, technically, he was a civilian, albeit one in command of a military warship. Somehow, the thought did not cheer him up.
The compartment was dead silent. “Anyone?” Gray added. “We must know something by now.”
“It might help if the Denebans would deign to talk with us,” Ferris grumbled.
“Captain Gray,” Vasilyeva said.
“Yes, Doctor?”
“We can know very little about the aliens at this point . . . at least nothing about their biology or their psychology. However, I think we can be confident in our understanding of this planet . . . what are you calling it?”
“Enigma.”
“Yes, Enigma. Its existence is essentially an invitation.”
“The fact that they haven’t even tried to communicate with us directly,” Mercer said, “makes that seem extremely unlikely.” He was scowling, and sounded less than impressed with his fellow xenosophontologist.
“They may be a species that doesn’t use verbal communication,” Dr. Alec Godfrey said. He was head of Republic’s linguistics section, and an expert on both nonhuman and nonverbal communications.
“I doubt that,” Victor Garret said. He was the Republic’s expert in artificial intelligence. “When the America visited the Tabby’s Star system before, they encountered the Gaki, which turned out to be extremely sophisticated AI programs inserted into returning Satori probes, right? The ability to write code is absolutely bound up in language. You have to have a spoken language in order to develop a coding language.”
“Not necessarily,” Vasilyeva said. “Any form of communication must have a means of expressing itself in binary form . . . yes and no, on and off, zero and one. And if it can do that, it can be used to program computers.”
“So now you’re an expert on alien programming methods?” Mercer said.
“Not exactly,” Garret said, chuckling. “Binary doesn’t get you t
hat far when you’re deep enough into quantum computing.”
“Belay that, people!” Gray snapped. “Snipe at each other on your own time!” He waved his arm, taking in the vista arching overhead: alien structures that had taken on a godlike scope and mysticism. “Tell me about all of that!”
“Certainly,” Bradon Ferris said. “We can surmise quite a bit, just by examining what’s under our noses.”
One of the thousand-kilometer circles filled with transparent polygons was highlighted overhead, and a duplicate of the object appeared above the conference table, materialized by the room’s AI-controlled holographic projector.
“These are solar collectors,” Ferris continued. “Probability . . . ninety percent plus. They seem to be designed to pass most visible light, but ultraviolet and X-rays are stopped and converted to electricity. There are some hundreds of billions of these structures surrounding the star Deneb, most of them within a few tens of astronomical units out from the star. A number appear to have been parked out here at three-twenty AU and are in part shielding the planet Enigma.
“This last suggests strongly that the Denebans have such amazing control over basic matter that whipping up a planet from scratch may not be a big stretch for them.”
The collector floating above the table vanished, replaced by what looked like an enormous flat hoop. One was highlighted in the view overhead as well . . . though from that vantage point only a portion of the curved surface could be seen.
“This, we believe,” Ferris said, “to be something we call a Banks orbital. There are several thousand of these in the Deneb system. Most are roughly two million kilometers across, side to side, and about a thousand kilometers wide. I’m sure everyone here is familiar with the concept of a ‘Ringworld,’ a structure proposed by a twentieth-century writer of fantastic fiction. He envisioned a hoop encircling a star. As it rotated around the star, centrifugal force created artificial gravity, and the inner surface was . . . terraformed, I guess we could say, to create continents and oceans. In a very real sense, it is an artificial planet, rotating once in twenty-four hours to create a day-night cycle and artificial gravity of one G.”
“You’re saying they made those things to accommodate us?”
“No, no, not at all. I apologize if I gave that impression. This one I’ve identified here is close to a size that would produce that spin rate—not precisely, but close. However, we see a number of different sizes and spin rates, from just over a million kilometers to one that measures six-point-two million kilometers in diameter.”
“So the thing has a landscape on the inner surface?” Godfrey wanted to know. “Like a Ringworld?”
“Yes. There’s not nearly as much surface area, of course. One of these has a surface area of . . .” Ferris hesitated as he ran an in-head calculation. “Make it something just over eleven and a half billion square kilometers.”
Someone in the room gave a low whistle.
“Earth has a surface area of something like a half billion square kilometers,” Godfrey said. “One of those hoops would have a surface area equivalent to twenty-three Earths!”
“How do you keep the atmosphere in one of those things?” Mercer wanted to know.
“Rim walls. Artificial mountains along the entire circumference on both sides of the hoop. Make them a hundred kilometers high, and they keep the atmosphere from spilling over the sides and out into space. Otherwise, though, centrifugal force keeps it in place.”
“Dr. Ferris,” Gray asked. “You say there are thousands of these things in-system? Are they all inhabited?”
Ferris paused, looking uncertain. “Captain, we just don’t know. They may be. Or they may have been once, long ago. We’ve seen no sign of intelligent life on any of these structures, but that doesn’t mean it’s not there. We have . . . questions about the nature of the Denebans, questions that lead us to suspect that they are not carbon-based life forms like us.
“You mean they are a machine intelligence?” Gray asked. “Like the Satorai?”
“Almost certainly. We’re finding that all truly advanced species at some point merge with their technology. Organic life forms either upload their minds to their machines . . . or upload them to computer simulations, like the Satori have. Or they become mixtures of organic and machine so finely knitted together that it’s impossible to tell where the one leaves off and the other begins.
“Only by joining their machines can a species gain anything like true immortality. We saw this with the various Sh’daar species. Sooner or later, purely organic forms will be defeated by the sheer size and scope and depth and diversity of space. Ultimately, they must fall away into extinction.”
“Not true, Doctor,” Vasilyeva said. She glanced at Gray as if looking for confirmation, then pushed ahead. “According to the data brought back by the carrier America, several of the Sh’daar species remained organic. The Adjugredudhra, for instance . . .”
“If I remember right, Dr. Vasilyeva,” Gray said, “those guys—stacks of starfish, right? They went the route of highly advanced nanotech. They built smaller and smaller machines with which they were able to redesign their bodies into any shape they chose. Some of those shapes remained organic, yes . . . but they relied on the nanotech to extend their life spans and to develop as an advanced life form.”
“Well, then . . . the F’heen-F’haav. Or the Baondyeddi.”
“The first are . . . were a symbiosis, madam,” Mercer said, nodding, “between a deep-dwelling marine species and a semi-sentient land-dwelling species like a tangle of worms. The second were the probable builders of the Etched Cliffs. Both the F’heen-F’haav and the Baondyeddi appear to have uploaded themselves into a planet-sized computer where they ride out the eons in simulations embracing entire universes. Or at least they did, until the Rosette Aliens sucked the Etched Cliffs dry. But you could say that they, ah, knitted themselves to their machines as well.”
Ferris nodded. “We feel pretty sure that the Denebans are either intelligent artificial minds of some sort . . . or they don’t have a physical presence like we do.”
“That’s just sheer nonsense!” Vasilyeva put in. “They must have a physical presence to be harvesting and utilizing so much raw energy!”
“We know that the Denebans do harvest the energy from at least this star, and we suspect that they may mine the energy resources of a number of O- and A-class giant stars throughout this part of the galaxy. If they evolved around such a star, we would expect them to be very alien indeed . . . possibly something like organized plasmas or even patterns or fields of nuclear force.
“But we don’t know. It’s possible that the original, organic Denebans retired to the surfaces of their artificial worlds some time ago, and leave the running of the system to their machines, or to more highly evolved descendants.”
“Or the Denebans might have constructed these objects for some other purpose entirely,” Mercer said. “We need direct contact if we’re to get any additional information!”
“We’re also going to need direct contact if we’re to hit them with the Bright Light module,” Gray pointed out. “Elena? Any progress there?”
“Not as yet, Captain,” Vasilyeva replied. “Our Nikolai has been probing local EM channels, looking for a way in. He has so far not been successful.”
“Surprise, surprise,” Gray said, arching an eyebrow. “We meet aliens as advanced as these guys are . . . and we can’t get past their firewalls? I’m shocked.”
“The Cygni team would be delighted to hear your suggestions, Captain Gray.”
“To start with, stop trying to break through their defenses.”
Vasilyeva’s eyes opened wide. “But Project Cygni’s whole purpose, its whole point—”
Gray held up his hand. “I know, I know. But bear with me, okay? We have a super-advanced intelligence—probably a machine intelligence—and it’s been under attack, or perceiving itself as being attacked, from the Satori, who’re living next door. That intelligence is
going to be very sensitive to attempts to penetrate it, attempts to get through its security, don’t you think? It’s smart enough that it can rewrite its own programming on the fly, faster than any outside virus or attack software could manage. Hell, it’s the one that programmed the Omega virus in the first place! And it is not going to be stupid enough to leave an open back door.”
“We substantially changed the original alien programming,” Vasilyeva began, but Gray waved her to silence.
“All your Bright Light Module is going to do is piss these guys off,” Gray told her. “Unless we can find a way to get them to interface with it voluntarily, I think we’re going to have to keep that in reserve.”
“So how are we supposed to get Bright Light in direct interface with the aliens?” Vasilyeva demanded.
“We start slow . . . and tell them why we’re here. We were in communication with their probes when America was out this way. Maybe they learned the language. If they’re as sharp as Dr. Mercer is suggesting, maybe they can learn the language from us, right here.”
“How do we tell them anything?” Vasilyeva asked. “We’ve been broadcasting on a few billion different radio channels since we got here. . . .”
“We accept their invitation,” Gray said, smiling. “We go down to the surface of Enigma and wait.”
Chapter Thirteen
21 February 2426
Captain Gray
Enigma
1422 hours, TFT
Gray stepped off the ramp of the Marine Raven landing shuttle and took a long look around. The panorama stretching around him might as well have been that of Earth. The sun hanging low above the horizon was smaller and brighter, a pinpoint of glare like a welder’s arc, made barely tolerable by the dimly seen circular shadows of the energy collectors.
He was wearing a lightweight utility suit with a transparent helmet that turned dark when the harsh sunlight touched it. Those collectors out in space cut down on the UV a lot, as did Enigma’s atmosphere, but the ambient light was still a lot richer in ultraviolet than back on Earth.
