by Ian Douglas
“Well . . . yes, sir. There is. But it doesn’t make sense.”
Gray drew a breath. Something remained. “Don’t keep us in suspense, Commander.”
“It’s the timing signal, Captain. It’s telling us that today’s date is . . .”
“Yes?”
“Sir, it’s the seventh of February. Twelve-seventeen hours. Sir.”
The words jolted Gray to the core of his being. He imagined that he must look as shocked right then as did Commander Rohlwing.
SolNet was a kind of system-wide Internet comprising computers and AI systems scattered all across the solar system. Most of the servers were on Earth, of course, but each individual ship contributed its own computer network to the larger Web, as did all of the bases, orbital facilities, and colonies, from the solar energy collectors on Mercury all the way out to the cryo-drilling rigs attempting to penetrate the sub-ice oceans of Pluto in the ever-questing search for life. The under-ice bases on Europa, Ganymede, and Enceladus all connected with the Web through antenna arrays on their bitterly cold surfaces. The Mars colony was linked in, as were the Navy shipyards on Phobos. The moon was a major node in the network, as were the dirigible cities high up in the atmosphere of Venus. Eris, Triton, Nereid, Oberon, Titan . . . everywhere in the Sol System, in fact, where humans maintained a constant presence, there were computer nodes making up the systemwide Net.
Timekeeping was a critically important part of the far-flung computer network. For widely separated servers to communicate with one another, they had to match one another’s clock speed and time stamp, to be on the same page, so to speak, when they needed to exchange streams of data. The velocities of the ships and bases involved had to be carefully accounted for, since relativistic effects could throw two computers far off the mark with one another, far enough that communication between them would be impossible.
And according to the servers still on-line within the Sol System, the Republic’s network was off by over a month.
“Department heads,” Gray said after a moment’s thought. “Briefing Room One, ten minutes.”
The briefing room was located aft of the bridge, in the rotating hab module that created the out-is-down illusion of spin gravity. It contained a large central table set with touch panels, links, and other modern accoutrements, and the bulkheads could project a variety of external camera views as well as CGI graphics.
As protocol demanded—military protocol, Gray reminded himself—all of the department heads were already there and seated when Gray walked in.
“Attention on deck!”
“As you were,” Gray said, waving them back down. “We’ve got a lot to cover and damned little time to do it in. I’d like to talk about how we’re going to take down the Rosette entity.”
That startled them.
“Sir . . .” Commander Cordell began. He hesitated.
“Spit it out, CAG.”
“Sir . . . our mission to Deneb was a flat failure. I mean, we went out there to establish an alliance with the Harvesters, right? Or, at the very least, learn something we could use. And they sent us home with our tail between our legs. How the fuck are we supposed to . . . ah . . . take down the Rosetters?”
“But we did learn something, Commander,” Gray replied evenly. “Something that might prove to be quite decisive. The Deneban Harvesters, for whatever reason, have sent us back in time.”
They all knew about the time jump . . . though they’d not had much of a chance yet to think about it, or what it meant. “Captain,” Commander Brandon Hayes, of the ship’s physics department, said. He sounded . . . stunned, as though his entire understanding of physics had just been inverted. “Are we sure about that? I mean . . . a miscalibration of one of the TRGA cylinders could have—”
“As sure as we can be, Commander. We’ve been through the TRGA passage records, and everything appears to be operational . . . properly operational. And the timing was just too damned perfect for coincidence. The Harvesters sent us back far enough that we’ve arrived back in the Sol System seven days after we set out . . . about the time we were traversing the Penrose TRGA, in fact. We’ve been gone thirty-three days. According to our timekeeping, it should be the fourth of March. According to the computer networks here in the Sol System, it’s still February seventh.”
“It’s . . . simply not possible.”
“Nonsense, Commander. It happened, therefore it’s possible. It’s up to us to figure out how best to use the fact to our advantage.”
“In fact,” Carolyn Sanger put in, “we’ve known for some time that the Rosetters can twist time around for their own purposes. And, of course, we’ve used the TRGA devices to travel in time ourselves.”
Sanger, head of Republic’s IS department, had been aboard the America when they’d slipped 12 million years into the future and visited Invictus, the rogue-planet Glothr homeworld. She was a class-3 cyborg with parts of her face encased in plastic and metal. Gray was not sure he trusted her entirely . . . and he knew for a fact that she didn’t like him. She’d been transferred to the Republic, however, because she knew more than most about the Harvester Omega Code, and about the Trinity Code that had been derived from it.
And thanks to that highly technical knowledge, she was an expert on the Rosetters, and Gray was happy now that she’d been transferred. He knew that his mistrust was wrapped up in his ambivalent feelings about AI and computers in general, something he’d been seeking to correct ever since he started working closely with Konstantin. He had no question at all about Sanger’s competence . . . or of her knowledge of the Rosette Aliens or their technology.
“So you’re saying that if the Rosetters could play around with time,” Jeff Mercer suggested, “then the Harvesters could too.”
“Exactly,” Sanger replied. “Whoever built the original TRGA network knew how to use them to travel through time. It stands to reason that, with a sufficiently advanced technology, others could pull off the trick as well.”
“Unfortunately,” Gray said, pushing ahead, “we don’t know how to do it. At least we can’t use it as a weapon . . . and right now we need a weapon very, very badly. Something we can deploy effectively against the Rosette Aliens. Some of us have been discussing the problem with Konstantin, and we think we’ve come up with something. Not time travel . . . and it’s a hell of a long shot, but it’s worth looking at.”
“A weapon against an alien intelligence that’s at least a few million years ahead of us?” Rohlwing said. “This, I’ve got to hear!”
But Gray wasn’t comfortable with a lot of the science as yet. “Dr. Ferris? Help me out here.”
“The captain is speaking of how we might use the fighter drive singularities, of course,” Ferris said. “The aerospace wing has been working on this for several days now, tuning them so that they will do considerable damage to robotic swarms in combat.”
“What . . . you want to use the fighters’ drives as weapons?” Sanger said.
“It’s not so far-fetched,” Republic’s CAG said. “We’ve had pilots use their singularities like a kind of buzz saw . . . zap! Rips a slice right through an enemy ship’s hull!”
“But the buzz-saw target is one ship at a time,” Rohlwing said. “Not a few hundred billion microscopic robots! Remember . . . we’re up against another swarm intelligence of some sort.”
“Yeah, that doesn’t sound very practical,” Jeff Mercer added. “My God, Captain . . . do you know how big the Rosetter swarms are?”
“The one approaching Earth was roughly the same mass as Jupiter. Yes, I know.”
“But the singularity projected by a fighter’s drive unit is tiny,” Sanger pointed out. “It wouldn’t be able to swallow the nanobots fast enough.”
“That,” Ferris said, “is where being able to tune the fighter drives comes in. . . .”
During the passage home from Tabby’s Star, Gray had spent hours going over the concept with Republic’s team of physics and drive engineers, most of whom were at t
his briefing. He wanted their support . . . needed their support. Even now, not all among Republic’s crew were willing to accept Gray’s authority. Not all on his bridge staff, especially the civilian scientists and technicians among them, would acknowledge without question his right to command.
So far, Gray reflected, the mission itself had provided the framework to keep things going. Republic had been given her orders—to proceed to Tabby’s Star, then to Deneb, in order to find allies or technologies that might be useful against the Rosette Aliens at Sol. Their return to Sol after that mission’s failure left them facing an impossible question, one with no clear answer.
What now?
Gray had an idea for what now . . . but he wasn’t sure yet that he had the full support of Republic’s crew . . .
. . . to say nothing of the military command authority back home.
First, though, he needed to convince his department heads.
“Tuneable,” Ferris was explaining to the room, “means that we can collapse or inflate the gravity field of an artificial singularity, both to create the specific acceleration we need and to make certain that the field is large enough to encompass the entire spacecraft without . . . ah . . . unfortunate effects.”
Unfortunate effects, of course, referred to tidal stresses. Make a black hole big enough and the difference in gravitational acceleration between close in and farther out could rip a spacecraft to shreds. The larger the circumference of a black hole’s event horizon, the less the tidal effect on objects close by; the initial drive singularity of a Starblade fighter was smaller than a proton, but local space could be reshaped in such a way that the entire vessel rode tucked comfortably within the drive bubble without being torn to pieces. The singularity flickered on and off millions of times per second, pulling the fighter forward with each rapid-fire pulse.
Fighter pilots in particular were aware of the technicalities of using micro-black holes in flight. Flying through debris clouds could be a surreal experience, as molecules of gas and dust and small fragments of destroyed spacecraft were swept up by the singularity’s maw, vanishing in a burst of radiation. Some pilots, as the CAG had just said, had even used their drive singularities to slice open the hulls of much larger enemy vessels. Lieutenant Donald Gregory had famously used that maneuver in the desperate fight with the Slan more than a year ago, and there’d been others as well.
The tactic was . . . not recommended.
But in combat, sometimes, there were damned few choices.
What Gray had proposed to his staff was somewhat less audacious than disassembling an enemy spacecraft with the flickering black hole projected from the nose of your fighter. “Each fighter,” Ferris was telling them, “will follow a different vector through the target cloud with its singularity drive defocused to a sphere about two meters across. As it passes through the alien cloud, it will absorb large numbers of the nanomachines, crushing them down to an ergospheric volume a few centimeters across. . . .”
At that, there was still no way that the fighters off the Republic could destroy enough nanomachines to do the Rosetters any real harm. What Gray was counting on was the destruction of enough random pathways and connections between one part of the target cloud and another to degrade the emergent intelligence within the cloud.
Konstantin was displaying a schematic on one of the briefing-room walls to illustrate as Ferris continued his presentation. It showed a slightly oblate sphere of thick, gray haze, with hundreds of internal connecting lines throughout its volume. Those lines represented the network of electronic links that—theoretically, at least—mimicked the synaptic connections of an organic brain. Interrupt one, and the connection would probably shift to another line, from A to B to C over to A to D to C.
But interrupt a lot of them all at once, and maybe the Rosetter entity would actually feel it.
Maybe. In all likelihood the Rosetter clouds used many trillions of connections, and the human forces simply wouldn’t be able to take down enough of them to make a difference.
But it was all that Gray had to work with.
“Our fighters,” Ferris was saying, “will actually have two weapons at their disposal, two means of attacking the Rosetter entity. First will be the direct paths carved through the cloud. Konstantin will calculate individual vectors during the attack in order to maximize the effect on the Rosetter network.” On the graphic, green lines curved inward, converging at the cloud’s center.
“We believe,” Ferris continued, “that there is some sort of mother ship or control HQ near the cloud’s center, a mobile HQ controlling the entire cloud. It will, of course, be heavily protected. We doubt that our normal weapons will have much, if any, effect. However, we may be able to employ the drive singularities of our fighters as missiles, of sorts, by releasing them at high velocity on precisely calculated trajectories.”
Drive singularities were called into existence by warping a tiny pocket of spacetime directly ahead of the ship, creating artificial singularities. Those singularities attracted the ship, affecting every atom equally . . . which meant the ship and its occupants were in free fall. Each singularity lasted for only a fraction of a millisecond, however, before winking out and being replaced by a new singularity a little farther along on the vessel’s trajectory.
In the earliest days of gravitic drives, those who worked with the technology assumed that the artificial black holes were more or less permanent because they acted permanent. Each successive projection seemed to merge with the previous one, and at the end of a series of maneuvers, the last projection remained, complete with its packet of accumulated mass. At the conclusion of a battle, pilots would release the pockets of warped spacetime and their mass packets, called “fuzzballs” or “dustballs,” to send them safely out of the system. A kind of space pilot’s urban legend back then had suggested that the fuzzballs might pose serious problems for the inhabitants of other star systems when they came whipping along at near-c decades later.
Later studies had proven the idea wrong, of course. Microsingularities tended to evaporate in discrete puffs of X-ray and gamma radiation. But they did survive for some seconds or even minutes before winking out, and during that time a fighter could release them along a given trajectory. If they happened to end their flight path by hitting a solid target, they would cause damage—impact, radiation, thermal, and physical disintegration as the microsingularities took a bite out of whatever they hit.
Ferris was describing an assault using thousands of artificial singularities to bombard whatever was at the center of the alien cloud. It might even work . . . if the Rosetters didn’t have some sort of super-tech shield that could shrug off incoming singularities.
When it came to Rosetter capabilities, Gray was unwilling to lay down money on what they might be able to do or not do. It would be, in short, a learning experience.
“In conclusion,” Ferris said, “we cannot offer any guarantees that these tactics will do a damned thing against the Rosetters. They do, however, offer us our best chance of challenging them. Questions?”
“I have one for the captain,” Cordell said.
“Go ahead, CAG.”
“Do we know the Rosetters are hostile yet? We’ve been gone for a month. Anything could have happened while we were out at Tabby’s Star and Deneb.”
“We’re waiting on a call-back now,” he replied. “We messaged to Earth, to Luna, to Mars, and to several deep-space facilities as soon as we emerged from Alcubierre Drive. That was about three hundred light-minutes from Earth, so they won’t have learned we’ve arrived until . . .” He consulted his in-head time keeper. “Make it 2310 hours. We’re following our announcement in, but at only point two c. We want to get a good look at the situation in the inner system before we just blunder in there.
“However, the astro department might have some information for us about the inner system. Dr. Keller?”
Dr. Anna Keller, the civilian in charge of Republic’s astronomy department, nodded. “I’m
afraid so,” she said. “It’s not good.”
At her mental command, Ferris’s cloud schematic vanished and was replaced by a deep-space image scan with CGI overlays of the inner solar system, depicting the planetary orbits out to Jupiter.
Gray’s heart sank. Keller had told him what her scans revealed moments before the briefing had begun, but seeing it was a lot worse. The images horrified him. Earth appeared to be enmeshed in a haze like an irregular spider web so thick that Republic’s most powerful long-range optics had not been able to pick up the planet itself. The image slowly zoomed in, but details were blurred by distance. Earth itself remained totally invisible, engulfed by the weblike haze, to say nothing of far smaller, delicate artifacts like the space elevators and the elevator complexes in synchronous orbit. The web work ensnaring the Earth appeared to be the central anchor for a far-flung tangle of lines, cylinders, and various geometrical shapes, all seemingly manufactured from light and quite possibly extra-dimensional in nature. Gray had seen similar constructions at Kapteyn’s Star and—far more distant—within the Omega Centauri star cluster where the Rosetters had first appeared.
The moon, he noticed, was well clear of the cloud and of the faintly glowing outlines of alien geometries. That would give Republic an advance base from which to strike at the cloud over Earth, and serve as a rallying point for any human warships in-system still trying to fight back.
The other personnel gathered around the table murmured with one another, horrified by the sight. Clearly, the Rosetters had struck directly at Earth, probably a short time after Republic had left the system, and they had struck efficiently and successfully. Gray wondered if there was anything of Earth’s various defensive fleets left.
The war, he thought, with an uncharacteristic sense of finality, might already be over.
“As you can see,” Keller went on, “the aliens have infested Earth just as they did Heimdall. We do not know how they have affected the planet physically, but we can assume that local defensive forces have been brushed aside . . . or destroyed.
