by Ian Douglas
This time, however, everything seemed to have taken place as . . . and more importantly, when it should have.
And the Sh’daar Associative, the Xuzhou reported, was waiting for them.
Gray had been steeling himself for the meeting. Time, he thought, to talk to the damned bugs.
That wasn’t entirely fair, but it was essentially accurate.
Because the microbes that infected so many of the Sh’daar species were the source of an emergent intelligence, a conscious group-mind that could in various ways intelligently and deliberately influence its hosts.
“Sh’daar vessel approaching, Admiral,” Gutierrez said quietly. “Link incoming . . .”
“I’ll take it here,” he told her. He could see the alien ship—a golden teardrop now hanging off America’s bow a few hundred kilometers away. “Hold position relative to that ship.”
“Aye, sir. . . .”
“Ready Konstantin?” he thought.
“Channel open, Admiral.”
And the alien Mind poured through.
A human woman stood before him, attractive, dark-haired, and smiling. “Hello, Trev,” she said.
“Harriet! I thought you were back on Earth!”
“Only briefly, for debrief and to take the treatment . . . but then they shipped me right back to DT-1.”
Dr. Harriet McKennon was a civilian, the lead xenosophontologist of the Deep Time One research facility, an artificial world created to human needs and specifications within the N’gai Cluster. What Gray was experiencing now was a virtual conference, an AI-generated space where mutually alien entities could meet and interact. Physically, Gray was still back on America’s flag bridge; in his mind, he was in a kind of tropical garden lush with plant life, only a few species of which he recognized. A waterfall splashed in a large pool to his right. To his left, broad, white steps led up to a kind of outdoor amphitheater surrounded by jungle. Overhead, the densely packed suns and artificial habitats of the cloud’s central core shone through broad daylight, dominated by the intense blue glare of the Six Suns. Several of the stars he could see were nearly as bright as the six, including one which, from this angle, appeared to be in front of the Six Suns’ central opening.
A trick, he thought, of perspective . . .
Harriet was . . . dazzling, wearing a shimmering, almost-present translucence and roiling clouds of animated abstracts. Gray stretched out his arms and she stepped into them. “It’s good to see you again, Trev,” she told him. “I’ve missed you.”
“As I’ve missed you. Three months . . .”
She pulled back a little. “I . . . I’m sorry about that.”
“Doesn’t matter a bit.” Hope flared, nova-bright. “Maybe . . . we can pick up where we left off?”
“Maybe . . .” She didn’t sound sure of that. “Let’s see . . . where Bright Light takes us.”
He nodded understanding.
Gray had met McKennon during his last visit to the cloud. Neither of them had known at the time that she’d already been infected by the alien paramykes . . . or that the microbes could be sexually transmitted. Their sudden connection, their brief affair had been surprising—not least because both of them had grown up instilled with a strong preference for monogamy in a culture that found such rigid pairings . . . distasteful at best, perverse at worst. Gray still wasn’t sure what had drawn them into bed together, but he definitely hoped they could do so again. Being a monogie didn’t mean he wasn’t human.
Besides, this time around they wouldn’t be sharing a super-intelligent STD in the process.
For right now, though, he understood that it was business first.
“Beautiful simulation,” he said, holding her hand as he looked around. “Is this Konstantin’s doing? Or yours?”
“We’re being managed by Darwin,” she told him. “Charles? Say hello to Admiral Gray.”
“Good afternoon, Admiral,” a man’s voice said in Gray’s mind. “Welcome to the N’gai Cloud . . . and to the Odeon.”
“Good to meet you, Charles. Odeon?”
“A stone amphitheater on the southwest slope of the Athenian Acropolis, on Earth,” the AI explained. “It seemed an appropriate name.”
And perhaps it was. DT-1 was intended as a meeting place of mutually alien cultures, a place where those cultures could be showcased for one another. Ancient Athens hadn’t been out in the jungle, nor had it possessed such a startling view of the night sky overhead, but a showcase of culture, Western philosophy, and government it most certainly had been.
“There’s someone you must meet, Trevor,” McKennon told him.
Leading him by the hand, she took him up the steps of the Odeon . . .
. . . and he stepped into another, alien world, a place of colored smoke and translucent geometries. And before him was a Baondyeddi.
The Baondyeddi, clearly, were among the principal species that made up the Sh’daar Associative, and Gray had met them on numerous occasions. It was round and flat, a horizontal sand dollar a meter and a half wide, standing on hundreds of short, sucker-tipped and highly flexible legs. Dozens of bright blue eyes lined up around the rim, like the eyes of a terrestrial scallop, giving the entity a 360-degree view of its surroundings.
“Welcome back to the N’gai Cloud,” the being said in Gray’s head. “I am Nejedthebraoteh of the Concourse of Light. And you, of course, are Admiral Trevor Gray of this fleet of warships you have brought into our realm.”
“I am happy to meet you, Nejedthebraoteh,” Gray replied, letting his in-head circuitry call up the name for him so that he didn’t stumble over the unfamiliar syllables. Some physical gesture seemed appropriate . . . and after a brief hesitation he gave a stiff and shallow bow. “The fleet is here. . . .”
“We know,” the being interrupted. “And this presents us both with a problem.”
“What problem?”
“To reach the Dark Mind in your epoch,” the alien said, using the Sh’daar term for the Rosette entity, “you will need to approach the Six Suns at an extremely precise angle, following an extremely precise path.”
“That’s right. One time-like path out of some quintillions . . .”
“At this moment,” Nejedthebraoteh said, “there is a star blocking that path.”
The hazy translucency vanished, and Gray found himself adrift in open space. The simulation was almost unbearably realistic. Visible light glared so brightly that it took a moment—and some help from Darwin managing his in-head optics—before he could see.
Had he actually been floating unprotected in that region of space, he knew, the radiation would have blasted him to a crisp in an instant.
The Six Suns were much closer here than as seen from DT-1, their span stretching across half the sky. His viewpoint, he estimated was somewhere between fifty and a hundred astronomical units from the yawning maw of the alien portal. He rotated in space . . .
. . . and saw behind him a seventh sun, a point of blue-white radiance so bright that even with technological editing of the scene he could not bear to look straight at it.
When America had been in the Sh’daar home galaxy before, there’d been no star in that position. He remembered that “trick of perspective” he’d noted moments before, and realized that the seventh sun was, in fact, directly in front of the center of rotation for the other six.
Gray’s point of view shifted. He was seeing the seventh star from a new viewpoint, from off to the side, he thought. A complicated-looking structure hung in space in front of it; the thing must have been huge . . . millions of kilometers across, perhaps.
He did a rapid-fire series of calculations. If that star was roughly the same size as a blue-white star with which he was familiar—Rigel, in his own time—its diameter would be about eighty times that of Sol, or something close to 112 million kilometers. The artificial device or structure, then, would be something like 5 million kilometers across—mega-engineering on a scale to rival that of Matrioshka brains and Dyson clouds.
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And he knew instantly what he was looking at.
A Shkadov thruster.
Except . . . it wasn’t.
“What am I looking at?” he asked.
“A mobile, artificial world,” Nejedthebraoteh told him. “It is also a ship . . . and a weapon . . . perhaps the most powerful weapon ever deployed within this universe.”
Gray raised his virtual eyebrows at that but didn’t comment. It would have to be pretty damned powerful to surpass the Harvester computer virus that had destroyed the Satori Dyson sphere.
Gray checked his back channel through to Konstantin. “Are you getting all of this?”
“I am.”
“Are they actually using a supergiant star as heavy artillery?”
“That would appear to be the case.”
The artificial object, he could see, rather than heating a spot on the star, was projecting some sort of spacetime-bending field, creating a moving wave into which the star was continuously falling. He could see the distortion just ahead of the huge object; background stars were severely twisted and warped, even smeared into semicircles by the spacetime distortion.
“They rolled it out a couple of months ago,” McKennon told him. “Essentially, they’ve turned that star into a huge missile that’s going to blast through the Six Suns portal . . . and emerge in the middle of the Black Rosette.”
“As what?”
“That,” Nejedthebraoteh told him, “remains to be seen.”
“The Six Suns,” Gray said, keeping his virtual voice light, conversational. “They’re arranged in a circle . . . what . . . a few hundred astronomical units across? Lots of empty space. But on the other side, you know, things get tighter. A lot tighter.”
Gray was trying to imagine a star eighty times wider than the sun hurtling into the wide-open maw of the Six Suns on one side, with plenty of room to spare . . .
. . . and coming out on the other side, squeezed through an opening smaller than the planet Neptune.
It didn’t sound even remotely possible . . . a conjuror’s trick, but on a stellar scale.
Gray shook his head. “I don’t think it’s going to fit!”
“The Sh’daar have been engaged in stellar engineering for longer than Humankind has existed,” McKennon said. “They believe that this will end the threat of the Dark Mind once and for all.”
“Interesting. Very nice if true . . .”
“You seem skeptical, Admiral Gray,” the alien said.
He shrugged, then wondered if the gesture would mean anything to a many-legged pancake. “Not skeptical, exactly. But the Rosette entity represents a . . . a unified hive mentality so far beyond either of us that technology—even the technology of throwing stars at them—may be meaningless. Have you given thought to what might happen if the star doesn’t fit through the hole? Or . . . worse . . . if the Rosetters have a way of slamming the door shut in your faces before it gets there?”
“You don’t understand, Admiral.”
“Then teach me. Show me I’m wrong.”
“Your species is not capable of that level of understanding.”
“Try me.”
Data flowed through the virtual link. Gray had already assumed that he wouldn’t be able to comprehend whatever the alien sent to him without some pretty high-level backup, but he simply channeled it through to Konstantin. As it passed, he noted that a lot of the material, stuff dealing with Hilbert space, ergodic theory and quantum vectors, among other esoterica, was incomprehensible, at least to him. Gray was confident, however, that Konstantin would be able to handle it. Humans might not be the brightest stars in the galaxy, but they had a lot of experience in building tools to make the universe comprehensible.
The stuff he did understand included data describing the moving star’s velocity.
“Looks like it’s going to take you a while to get there,” Gray observed. His in-head software continued to analyze the star—velocity, vector, angles of approach . . .
Another week, he decided . . . or a little longer.
“The mobile star will reach the center of the Six Suns in another eight days,” McKennon told him.
“That’s about what I was thinking,” he replied. “You know, Nej,” he added, “you folks might want to stay well back when that star goes through. The opening’s big enough on this side, but it’s pretty small on the other . . . like a funnel. It might . . . splash.”
“We have already begun evacuating this galaxy,” Nejedthebraoteh replied.
They showed him the migration.
Xenosophontologists, alien-watchers like Harriet, who’d been studying the Sh’daar within the N’gai Cloud, had noted both the Sh’daar fear of the Rosette entity, which they called the Dark Mind, and their determination to destroy it. The long human-Sh’daar War, only recently concluded, had been brought on by their determination to control the technological developments of other species—of humans, in particular.
And that, in part, was tied to their desire to block the evolution of species such as humans into ascended beings, like the Rosetters.
The poor, paranoid civilizations of the Sh’daar Associative . . . Gray almost felt sorry for them.
Now, Gray saw untold thousands, hundreds of thousands of starships and mobile habitats leaving the N’gai Cloud. They spread out within his mind, drifting among the thronging stars. There was, he noted, a long stream of them, apparently moving toward the glorious spiral of stars close by, which was, he knew, the Milky Way galaxy of almost a billion years earlier.
The Sh’daar were abandoning N’gai.
Chapter Twenty-one
6 March 2426
TC/USNA FFS Plottel
Omega Centauri
0810 hours, TFT
The Plottel was a frigate, one of those small, cramped, and thin-hulled workhorses found in every navy, whether out in space or on the surface of a planetary ocean. Commander Jeremy Ranier was the Plottel’s skipper, with forty-seven men and women and one somewhat cranky AI on board. At the moment they were in stealth mode, five hundred astronomical units off the Black Rosette well in advance of the main force. Not that the Rosetters ever seemed to notice anything as small as a frigate. The joke had it that frigates were too small to see, and so harmless, so far as the Rosetters were concerned, that they could be safely ignored.
“Quite a light show, Skipper,” Fred Hanson, his executive officer, said. The forward bulkhead of the bridge was set to show the expanse of space filling the central reaches of the Omega Centauri cluster. Vast sheets and beams and sweeping curves of light seemed to reach out from a central point—the point occupied by the six black holes of the Rosette. “What do you think it’s for?”
“God only knows,” Ranier replied. “The scuttlebutt was that they used the stuff to twist time into knots at Earth.”
“You believe that?”
“Not sure what I believe, Fred. They seem damned serious about it, whatever it is. Helm!”
“Yes, sir,” the young helm officer of the watch snapped.
“Keep us well clear of that light, okay? I don’t care to go time traveling this morning . . . and if nothing else it’s perfect for making us very visible indeed.”
“Aye, sir. Maintaining position.”
“Our torpedo ready to go?”
“Yes, Captain,” Hanson replied. “Just give the word.”
Ranier nodded. If things went south—way south—he would launch the message torpedo, which would carry his situation report up to that second across a hundred light years to Admiral Reeve, waiting on board the New York.
And he would also launch if Admiral Gray’s task force made its expected appearance from inside the Black Rosette. That would summon Reeve’s task force and begin the battle.
But so damned much could go wrong. . . .
“Deploy the battlespace drones,” Ranier ordered. “Let’s get a closer look.”
TC/USNA CVS America
N’gai Cloud, Omega T-0.876gy
142
0 hours, TFT
Some 876 million years earlier, the star carrier America hung in empty space well outside the star-clotted central core of the N’gai Cloud. The Milky Way, a vast, flat disk of stars and glowing nebulae, stretched across half of heaven. Nearby, a few hundred kilometers distant and already moving at half the speed of light, a cluster of Sh’daar migration ships hung in the darkness of the Void.
The Sh’daar migration, McKennon told Gray, had been underway for months, now, and on a scale scarcely imaginable to humans used to star-faring in ships no more than a kilometer or so in length. These vessels, for the most part, were gigantic.
In every star system inhabited by members of the Associative, enormous structures—called McKendree cylinders—had been constructed, filled with billions of inhabitants, and set in motion by gravitational thrusters similar to the one propelling the giant star into the Six Suns.
Like the thermos-bottle O’Neill habitats designed and built over the past few centuries by humans, a McKendree rotated on its long axis to create spin gravity. Reinforced by carbon nanotubes rather than steel, however, they could be considerably larger. According to Konstantin, many were as much as a thousand kilometers wide and ten thousand long—large enough to provide an internal surface area of 63 million square kilometers—a land surface larger than Eurasia, on Earth. Each McKendree cylinder could comfortably support a population numbering in the billions.
The original design by NASA engineer Tom McKendree in the early twenty-first century had pictured the cylinders constructed in side-by-side counter-rotating pairs to avoid unwanted precession. Konstantin told Gray that the solitary Sh’daar versions were nested, one cylinder inside another, but with the same effect.
