by Ian Douglas
But what confounded Gray was the sheer scale of the operation . . . and its speed. Each cylinder in the alien fleet had been grown from large asteroids or dwarf planets using fairly basic nanotech engineering. That, he thought, must have sparked some debate. Nanotechnology was one of the “forbidden techs” proscribed by the paramycoplasmid mind.
Perhaps even intelligent microorganisms could recognize the danger posed by the Rosette entity.
Far more difficult than actually building those rotating cylinders, though, would be making them habitable, filling them with breathable atmospheres, creating the cities and landscaping and biomes of entire worlds spread out across each structure’s internal surfaces. And once that was done, there was the small problem of transporting hundreds of billions of Associative citizens to their new homes in deep space.
Only a fraction of the Sh’daar population was fleeing in McKendree cylinders, of course. When Gray had been there last, the core of the N’gai galaxy had been heavily populated with various types of mega-engineering habitats—Bishop rings, Banks orbitals, and the much larger worldrings. All that had been necessary to evacuate those citizens were gravitational thrusters tugging them out of the core and into deep space.
But enough Sh’daar still lived on or under planetary surfaces to require the construction of hundreds of McKendree cylinders for massive evacuations.
From his vantage point on board America, Gray was watching the population of an entire galaxy accelerating into the distance.
How the hell had they managed it?
“Many,” Konstantin whispered in his mind, “were uploaded into powerful computer networks while their bodies were frozen. Some of those vessels are essentially pure computronium supporting whole universes of virtual reality. The uploaded Sh’daar will span the centuries with the passage of virtual time greatly slowed. Tens of thousands of years in the outside universe will seem like a few months to them.”
“Tens of thousands . . .” Gray tried to wrap his mind around that. “They don’t have faster-than-light?”
“No. Evidently there wasn’t time. The N’gai Cloud is approximately ten thousand light years above the plane of the Milky Way. These vessels will reach it in fifteen to twenty thousand years.”
Gray wondered if the inhabitants of those star-faring habitats had any automated defenses in case of attack. There might, he thought, be worse things among the stars than the Rosetters.
“We should return to the cloud’s center, Admiral,” Konstantin told him.
“I know. I wanted to see this . . . this exodus for myself.”
“Nejedthebraoteh estimates that perhaps twenty percent of the cloud’s inhabitants have fled already. They’re not all going to make it.”
“So I gathered. It’s all so . . . so pointless.”
“Enough have escaped to preserve their culture, their civilization,” Konstantin said. “If a few hundred billions are unable to escape, their civilization will still survive.”
“That’s not acceptable!”
“It is acceptable within their worldview.”
“Konstantin, we need to stop this!”
“To what end, Admiral?” Konstantin sounded genuinely puzzled. “Stopping the Rosette entity is why we are here in the first place. It appears that our former enemies are willing to undertake that task for us, with technologies Humankind cannot yet begin to understand. That was, in fact, why the Republic went to Deneb, wasn’t it? To find advanced alien technologies that might help us eliminate the Rosette entity’s threat?”
“But . . . my God, the price . . .”
“It seems to be a price the Sh’daar are willing to pay,” Konstantin told him. “The human-Sh’daar War was fought, remember, by humans demanding the right to choose for themselves, correct?”
“Yes . . .”
“Then we should grant the Sh’daar the same courtesy.”
The return voyage to the N’gai central core was, for Gray, a somber one.
And what made it worse was that there was no guarantee of any sort that the Sh’daar attack on the Rosetters through the back door of time would be successful. Squeezing a 112-million-kilometer-wide star through a 20,000-kilometer-wide aperture seemed like total lunacy. A galactic civilization, trillions of individual Sh’daar who would not be able to get out in time, was committing suicide . . . and for what?
Of one thing Gray was certain, however. The clock was ticking. Back in his home time, 876 million years in the future, a human fleet numbering more than 100 ships was preparing to move into the center of Omega Centauri. Those ships were expecting Gray’s force to emerge from the Black Rosette just ahead of them, attacking the Rosetters from an unexpected and—they hoped—unguarded flank.
But there was no direct communication with those other ships, which would be gathering at a way point a hundred light years or so from the Black Rosette. The plan was for Gray to send his fleet through and make contact with one of the picket ships that would be lurking nearby. That ship would then dispatch an FTL messenger drone that would alert the main fleet, under Admiral Reeve.
That was fine, so far as it went, but if nothing was heard from Gray’s fleet, Reeve’s force would move in to the Rosette anyway in another two days.
“No battle plan survives contact with the enemy,” Helmuth von Moltke the Elder had famously observed in this paraphrase from his classic work On Strategy, in 1871. But Operation Thunderflash, as they were calling it, seemed particularly vulnerable to mischance. Obviously, the human battle plan had not accounted for the possibility that the Sh’daar would have plans of their own in motion.
What worried Gray was the realization that when the Sh’daar missile came through on the other side, ships within the central core of Omega Centauri would be vaporized . . . and that included Reeve’s fleet.
Which left Gray with a difficult call indeed.
He could try to stop the Sh’daar from shoving their star through the Six Suns and into their future. He doubted that they would go for that, not with so many of their citizens already fleeing the N’gai Cloud. Whatever their reasoning might be, they had committed to this act against the Rosetters, and they weren’t about to change their collective mind.
He could go through the Six Suns gateway ahead of the star and try to reason with the Rosette entity, and in doing so warn them of what was coming. But betraying Humankind’s new Sh’daar friends felt a bit too much like treason. Besides, the Rosetters might well have technologies that would inflict terrible damage to the Sh’daar; if they had a means of slamming the gateway shut, for instance, the blue star might detonate at the center of the Six Suns before passing through, and the gods alone knew what a supernova at the center of a ring of six other giant blue suns would do.
Or he could go through the gate and carry out his part of Operation Thunderflash as planned. The tricky part would be getting out of the way before . . . whatever was going to happen happened.
There was a part of him that actually wanted to warn the Rosetters, even knowing that they had very nearly destroyed Earth. Somehow, a sneak attack through an unguarded back door felt wrong.
On the other hand, Gray was a firm adherent to the warrior’s ethic, which said that in warfare there can be no sense of fair play or sportsmanship. War, after all, is not a game . . . whatever generation upon generation of human politicians might have believed. There might be rules introduced unilaterally in an attempt to mitigate the sheer out-of-control viciousness of war—abstaining from the use of nuclear weapons, for example, in the heartfelt hope that the other guy will abstain from using them as well—was a good example. But if you had the chance to strike when the other fellow wasn’t looking, well . . . as the saying had it, probably since the days of Sargon the Great, all’s fair in love and war.
And taking the longer view . . . Gray didn’t trust the Sh’daar, didn’t like the Sh’daar, and understanding them had not, for him, helped. Neither did he trust or like the Rosetters, which were essentially incomprehensible a
s an intelligent life form. Perhaps the best thing that could happen from Gray’s point of view was the two going at it with each other’s hammers and tongs, leaving Humankind out of it entirely.
So much depended on what Gray’s America task force would find when they emerged from the Black Rosette.
So much, so very much, could go wrong.
USNA CVE Guadalcanal
Way Point ’Raptor
1610 hours, TFT
Captain Taggart floated on her bridge, studying the star-filled Void beyond. Somewhere ahead, inside that mass of teeming suns, lay the Black Rosette, but it was invisible from here. After all, they were a hundred light years from the core of Rosetter activity, so the light simply hadn’t had time to travel that far out.
Even if it had, she reflected, there were enough stars between the Black Rosette and the human fleet that they would have blocked any visible signs of such activity quite well. Stars in toward the center of the Omega Centauri cluster were so tightly packed they gave the impression of an immense popcorn ball . . . as though individual stars were crammed up against one another, photosphere to photosphere.
So the auroral beams and bridges and walls and shifting masses of light created by the Rosetter aliens were not in evidence, though she knew they were there.
The thought was less than comforting. Not being able to see any sign of the lights whatsoever left her wondering what the bastards were up to.
“Mr. Rodriguez,” she said. “Any sign of the Rosetters?”
“Nothing close by, ma’am,” her combat information officer replied. “Dead silent. We are detecting the Rosette, of course.”
But, again, that was an effect of distance. If light hadn’t crossed a light-century yet, neither had other forms of electromagnetic radiation. The Black Rosette had been spitting out X-ray and gamma radiation for eons, so that was present.
And human ships had picked up signs that whatever the Rosetters were doing in there, it was reaching through time as well, with structures of light appearing to stretch across light years in an instant. How the aliens were able to pull that off was still a mystery . . . but they’d given evidence enough of their ability to mess with time back in the Sol System. Taggart hadn’t been there at the time—she’d been en route from Kapteyn’s Star at the time of the Battle of Earth—but she’d seen the vid recordings.
She wished they could edge close enough to the cluster’s core to actually see what was going on in there. There were pickets—frigates and other small military ships—already deployed within a few hundred astronomical units of the Black Rosette, but anything they transmitted would, like light, take a century to reach the fleet.
And taking the fleet in close—or even a single light carrier like the Guadalcanal—might well be the equivalent of poking a hornet’s nest with a stick.
She sensed someone coming through the hatchway at her back.
“Captain . . .”
It was Lieutenant Colonel Randolph Macy, the CO of Guadalcanal’s Marine contingent. The Guady was a Marine carrier, with a battalion of USNA Space Strike Marines on board—the 8th Marines—with five hundred Marines organized into three companies, along with a headquarters/support company plus three squadrons of Marine fighters.
“Hello, Colonel,” she said. “What brings you to the bridge?”
“They’re getting a bit antsy belowdecks, Captain,” Macy replied. “They’re wondering whether we’re going to see action.”
“That, Colonel, I couldn’t tell you,” Taggart told him. “I’m not sure they even had a clue back on Earth what you people were supposed to do out here. It does not sound like NavCom had any particular objectives in mind.”
He gave a grim smile. “That was my take as well, Captain. Thanks for your honesty.”
“I’ll be sure to tell you if I learn anything.”
“Thanks, Captain.” He turned and hauled his way hand-over-hand off the bridge.
She wondered briefly at why Macy had come up here in person, rather than talking to her in-head. Then she decided that he might be just paranoid enough to want to avoid AI comm recorders listening in.
Marines were not exactly known for their trusting natures.
She sympathized with the colonel. With the Marines packed in like sardines in the troop compartments, things would be getting pretty tense. These same Marines had been packed away down there for weeks; there’d been no liberty port at Kapteyn’s Star, and only a few had rotated down to the surface of Heimdall and back. Then, when the Guady had made it back to Sol, they’d been tapped for deployment to Omega Centauri and hadn’t had the chance for liberty at Earth.
What made things really hellish was that she didn’t know of any place inside Omega Centauri where they could be deployed ashore either. Surveys had turned up planets in there, but very few of them, and the ones they did find were mostly radiation-blasted cinders or frozen balls of ice. The Rosetters didn’t seem to go in for planetary surfaces, and any fight with them would be out in space.
So what was a shipload of Marines, trained and equipped to grab beachheads or storm orbital habitats, supposed to do?
Either someone back at Navy Command in SupraQuito wasn’t thinking straight, or they’d snagged the Guady for the fighters she carried, and to hell with the Marines packed on board like so much cargo. The old saying held true: to the Marines, the Navy was a transport service; to the Navy, the Marines were cargo.
Taggart could think of no worse fate for those people, trapped in their tiny compartments, dying if the Guady got hit, unable to ever even come to grips with the enemy.
Besides, how could ground troops even come to grips with an ultra-advanced Mind like the Rosette entity?
She thought again of the Stargods.
The gods, she thought, were real, but they bore no similarity, no relationship to the Stargods of her old church. Those benign beings had been humans with a thin veneer of high-tech and ancient wisdom; even the Sh’daar were so far beyond that as to be utterly alien. And the Rosetters . . . vast, incomprehensible, unapproachable. As far beyond humans as humans were beyond bacteria.
“They don’t even notice us . . .” she whispered to herself.
“Beg your pardon, Captain?” Commander Simmons, the exec, asked.
“Nothing,” she said. She stared out at the stars. “Nothing that matters. Nothing we can do anything about.”
TC/USNA CVS America
N’gai Cloud, Omega T-0.876gy
1925 hours, TFT
They were back at the N’gai Core, somewhere between the oncoming Sh’daar stellar missile and the widening circle of the Six Suns. Gray had arrived at the best . . . at the only decision he could make.
He was leading Task Force America through.
Several human ships—including the transport Lovejoy, with Harriet McKennon and the xenosoph researchers off of DT-1—were already en route for the N’gai Core TRGA. As nearly as America’s scanners could determine, the central heart of the cloud was empty now; there were still trillions of Sh’daar within the N’gai Cloud as a whole, but the evacuations had begun here within the Core, where the results of their attack on the future would first manifest. Their worlds and habitats farther out would be evacuated as the wave front of the giant star’s detonation crawled toward them at the speed of light. They would have more time . . . though Gray’s analyses of the possible outcome of a massive stellar detonation within the Core suggested that the entire dwarf galaxy might well be uninhabitable within a few thousand years.
If a supernova blazed in here—if seven supernovae blazed in here—at least no one was left to burn . . . not even the human researchers and diplomats of DT-1.
“Pass the word on the fleet channel, Comm,” Gray told the duty flag comm officer. “Keep it tight. I don’t want to lose anybody.”
“Aye, aye, Admiral.”
A screen on Gray’s left showed the schematic deployment of the fleet. America was in the van, almost all the way at the front; a cruiser—the San Jacin
to—and three destroyers were going first . . . simply because losing them to some unanticipated Rosetter defense wouldn’t be the same blow to the human fleet as losing a star carrier like America, with five thousand people on board.
The cold, hard equations of warfare.
They were traveling at better than 95 percent of the speed of light, and space up ahead had puckered into its characteristic near-c distortion. All of the stars of the cluster, including the Six Suns, had smeared together into a rainbow circle of intolerable brilliance as America slammed into the oncoming sea of photons, shifting their wavelengths far up the spectral bands. Time had slowed according to the rules of relativity; hours in the universe outside passed in minutes as the fleet arrowed ever closer to their objective.
“All weapons stations report readiness, Admiral,” Captain Gutierrez told him. “And CAG says the squadrons are ready for launch.”
“Thank you, Captain.”
What good would fighters be against what was waiting for them on the other side of the Six Suns gateway? Gray tried not to dwell on that. Human fighters had done a remarkable job in driving the Rosetters away from Earth, and Operation Thunderflash was counting on using all the fighters that could be deployed to use those tactics learned in the Battle of Earth. Hit the internal communications nodes of the Rosetters, hit them hard, and disrupt the Dark Mind’s ability to think.
Thunderflash—who the hell came up with these ridiculous operational names? There was no thunder in space . . . no sound at all in hard vacuum. Did the operational planners back in SupraQuito even have a clue what was going on? It sounded good in theory: catch the Rosetters in a pincers attack, disrupt their internal communications network, destroy larger ships and possible hard points, and keep hammering at them until they took notice of their human attackers and agreed to talk.
But there was still that nagging dread that a Mind as powerful as the Rosette Aliens would simply wake up to the threat posed by the insignificant mites around them and dispose of them all with a careless wave of whatever they used as hands.
