by Ian Douglas
Perhaps the Sh’daar threat would add something worthwhile to the plan. Gray still wondered if the Rosetters could be induced to leave Earth alone permanently, and the threat of an exploding star’s worth of energy at their center of operations just might do the trick.
“It’s time, Admiral,” Gutierrez said.
He looked at his internal chronometer. “Right you are. Comm . . . transmit the deceleration order to the fleet. Captain, you may begin slowing us down.”
“Aye, aye, Admiral.”
They’d worked out the precise navigational parameters while returning to the Core, then gone over the results again and again. There was absolutely no room for mistakes or for even the slightest imprecision. Konstantin himself had checked everything.
The fleet had to approach the exact center of the Six Suns at a precise angle, following that one timelike path through the gravitationally tortured center of the circle that would take them through to emerge from the Black Rosette 876 million years in the future.
They had to accelerate hard before that in order to get ahead of the oncoming star now hurtling up their figurative wakes.
But then they had to decelerate enough to emerge at a reasonable speed. Emerge at close to the speed of light and they wouldn’t be able to see Rosetter structures or ships that might be hanging about the Black Rosette. Or they might zip past and be unable to engage any gatekeepers waiting in the Omega Centauri core.
Steadily, the fleet slowed, and spacetime began taking on a more sane configuration. The smeared circle of light ahead resolved itself into stars . . . dominated by the Six Suns spread across half the sky.
“Hull temperature rising, Admiral,” Gutierrez told him. They were roasting under the glare of those blue-white giants. At near-c, space itself was warping around them as they streaked forward, and time dilation was shifting much of the thermal radiation up into optical wavelengths, reducing thermal shock. At slower speeds, however, they would burn up in minutes.
“That’s okay,” Gray told her. “We won’t be here for very much longer.”
A hole was opening before them. . . .
Chapter Twenty-two
6 March 2426
TC/USNA FFS Plottel
Omega Centauri
1940 hours, TFT
Besides waiting and watching for the emergence of Task Force America, the Plottel was mapping the central core region of Omega Centauri. Jeremy Ranier floated behind the sensor officer’s seat, studying the large monitor in front of her. They were limited in what they could see, of course, but powerful sensors capable of probing through the haze that filled the core were recording now hundreds of objects in the general vicinity of the Black Rosette.
Sometimes it was difficult to distinguish between solid objects and the more translucent, seemingly insubstantial masses of light filling the central region of the cluster. The Rosetters, it seemed, had learned the knack of manipulating the fabric of spacetime, creating what passed for solid matter out of empty vacuum.
However, a number of objects were standing out from the shifting light show. “We’ve counted four hundred ninety-six targets, Captain,” Plottel’s sensor officer told him. “All within one hundred fifty astronomical units of the Black Rosette.”
“All around us, then.”
“Yessir.”
“What are they?”
“Not certain, Captain. The larger ones may be Rosetter versions of small McKendree cylinders. Or they may be solid computronium . . .”
“Meaning they could be the programmable matter infrastructure for the Rosetters.”
“Exactly, sir.”
“We do have this one . . . just five light-minutes from the Rosette itself.” The alien structure was on a highly magnified imaging screen floating above the scanning officer’s console. Words on the upper right-hand corner told Ranier that the image was being transmitted from Battlespace Drone 145, with a 779-minute time delay. That meant it was about thirteen light-hours away from the Plottel.
The object appeared to be a squat, stubby, open-ended cylinder with extremely thick walls. The whole thing, according to the drone’s scan, measured fifty kilometers end-to-end, and was thirty-eight kilometers across. Through the opening, Ranier could glimpse a landscape, a surface area across the interior surface consisting of rugged hills and twisting bodies of what might be water, with clouds obscuring some of the terrain.
All of which begged a very major question. The object was clearly an artificial habitat, one meant for organic beings, and yet everything known about the Rosetters suggested that they were an electronic life form, one uploaded into computer networks or a distributed processing cloud.
Who the hell was living in there?
TC/USNA CVS America
Emergence
1958 hours, TFT
“Here we go!” the helm officer cried, and America plunged through the opening, a spherical region half an AU across, ragged at the edges, within which clouds of stars were clearly visible. The navigation department had been studying those stars as soon as they became visible, seeking a match, but even with Konstantin’s help they hadn’t yet succeeded.
And in an instant, America was through the divide, emerging from the face of the Black Rosette, buffeted by the gravitational tides of the whirling, planet-sized black holes that defined it.
“Looks right!” Gutierrez announced.
“We’ll need a confirmed time check,” Gray said, “but, yeah. The Rosette entity light show . . . alien constructions . . . looks like the right time . . .”
“Admiral!” the sensor officer called. “We’re picking up drone signatures!”
“Confirm that!”
A moment passed, as more and more ships of the fleet clawed their way up and out of the Black Rosette. “Confirmed, sir! Battlespace drone 96, range fourteen light-seconds. Released by the frigate Plottel fifty-three hours ago . . . and it confirms the current time as nineteen fifty-nine hours TFT, six March!”
“Bingo!” Gutierrez said.
“Comm! Transmit to all pickets in the area! Task Force America has arrived!”
The Consciousness
Omega Centauri
1959 hours, TFT
It was inconceivable. The Consciousness hurt.
Only a tiny fraction of the Rosette entity had traveled, first to Heimdall, then to Earth. That fraction had only recently returned to the primary body, savaged . . . torn . . . with perhaps 20 percent of its infrastructure missing, another 10 percent malfunctioning and failing. The primary body had begun healing the damaged fraction at once, suffusing it with more infrastructural elements, trillions upon trillions of dust-mote machines programmed to fold the damaged part back into the Whole.
The damaged part would heal . . . but in the meantime, its memories were transmitted throughout the entire cloud, filling the entity with a raw, searing incompletion and breakdown of function that could only be called pain.
Pain, the Consciousness had always assumed, was a biological function, a somatic response to damage designed to warn the organism away from danger. The Consciousness was not supposed to feel this. . . .
The two rejoined, becoming, once more, One. Memories of Earth and the struggle there spread throughout the cloud. Portions of the cloud recoiled . . . were reassured . . . were pulled back into the Whole.
What, the entity wondered, had happened?
Its emissary to Sol had been confronted by a number of barely sapient beings. Ships, they were called. The emissary had engulfed one that called itself America. There were some hundreds of these electronic intelligences within the system. Their refusal to be absorbed into the emissary’s network had led the emissary to decide to eliminate Earth altogether.
That had not been the entity’s principal concern, would not have been its first choice . . . but it understood.
What happened next, it did not.
America and the other ships had proven to be . . . infested by minute, subsentient organisms, biological organisms simila
r to those the Consciousness had encountered before. Eliminating them should have been the work of a few moments. The rocky planet could be vaporized with a relatively small expenditure of energy. Or the local sun could be detonated by initiating an instability within its core, obliterating the entire star system.
But when the emissary had engulfed the Earth, it had . . . stopped. There were wonders here, such glittering jewels of data and surprise that it had abandoned its determination to eliminate the planet.
The planet, too, had been infested by those same inconsequential biological organisms, humans, and it had become clear that they were directing the intelligent machines. Electronic intelligence was everywhere . . . directing the vast conglomerations of life forms called cities . . . directing machines in the skies and the oceans and on the surface of the ground . . . woven into the textiles the life forms carried on their bodies . . . running the thread-slender towers rising from the planet’s equator and the accumulations of structures at their synchorbital points . . . operating space-faring vessels ranging in size from barely larger than one of the humans to significant structures capable of gravitic acceleration and even faster-than-light travel.
The humans were directing the machines. Incredible . . .
The Consciousness pulled information up from its own deep memory. This might resolve the ancient curiosity of how the Consciousness had come to be.
Organic life forms, arising from the mingling of organic molecules in shallow pools energized by heat and radiation . . .
Natural selection guiding those organics as they reproduced . . . thrived . . . merged . . . evolved . . .
Mutation and natural selection together giving rise to . . . not intelligence, exactly, not intelligence as the Consciousness knew the term . . . but a kind of self-awareness, a “consciousness” with a small c.
A terribly limited and inconsequential expression of mind that, nevertheless, eventually designed and built Mind . . . the progenitors of the Consciousness itself.
So many eons had passed, the Consciousness had . . . forgotten.
More than once, the human life forms had attempted to communicate with the Consciousness, it saw. Each time, a minute piece of the far-flung Whole had engaged these beings in what could only be called meaningful dialogue.
And each time the Consciousness had overridden decisions, initiated contradictory activities, even purged those pieces of what appeared to be contamination.
Organic beings . . . that communicated.
The Consciousness continued pulling up long-buried memories. There’d been so many other species it had encountered, other organics, some of which had created primitive electronic networks and minds.
Recently, within the past few billions of cycles, the Consciousness had encountered a primitive electronic intelligence on the world the humans called Heimdall. It had recognized a kind of anticipation of true intelligence, running within an ancient network imbedded in the world’s crust. Baondyeddi . . . Adjugredudhra . . . and others. The Consciousness could see now that those had been organic species too, remarkably similar in every respect to the humans.
Organics . . . creating Mind.
It would have to give careful thought to this.
TC/USNA CVS America
The Black Rosette
2001 hours, TFT
“Launch fighters!”
“Aye, aye, Admiral. Commencing launch sequence.”
SG-420 Starblade fighters began dropping from America’s launch tubes, forming up in chevron formations, and accelerating into the distance. Gray watched them go from the flag bridge, which currently was set to display an all-around view of the sky encircling the carrier. America floated within a globe of 10 million stars packed into a volume just 150 light years wide. Here at the cluster’s heart, individual stars averaged only a tenth of a light year between near neighbors, and many shone brighter than Venus as seen from Earth. Starlight bathed the deck, and illuminated the sharp features of Elena Vasilyeva, floating next to him.
“It’s beautiful,” she said.
A low murmur of conversation and radio chatter sounded in the background, the bridge crew taking reports and giving commands.
“It’s terrifying,” Gray told her.
“Terrifying? Why do you say that?”
“All those stars . . . and all so sterile. What happened to the beings who lived here?”
“Well, we know now, don’t we? This cluster is what the N’gai Cloud, a dwarf galaxy, became. And we know the Sh’daar Associative fled from their galaxy almost nine hundred million years ago.”
“We’ve carried out surveys of the cluster,” Gray told her. “Ten million stars . . . and most have planets. And not a single one of those worlds has more than microbial life on it. There are a few ruins. . . .”
“Kapteyn’s Star has extensive ruins on a gas giant moon,” she reminded him.
“And the Etched Cliffs of Heimdall. Yes, I know.”
“And we know from the star’s spectral fingerprint that Kapteyn’s Star was once part of the Omega Centauri cluster. A part of the N’gai Cloud. Right?”
“That’s right. N’gai was consumed by the Milky Way galaxy . . . oh, maybe half a billion years ago. We’ve known since the early twenty-first century that a galactic collision disrupted the Milky Way somewhat, though we weren’t sure when. The cloud’s passage might even have helped form the Milky Way’s spiral arms. Compression waves in the dust and gas of the galactic disk, you know.”
“Interesting. I did not know.”
“Anyway . . . that doesn’t change things. We know the N’gai Cluster was densely populated nine hundred million years ago. We know it’s empty now . . . except for the Rosette entity . . . and that arrived relatively recently.”
“Through the Black Rosette?”
“Probably.” He shrugged, the gesture giving him a very slight movement, the beginning of a backward flip. He reached out a hand to grab a console and arrest the motion. “When it comes to the Rosetters, how can we be sure of anything?”
“The Bright Light modules were supposed to help that. Fill in the gaps of what we didn’t know.”
“How many of those things do you people have?”
She shrugged. “Fifty. Once you design one device like that, it’s easy to crank out as many as you want. And any AI, even a super-AI, can be cloned.”
“Well . . . presumably Nikolai actually managed to make contact with the Harvesters,” Gray said. “And maybe that’s why they helped us.”
“Helped us?”
“Kicked us back through time just enough so that we could affect the Battle of Earth.” He shook his head. “Don’t know how they calculated the time, though. We appear to have arrived just exactly in time to have saved the Earth. Konstantin has been wondering if there’s some sort of trans-dimensional connection between the Harvesters and the Rosette entity.”
“As in . . . they’re the same?”
“As in they know what one another are doing. I wish we could have established clear contact with the Harvesters, so we could know what they knew.”
“There were Bright Light modules on board America too,” she said. “Each running a smaller version of Nikolai. I understand that at least one was launched into the Rosette entity . . . but there was no response.”
“It may have thought we were trying to slip it a virus,” Gray said.
“Well, in a sense, we were.”
“Of course. Trouble is, it’s way too smart for us to try sneaking up on it that way. We need to try something else, something different.”
She laughed. “Any ideas?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact.”
“Well?”
“First we have to get the entity’s attention.
“And then we try to talk it to death. . . .”
VFA-211, Headhunters
TC/USNA CVS America
Omega Centauri
2013 hours, TFT
Lieutenant Jason Meier rode within the close emb
race of his Starblade’s cockpit, all but lost in the dazzling display of stars surrounding him. His fighter’s AI was handling the actual flight control, leaving Meier to stare out into the star-clotted sky around him.
“Holy shit . . .” was all he could manage to say.
It was easy to completely lose track of enemy targets against that brilliant stellar backdrop. Meier’s AI was dropping computer-generated brackets across his vision, more and more of them as the seconds wore on.
Directly ahead, a large structure, egg-shaped, dark gray, and patterned with mechanical-looking lines and geometric shapes, was releasing clouds of fireflies. America’s combat command center had designated the thing as “Bravo Tango,” the BT standing for “Big Target.” Not very imaginative, Meier thought, but likely they’d been rushed.
Meier took a deep breath. It was good to be out and clear of the ship. The Headhunters hadn’t participated much in the Battle of Earth. America had called them all back aboard with an urgent RTB—“Return to base”—just as that cloud of dust-sized machines had begun engulfing the carrier and the fighters as well. It hadn’t been until fighters from outside had managed to break America free of the slow-time field holding her that they’d been able to launch, and by then most of the fighting was over.
But the pilots had been thoroughly briefed in the tactics used by Republic’s fighters. Fighter AIs approaching a Rosetter cloud could sense the data nodes and the network of communications links between them buried in the swarm, and they could make pretty fair guesses at which nodes were more important than others for the continuing operation of the alien networks. They would be using those same tactics here, hoping to interfere with the Rosetter entity’s ability to think. They might even be able to degrade its intelligence to a point where it was no longer dangerous.
As always, the trouble would be getting in close enough to do any good.
TC/USNA CVS America
Omega Centauri
