Darkness Falling

by Ian Douglas

  Unfortunately, those in charge of the civilian sector were, for the most part, devoted to the idea of maintaining the status quo. They had the power, and they intended to keep it.

  And short of his staging some sort of military coup, St. Clair saw no way to change that.

  Chapter Four

  Lord Günter Adler woke up.

  The cerebral cortex scan procedure was simple and noninvasive, but the recording did take about twenty minutes. The patient lay down on a table and his head was inserted into a massive hollow cylinder that read the 86 billion neurons and the synaptic linkages between them. He was put into a fairly deep sleep in order to have as quiet a brain as possible for the actual recording, though, of course, there was always some brain activity going on.

  Adler long ago had established a regular routine. Once a week—each Sunday afternoon—he visited the local hospital and had them pull a cerebral backup. He’d started the routine back on Earth, in Geneva, and he’d continued it when he moved on board the Tellus colony. It was damned expensive, but that way he always had a copy of himself in reserve. If anything ever happened to him—if he had a stroke or a heart attack say, and his brain was damaged by the loss of its blood supply—the doctors could repair the damage and reload his last C2S. Even if his body was destroyed, they could clone him a new body, force-grow it to adulthood, and download the stored data . . . or even put the recording into a robot body.

  It was, in fact, his guarantee of immortality. Only a few tens of thousands of people on Earth had been able to keep backups like this . . . and now, on board Tellus Ad Astra, he wasn’t sure of the number but it wasn’t very large. Ten or twenty, perhaps? Sometime he would have to research that, and learn the identity of his fellow immortals.

  Or he could just wait and see who was still around a few centuries from now.

  Lord Günter Adler woke up, and it took him a few moments to realize something was wrong.

  His eyes snapped open. A moment before, he’d been in the outpatient center in the Seattle Hospital, a few kilometers from his villa in the port hab cylinder. There’d been a window over there looking out into the lush forests below the hab’s endcap, but now it was a blank wall.

  He’d been under gravity a moment before, too—the one-G spin gravity of the port cylinder—but now he felt the stomach-dropping sensation of free fall, which meant he must be in the colony’s command-control-engineering section, or CCE . . . the Ad Astra interstellar tug aft of the side-by-side colony cylinders.

  Too, he’d been wearing a colony jumpsuit . . . but now, in a seeming instant, he was swaddled in some sort of medical paraphernalia, a kind of silvery blanket adhering to different parts of his body.

  Damn. Just how long had he been asleep?

  “Lord Director?” a voice said by his ear.

  He started. “Eh? What? Where am I?” His arms thrashed against the mediwrap. “What’s going on?”

  “You are in Ward Two of Ad Astra’s principal medical facility, Lord Director. I am Dr. Kildare 117 AI Delta-2pmd, a psych-specialty medical android. There has been . . . a problem.”

  “A problem? What . . . with my scan?”

  “One week ago—two days after your last cerebral cortex scan—you suffered severe neuropsychological damage in an encounter with the entity you call the Andromedan Dark. The damage was judged uncorrectable, so the decision has been made to download your last C2S recording.”

  “Was . . . was I dead?”

  “No, sir. You were insane. We attempted to put you into a medical coma to reduce the traumatic side effects, but the procedure was only partially successful. Lord Commander St. Clair authorized the use of your backup.”

  “Oh . . .”

  The knowledge, he thought, would take some getting used to. His religiously weekly brain scans, it seemed, had just paid off big-time. For eight years he’d been making backups, and this was the first time they’d needed to download one.

  But . . . did that mean he—the real Adler—was dead? It was an odd feeling. Each time he made a new backup, the technicians simply recorded over the old copy, in essence murdering the stored personality. Now, he—the essential he—was one of those backups, and the original Günter Adler was . . . what? Dead? Erased?

  He couldn’t tell any difference. It was all there, all of his memories, his experiences, his feelings. He still remembered his fifth birthday . . . his marriage to Clara . . . his election to the Cybercouncil . . . his absolute and unshakeable determination to bring Tellus Ad Astra under his complete control rather than let the damned military run things. . . .

  All that was missing, evidently, was the last week and a half.

  He took a deep and somewhat shaky breath. If he understood the concept correctly, all that happened was that his neurons and the synaptic connections between them had been reset to the way they’d been at his last backup session. He was still him. He reached over and pinched his forearm.

  Ouch.

  “Your wife and companion are here to see you, Lord Director.”

  “What . . . Clara?”

  “Do you want to see them?”

  “Yes! Yes, of course!”

  Clara floated through an open door. She was the quintessential trophy wife, elegant, impossibly beautiful . . . though right now her face was flushed and a bit puffy. She’d been crying. With her, equally lovely but with blond hair instead of black was Tina, his gynoid companion. Tina’s face showed concern, but not the effects of crying.

  No, of course not.

  “Günter!” Clara cried. “Is it really you?”

  “Of course it is, Clara. Who else would it be?”

  “I . . . I don’t know. They told me they wanted to download your personality, that that was the only way to treat your . . . what was wrong with you. But . . .”

  “What, Clara?”

  She swallowed. “But does that mean you’re running on some kind of a recording in your head?”

  “It’s okay, Clara,” Tina said. “He’s still Günter. They’ve just reset his programming, in a manner of speaking.”

  “Damn it, what’s okay with that?” she said with what was almost a snarl. “You make it sound like he’s a robot! A thing that can be turned on and off!”

  If Tina was bothered by this outburst, she didn’t show it. “Perhaps robots and humans have more in common than has been believed possible,” she said.

  “Don’t worry, hon,” Adler told his wife. “I really am me. I just can’t remember the last week or so. Apparently I slept through most of it.”

  He wondered if he’d dreamed. He could remember absolutely nothing. It literally felt as though he’d gone into the clinic to make his backup . . . he’d blinked . . . and when his eyes opened he’d been here.

  He looked at the medical android. “I’m going to need a briefing download,” he said, “to bring me up to date.”

  “Of course, sir.”

  “Now get me out of this damned sheet and find me my clothes.”

  “We have a few tests to run first, Lord Director,” Kildare said. “And we wish to observe you for a period to make sure the download is stable.”

  “How long will that be?”

  “I would say two hours at most. Then you can go home.”

  He tried to access his in-head circuitry. He needed to make some calls, but found he couldn’t.

  “Why can’t I call out?”

  “Your cerebral implants have been disabled. This was necessary to prevent you from making random electronic connections with other personnel while you were dreaming or irrational. Restoring full electronic access and function is part of what we need to do before you can leave.”

  “Okay. Please hurry—I need to talk to some people.” Starting with that bastard Lloyd. He would not be in the least surprised if the ambassador had already taken over the colony in Adler’s absence, or tried to.

  “I’m sure your associates on the Cybercouncil will be delighted to hear you’re back, Lord Director,” the android d
octor said.

  Ha! The fucking machine didn’t have a clue. . . .

  Lieutenant Christopher Merrick walked into the Carousel Bar, the watering hole favored by his squadron. GFA-86, the Stardogs, had been assigned to the Ad Astra—the “Asty Nasty” as the fighter jocks preferred to call her—just before the deployment to the galactic core. The plan had been for the Stardogs to stay there with the American delegation for a year before returning to Earth.

  That return, evidently, was not going to happen. Morale was low, and there’d been a lot of avoidance behavior involving alcohol, download sims, and recdrugs.

  “Hey, Kit-Kat!” Janis Colbert said over his in-head. “Over here.”

  A green light winked against his field of vision, guiding him. “Got you, Skipper,” he said, and he made his way across the crowded floor.

  The Carousel Bar was named for the rotating structure in which it was housed, a two-hundred-meter wheel turning three times a minute just forward of Ad Astra’s bridge tower nicknamed the Hamster Wheel. There, off-duty personnel could snag some gravs just like the rich people up in their thermos bottles forward. Too much zero-G was a bad thing over time, causing bone loss, muscle atrophy, immune system problems, and vision disorders. Ad Astra’s personnel were encouraged to spend their off-duty hours in the rotating module. The fact that it held a number of bars, restaurants, barracks areas, briefing rooms, and rec spaces made it a pretty easy choice for military men and women.

  Merrick was no exception. The various naval fighter squadrons attached to the Ad Astra worked hard, and when they went off-duty they tended to play hard as well. Merrick reached the table where a half dozen of his fellow pilots were sprawled in their chairs, palmed an order pad, and asked for a Triplanetary.

  “Kit-Kat, the man!” Lieutenant Bryon Pauli called, raising a glass. “Pull up a chair and join the fucking party!”

  “Roger that,” Merrick replied. “What’s boostin’ free?”

  “Pear here was just telling us how the high brass is saying we can’t go ashore. I think they’re afraid we would get into trouble!”

  “Well, that sucks.”

  “Damn straight,” Lieutenant Vicente Pearson said. “A megahab full of fresh alien poonanny, and we can’t have a lick of it.”

  “You’re full of shit, Pear,” Merrick said. “Everybody with half a brain knows humans can’t bang xenos. Morphofuckological incompatibility. Isn’t that right, Skipper?”

  “If you say so, Kit-Kat,” Senior Lieutenant Colbert said. “But remember . . . Pearson thinks with his dick.”

  “Pearson is a dick. There’s a difference,” Merrick said.

  “And one that explains so much,” Rick Thornton said, laughing.

  “Yeah, but Kit-Kat’s right,” Lieutenant Sam Vorhees said. She downed the last of her drink, then added, “Pear’s always bragging about how much fun it is screwing aliens. But humans are more closely related to oak trees and slime molds than they are to anything out here.”

  “Exactly,” Merrick said. “Neither of which have the appropriate equipment or the right pheromones. No way to complete the docking maneuver . . . and no attraction, no chemistry. You wouldn’t have a reason to even try.”

  “I dunno,” Thornton said. “If anyone could screw an oak tree, my credits would be on ol’ Pear.”

  “Fuck you all,” Pearson said. “What about the Xammies, huh? They’re supposed to be like our great-great grandkids, right? And scuttlebutt says that’s Earth out there, so it stands to reason—”

  “Bullshit, Pear,” Colbert said. “The xeno guys are saying now that the Xam aren’t related to us after all.”

  “Yeah, even if they were our grandkids,” Vorhees said, nodding, “there’d be a few hundred million greats tacked on in front. They would’ve evolved into a completely different species.”

  “Right,” Pauli said. “After 4 billion years, they wouldn’t be anything like us.”

  “Besides that,” Thornton said, “they don’t like us. Every damned time we see the bastards, they’re shooting at us.”

  “Downright unfriendly sons of bitches,” Merrick said.

  “Angry sex is the best sex,” Pearson was saying, but Merrick was thinking about maneuvers earlier that morning, when the squadron had deployed in close defensive formation around Tellus Ad Astra, while the Marines had advanced toward that cloud of Dark Raider needleships. It had been a terrifying moment . . . but one that had ended in complete anticlimax. A sky filled with hostile ships . . . the sudden appearance of the ring’s nanotech defense cloud . . .

  We may not be able to sleep with them, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t at least somewhat friendly. I hope.

  Merrick found himself desperately wanting to know more about the ring’s inhabitants.

  “One thing: it doesn’t look like the Xam have a presence inside the ring,” Vorhees added, echoing Merrick’s thoughts.

  “Yeah, so maybe Pear should stick to oak trees and slime molds,” Merrick said. The others laughed.

  A nude gynoid arrived with his drink, a layered concoction of silver over blue over red in a wide snifter. The silver Venus component on top was actually a heavy mist that was inhaled before you drank the Earth and Mars layers. Merrick thanked the robot, then gently inhaled the fog. The cloud of programmed nano smelled like lilacs, made his brain buzz, and sent warm and frankly erotic sensations to his groin.

  “So . . .” Colbert said after taking a sip of her own drink, “what would you do if we could go to the ring? You probably can’t eat or drink their stuff. Different biochemistries. You can’t screw their females—”

  “Well, we could try,” Pearson insisted.

  “Visit strange and alien ports of call,” Vorhees said. “Meet interesting and exotic people. Kill them . . .”

  “You’re confusing us with the Marines, Sammy,” Colbert said. “Hell, I think we’ll have a better time if we stay right here on the Asty Nasty.”

  “There is another option,” Merrick said.

  “What’s that?”

  “We go ashore unofficially, like civilians, and we try to learn something about this place.”

  “Whoa, now, Kit-Kat,” Thornton said, holding up both hands. “Don’t go all radical on us.”

  Merrick shrugged. “You realize that we don’t know a goddamn thing about Ki, about the ring, about the people here, right? We drop in and find ourselves in the middle of some kind of war—hell, find ourselves taking sides, for Chrissakes. If we have to fight, wouldn’t it be nice to know what we’re fighting for?”

  Vorhees nodded with considerable enthusiasm. “Or to say, ‘thanks, guys, but we’re not getting involved because this isn’t our fight.’”

  “It may be our fight,” Colbert pointed out, “whether we want it or not. If we can’t go home to our own time . . . well, we’re going to need to put down roots here.”

  “But suppose Ki isn’t Earth?” Pamela Carstairs asked. She was the quiet one of the bunch, but when she said anything at all it was usually bang on target.

  “I meant putting down roots in this time,” Colbert said. “I don’t care if that desert out there is Earth or not.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Thornton said. “I want to go home. Even after 4 billion years . . .”

  “Then we keep looking until we find it,” Vorhees said. She tossed back her drink, palmed the order pad for another. “Simple.”

  “Fuck, Earth’ll be so different after all that time,” Pearson said, “we’ll be more at home if we find a different planet. Someplace that feels like home. . . .”

  “We’ll need to do that if it turns out that Ki is Earth,” Merrick said. “I mean, if it is, then the place is changed out of all recognition. The population is living in those ring structures. The surface looks like salt deserts and brine seas. The atmosphere is as thin as a politician’s promise . . . Not like home at all.”

  “I think I’m going to pass your suggestion up the chain of command, though,” Colbert said. “About scop
ing the place out. The more we know about these people, the better.”

  “Nah, the lords of the most high brass’ll never go for it,” Pearson said. “Makes too damned much fucking sense. . . .”

  They all laughed—and drank—to that.

  “Ten minutes, my lord,” the shuttle pilot’s voice said in St. Clair’s head. “We’ve been given clearance for final approach.”

  St. Clair acknowledged the transmission, then took another look around the interior of the personnel carrier. AAT-2440 FPCs were Marine troop transports popularly called “Devil Toads.” Like the prehistoric predatory toads they’d been named for, Beelzebufo, they were squat, ugly, and deadly, thick-skinned brutes spiked with heavy weapons designed to provide covering fire for Marines as they touched down in a hot LZ. St. Clair had spoken with General William Frazier, the commander of Ad Astra’s two divisions of Marines, and requisitioned the use of a couple of the ungainly fliers as transports to and from the ring.

  “You sure you won’t need a couple of platoons to go with them?” Bill Frazier had asked. He was on record as opposing the decision to allow civilians into the alien megahabitat. St. Clair wasn’t sure he disagreed with him.

  “Sending both divisions in wouldn’t help if we run into trouble, General,” St. Clair had replied. “I’m told that a trillion beings occupy the ring. But the firepower of a couple of Toads might come in handy if we have to evac in a hurry.”

  “Roger that, Lord Commander. I’ll transmit the order.”

  Now, St. Clair wondered if a few dozen Marines in full battle armor wouldn’t at the least have been a comforting presence. From his seat inside the FPC’s Spartan payload bay, locked inside an inertial cage, he could link through to the cockpit view and see what the pilots saw—an immense expanse of separate rings nestled closely together, rotating at different rates that depended on the local required orbital velocity, and gleaming with flashes of rainbow brilliance beneath the distant, yellow-orange sun. It was more than a bit intimidating.

  As a megastructure, the ring system circling Ki was a bit on the small side. Not like that tangle of fuzz completely circling the central star thousands of times they had encountered a few weeks ago. That had provided a livable surface area for its inhabitants equivalent to some billions of Earths. The structure, it had turned out, had been long dead, but the sheer audacious scale of the thing had been overwhelming.