by Ian Douglas
“But I’m worried about her!”
“I realize that. I can tell you that she is safe. Does that help?”
“No, damn it. Where is she?”
“I won’t tell you that.”
Privacy had been a hot-button issue within technological society for a couple of centuries, since even before the American collapse, in fact. Long before Tellus Ad Astra had departed from Earth, most Imperial citizens had been chipped, with tiny, subcutaneous devices inserted under the skin of their forearms that allowed various types of scanners to identify and locate them. In a small, tightly enclosed world like the mobile colony, the location and current health of each and every inhabitant could have been a matter of public record.
There were laws on the books, however, limiting access to that data to the machines running the colony infrastructure. Robots were tracked by their owners as a matter of course, but emancipated robots, at least in theory, had the same privacy rights as humans.
He knew that Newton wasn’t going to back down on this. Hell, St. Clair himself had been a vocal proponent of those laws when they’d been written into the colony’s charter the year before. Staunch anti-Imperialist that he was, he was convinced that the American republic had collapsed in the wake of its disastrous twenty-first century experiments with socialism, that a bloated government convinced that it needed to monitor its citizens was a sure and certain highway to tyranny. And Newton had been programmed with the same ideological ethic. In modern society, AI machines were expected to keep track of human citizens in case there was a health issue or an emergency. People, however, were carefully kept outside the loop.
“Okay. But if anything happens to her, you’ll let me know? So I can help?”
“That will depend on the circumstances, Lord Commander, but I will do what I can.”
“I guess I’ll have to live with that. Where do we stand on the recon?”
“Lord Commander Deladier reports that the Vera Cruz is ready in all respects for space. Her Marines are reporting on board now. Launch is currently scheduled for 1540 hours . . . thirty-five minutes from now.”
“And the escorts?”
“Ready for launch. Six Predator gunships have already been deployed along the object’s path of approach to give us advance warning.”
“And is there anything new on the Bluestar?”
“Incoming Object One,” Newton replied, “is almost certainly within one hundred astronomical units—something less than fourteen light-hours. The Astrophysics Department believes it may be refining its navigation by degrees in order to rendezvous with Ki . . . or possibly with us.”
“Us?”
“If this is an Andromedan Dark artifact, as seems likely, they may be interested in the unknown alien force that has defeated their warfleets on several recent occasions.”
“Makes sense. But there’s still no indication of what it is?”
“Impossible as yet to say. It does not appear to be matter, at least in the conventional sense, nor is it energy . . . although whatever it is certainly is emitting energy as it approaches.”
“Not matter, not energy? That doesn’t leave much it could be, does it?”
“Astrophysics says it is most likely a kind of dark-matter storm, a knot of intersecting currents.”
“So I read in Dr. Sandoval’s report. But dark matter wouldn’t emit light, would it?”
“Under normal circumstances, no. But normal matter may exist within the hyperdimensional matrices of string theory. And in different dimensional configurations, dark matter may interact with normal matter in ways we do not yet understand.”
“That was complete gibberish, Newton. Impressive . . . but gibberish.”
“Dr. Tsang or Dr. Sandoval might be able to explain it more clearly.”
“They’re not here, so why don’t you give it a shot.”
“Very well. You are aware that one consequence of superstring theory is the existence of a number of dimensions beyond our normal three?”
“Yes. Three spatial dimensions, plus time, plus six or seven additional dimensions rolled up very, very tightly on themselves, so small we can’t see them.”
“We can disregard time for the moment. All spatial dimensions were present at the instant of the big bang. As inflation manifested, only our familiar three dimensions expanded. The other spatial dimensions, as you say, were rolled up into extremely small structures, smaller than a proton.”
“Right.”
“What is not commonly understood is that any of these subnuclear dimensions can unfold if it is rotated relative to the observer. The change in perspective will make an invisibly tiny dimension huge.”
St. Clair had heard the argument before. You look at a line hanging in space and see a one-dimensional object. Move your viewpoint up and over that line, changing your perspective, and the two-dimensional plane previously hidden from view becomes visible.
“It becomes a matter of orientation,” Newton continued. “The previously inaccessible dimensions might be as extensive, and might contain matter just as our normal three-plus-one dimensions do.”
“We discussed this when Maria Francesca was attacked,” St. Clair said. He suppressed an inner shudder. Ad Astra’s CAS, her Commander Aerospace, had been turned inside out by something that had emerged from between the dimensions of normal space. High-D. The term didn’t make it any saner. He’d had nightmares. “I still can’t say I understand any of it.”
“Understanding on your part is not necessary,” Newton told him. “Indeed, it may not be possible for you to understand, since such dimensions can only be described, interpreted, and understood through the application of certain quite rarified branches of mathematics. Suffice to say that it is likely India Oscar One is the intersection of several abstruse hyperdimensions extruding into our space, a knot of complex topologies involving both dark and normal matter. It is now currently less than thirteen light-hours away—we have no idea how much less—and is approaching us at close to the speed of light.”
“And it is an instrument of the Dark.”
“Almost certainly. We must assume that to be the case.”
“Then we’d better put some light on the thing,” St. Clair said.
“‘Light.’” Newton hesitated, as though confused. Then he understood. “Ah . . . a pun.”
“A metaphor, Newton. We need to find this thing and learn what it is.”
“Our Cooperative hosts report having encountered phenomenon like this before, but they can tell us very little about them.”
“Then let’s help our new allies out.” He rose. “Sound General Quarters, please, Newton. I’m going to the bridge.”
“I’ll meet you there.”
Chapter Nine
Major General Kelly Wilson floated at the eye of the storm, a relatively calm center to the swirling chaos and noise of Ad Astra’s number one flight bay. Pneumatic hammers and power torques shrieked and rattled as swarming platoons of armorers made their final adjustments to the hulking war-shapes of waiting Marines. Munitions trains clattered along their magrail tracks, delivering their warloads. Overhead hoists growled along a spiderweb of tracks, hauling weightless but still massive pieces of heavy equipment to the waiting squadrons of squat Devil Toads. Nearby, lines of heavily armored Marines filed toward the boarding hatchways leading to the Vera Cruz, hauling themselves along hand over gauntleted hand in the zero-G of the flight bay.
The Cruzer, as the heavy Marine transport was affectionately known, was docked to Ad Astra’s ventral hull, together with her two sister ships, Inchon and Saipan, and access was down those gaping hatchways. Marine gunnies and staff sergeants chivvied their platoons along, some speaking strictly in-head, a few shouting their traditional imprecations through augmented speakers. Columns of heavily armored Marines filed into the Vera Cruz, and also into the dozens of waiting Devil Toads. The choreography of moving over six thousand Marines into their assault craft was always an awe-inspiring spectacle—if only becau
se it seemed like a miracle that the evolution could be successfully completed.
“Move it, you lead-headed space-slugs! We do not have all day!”
“C’mon, c’mon! I wanna see nothin’ here but amphibious green blurs! Haul your miserable asses down that line!”
“Move! Move! Movemovemove! Carter! Rolper! Anytime this week will be just freakin’ fine!”
Wilson checked his internal timekeeper, and noted the loading was bang on sched.
Good.
“Time to get on board, General,” his senior aide, Subcommander Jennings, told him.
“Right.” Using the handholds strung along the deck, Wilson hauled himself toward the nearest hatch leading to the Vera Cruz. He would direct the deployment from the C3, his Combat Command Center, on board the transport. It would be good to shed this somewhat cumbersome body in favor of his C3 jack. He took a moment to check again on IO-1. No change.
Again, good.
A Marine hurrying down the safety line collided with Wilson, their ceramic and plasteel laminate armor clanging with the cacophony of a boilerhouse. Wilson wasn’t sure what a boilerhouse was, but it sounded loud. “Easy, son. Where you going?”
“Sir! Excuse me, sir!”
Wilson’s in-head readouts identified the Marine as PFC Donald Colby, First Platoon, Bravo Company, 1/3. The Marine was painfully young and looked as though he was about to faint. PFCs did not interact with general officers if they could possibly help it.
“I’ve got him, General,” another Marine said, overhauling the private. His ID listed him as Gunnery Sergeant Roger Kilgore, also First Platoon Bravo.
“Don’t lose him, Gunny,” Wilson said. “He’s a hard charger!”
“No, sir. C’mon, Colby. Let’s find your cage.”
“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir. . . .”
“I’m not a sir, Colby. I work for a living.” The gunny glanced at the general and had the decency to look embarrassed as he thought about what he’d just said. “Begging your pardon, sir. By your leave.”
Wilson let the two precede him onto the Vera Cruz. Damn, when did they start issuing Marines that young?
He followed them through the yawning hatch.
His jack station was aft and below the Vera Cruz’s bridge, a narrow compartment claustrophobic with massive cables and bundled optical wiring, secondary repeater screens and touch-screen panels. A task-specific robot helped him remove his combat body, sealing off direct neural connections and fluid feeds and easing him clear of the gaping armor shell. Wilson was a fully functional cybernetic Marine, far more machine than human.
He’d been wearing his Mk. III Marine Combat Unit armor so that he could be seen in the landing bay by his Marines, but there was little of his organic body left. Savagely wounded at Pyongyang during the Imperial Unification, there’d been little left of him. They’d saved his brain and his spinal cord, which were now encased in nanochelated microcircuitry and plastic, allowing him to change bodies almost as easily as other humans could grow new clothes. It took a matter of moments to transfer him from the black plasteel chest of his armor to the computronium receptacle of his jack station. As connectors snapped home, data and sensory input from all over the Vera Cruz began flowing through his cybernetically enhanced brain. He was aware now of the entire Vera Cruz, her power systems, her drives, her weapons, her crew, her load bays crowded with armed and armored Marines.
Beyond the Vera Cruz and the looming ventral surface of the Ad Astra some half an astronomical unit distant, the six AGS-4 Predator gunships deployed earlier stretched across the sky. Predators were small—only fifty-five meters in length—and light—massing some nine hundred tons—with crews of twenty-one humans and robots apiece. They were also heavily armed for their size, carrying extensive magazines of shipkiller missiles, paired high-velocity autocannons, and spinal-mount Flarestar-5000 gW pulse lasers. The gunship concept had first appeared in the twentieth century with the appearance of heavily armed attack helicopters over battlefields on Earth. With the development of space-faring fleet vessels, gunships became a cost-effective way of blunting an enemy fleet attack, with heavier weaponry than typical fighters like the ASF-99 Wasp fighter.
Naval engagement purists liked to point out that a fighter could carry nuke-tipped NGM-440 Firestorm missiles delivering as much damage as anything in a Predator’s inventory while remaining far more maneuverable. St. Clair, Wilson thought, was squarely in the fighter camp; during recent engagements in this new epoch, he’d held the gunships back while relying on Wasps and other fighters to carry the attack to the enemy. Predators were easier to hit than Wasps, were far more vulnerable to serious combat damage, and when they died over twenty men and women died with them, as opposed to only one.
This time, though, St. Clair had ordered the Predators out on deep recon, and Wilson was in complete agreement. For his part, Wilson appreciated the stubby gun-toters, and their ability to deliver massive close-fire support to his Marines.
He had to admit, though, that he didn’t know how best to utilize the craft in this situation. Through the transport’s sensors he was aware of IO-1 hanging in the star-clotted distance, but it didn’t appear that there was anything solid in that blue swirl of gravitational energy.
There did not appear to be anything there that could be subjected to a conventional attack.
Predator gunships didn’t have formal names, but the crew of AGS-4 1293-N had painted the name Black Hawk on the prow, a nod to the MH-60L Black Hawk helicopter gunship of the late twentieth century. Marine Captain Peter Westfield was her skipper, wired into the craft’s claustrophobic bridge compartment. His XO, Lieutenant Yuri Olegski, and the Chief Engineering Officer, Lieutenant Maria Salvador, floated side by side before the big repeater screen, staring into the blue-lit swirl of twisted space ahead. It looked, at least superficially, like a spiral galaxy wrapped around an intensely brilliant central star. Four close copies were stacked up behind it, creating a line of five of the things.
“I don’t get this at all, Captain,” Olegski said. “What the hell is it?”
“Isaac says gravitational currents,” Westfield said. Isaac was the ship’s AI. “As good an explanation as anything, I guess.”
“Isaac doesn’t know his mass from a hole in space,” Salvador replied. “There’s something solid in there. Mass readings are strong . . . at least 10 million tons.”
“Might be a micro-black hole,” Westfield said.
“Might be a frickin’ Dark Raider dreadnaught,” Salvador said.
“That’s why we’re here . . . to find out. Strap in for acceleration.”
Olegski and Salvador pulled themselves into acceleration seats, which folded to embrace them as the boost alarm shrilled its warning through the ship.
“That . . . thing,” Olegski said, indicating the long-range view of IO-1. “It looks like the same object copied four times. Five images of the same thing.”
“Isaac says that’s exactly what it is,” Westfield said. “We’re seeing light coming from the object at five different points in its journey. In between, it’s been going FTL.”
“Then it’s not a natural object. . . .” Salvador said.
“Almost certainly not.”
“All stations report ready for boost,” Olegski said.
“Let’s get a closer look, Ski. Punch it.”
Black Hawk’s gravitational drive engaged, and the blunt-prowed cigar-shape of black plasteel and ceramititanium fell rapidly toward the brilliant blue star ahead.
“Ten seconds to release,” a maddeningly calm voice said in Gunnery Sergeant Kilgore’s mind. “Stand by.”
Kilgore closed his eyes and silently counted off the seconds. The Vera Cruz was a massive warship, far roomier than the tight little Devil Toads, which meant he had his own acceleration couch rather than one of those damned cages. Still, as a warship, the Cruzer was built for speed, maneuverability, and endurance, not for comfort, and things could get a bit rough during a combat op. Gravitational d
rives accelerated the vessel in free fall, meaning that those on board didn’t experience high accelerations if the ship maintained a straight line of flight. Minor course corrections, though, were handled by plasma thrusters, and things could get brutal then.
“And three . . . and two . . . and one . . . release!”
Vera Cruz dropped away from the far vaster loom of the Ad Astra. Since the Ad Astra was in free fall already, the Vera Cruz had to use her thrusters to clear the larger vessel. For Kilgore, that meant that the overhead of his compartment was suddenly down, and he was dangling from the ceiling by his couch harness. That bit of acrobatics lasted only a couple of seconds, however, as the Vera Cruz eased clear of her docking well and drifted into open space. Kilgore could see both ships through his in-head link as it channeled a vid signal from a nearby drone. The Ad Astra, tucked in behind the far larger twin cylinders of the Tellus colony, was a sizable ship, some six kilometers long. By that scale, the Vera Cruz was a very small, black fish swimming in the shadow of a whale. Kilgore could see the side-by-side cigars of the other two heavy transports still adhering to Ad Astra’s belly. He wished at least one of them was coming along on this deployment. Things would’ve felt a bit less lonely that way, out there in the unknown.
The dangling feeling stopped, and the Vera Cruz accelerated, a smooth drop into emptiness. Kilgore watched as the Cruzer skimmed beneath the two colony habs. Then the Tellus Ad Astra dropped away astern, and the Vera Cruz continued to accelerate past the far-flung artificial rings of Ki. The drone followed the Marine heavy transport with its electronic sensors, but before long the ship had dwindled to a dim point of reflected light . . . then winked into darkness. The vid channel switched over to the feeds from the sensor array of another ship, one quite close to the target; the Bluestar shone dead ahead, larger and much brighter than it had appeared from the vantage point of Ki orbit.
