by Ian Douglas
“Listen up, Marines,” a new voice said. “This is General Wilson. The feed is streaming from one of our gunships. They’re approaching the objective . . . or they were an hour ago when they recorded this.”
The precise range from Vera Cruz to the gunship was sixty-four light-minutes—something like eight astronomical units, or roughly the distance between Earth and Saturn when they were at their closest. It looked like the gunship was practically on top of the thing. Columns of scrolling data gave a range of half an AU, a width of nearly 100 million kilometers, a mass of 10 billion tons.
But 10 billion tons of what? All Kilgore could see was something like the swirl of water going down a drain . . . assuming the water was deep blue and as thick as syrup. He tried to understand exactly what he was seeing; he could imagine a thick gas flowing down the insatiable maw of a black hole creating a spiral like that, but so far as he could tell the object was moving through hard vacuum, with no more than the usual atom or so of hydrogen per cubic centimeter of otherwise empty space.
The likeliest explanation, he thought, was an optical illusion, one caused by intense gravitational fields twisting space into a literal corkscrew. Ten billion tons wasn’t very much when it came to cosmic objects—a very small asteroid, possibly, or a black hole the size of a proton. It was creating a hell of an effect on local space, however. The space at the very center was so distorted it created a hot, gleaming white pearl nestled into the folds of the blue swirl. It might indeed be the ergosphere of a black hole, possibly opening to some kind of wormhole.
Or, and far more likely, it was something utterly unknown to Humankind.
Vera Cruz accelerated, and the range closed.
“Arm probe torpedoes,” Westfield ordered.
“Four torpedoes armed and ready, Skipper,” Olegski replied. “Roceti up and running.”
“Launch torpedoes, one through three.” He would keep number four in reserve against the unexpected.
Westfield felt a lurch as the torpedoes slid from Black Hawk’s keel, action and reaction in the service of Newton’s laws. Rather than carrying nuclear or nano-disassembler warheads, the probe torpedoes were an effort to communicate with the oncoming object. “Torpedo one fired,” Olegski informed him. “Two fired . . . three fired. . . .”
“Engage the AIs.”
“Roceti AIs engaged. Transmitting four languages on all available frequencies.”
“Let’s hope they hear us,” Westfield said.
But the real question was whether whatever was driving that blue swirl of spacetime would recognize Black Hawk’s torpedoes as an attempt to say “hello,” or if it would see them as an attack.
If IO-1 was a Dark Raider craft, which was the current best guess available, it should be able to understand the transmissions. They’d communicated clearly enough in earlier encounters, and apparently understood all of the major Cooperative languages.
The face-on spiral of blue light lunged forward.
The transition seemed instantaneous. One moment, IO-1 was still almost eighty thousand kilometers distant; the next, it filled the sky, its center less than a thousand kilometers away. All three Roceti torpedoes had vanished into that maw, and Black Hawk was rapidly being drawn forward into that intensely luminescent, haze-shrouded pearl at the thing’s heart.
The pearl, clearly, was not itself a solid object. It was a region of intensely twisted light enclosing a spherical volume about the size of Mars, shrouded and impenetrable to Black Hawk’s scans. From here it looked like a colossal, pupilless eye set deep within a concave crater of slow-swirling blue, an eye microscopically examining the speck of metal that was the human gunship immediately in front of it.
Somehow, Westfield found his mental voice. “Fire four!”
“Torpedo four launched.”
The range was so short the Roceti probe lanced into the pearlescent sphere almost immediately. For just an instant, Westfield could see the images streaming back from the torpedo, images transmitted from inside that zone of twisted space. It didn’t help. He could see them but not make sense of them . . . a vast structure like a ship or an orbital station or habitat, but alien, forbidding, with no sense of scale, with lines and angles that seemed to defy any sane understanding of basic geometry.
“Are they getting this on the Cruzer?” Westfield asked.
“We’re streaming, Captain,” Salvador replied. “And drones are deployed. They’ll see it in a bit over an hour.”
“Let’s see if we can back away.”
But the Black Hawk continued drifting forward, accelerating now as though caught in a powerful gravitational field.
“More power!” Westfield shouted. “More power to the gravs!”
“We’re maxed-out now!” Olegski replied. “It’s not doing a damned thing!”
And then the titanic eye just ahead blinked. . . .
“What the hell do you mean, ‘disappeared’?” General Wilson demanded. “They blew up? Crashed?”
“They appear to have been swallowed by that . . . that thing, General,” Nathan Deladier replied. Vera Cruz’s captain sounded as though he didn’t quite believe what he’d just seen. “Telemetry was cut off at the same instant.”
“Get us in there, Lord Commander.”
“My lord, there’s nothing we can do—”
“Get us in there! I am not leaving my Marines behind!”
“Yes, my lord.”
And the Vera Cruz accelerated toward the distant blue star.
St. Clair was on the Ad Astra bridge when his ExComm turned to face him. “Vera Cruz is under acceleration, my lord. General Wilson says he’s going after his people.”
“What’s Tellus’s orbital status?”
“Stable,” Symms told him. “Well beyond the outer edge of the Ki Ring.”
“Let them know we’re going to drop them off.”
“Yes, my lord.”
“Wait a second, Lord Commander,” Lord Gorton Noyer said, rising from the acceleration couch grown for him behind St. Clair’s station. “I can’t authorize that.”
“That’s too bad. You’re welcome to leave my bridge if you prefer.”
“As senior representative of the Cybercouncil, my lord, I—”
“Have exactly zero responsibilities in this matter,” St. Clair said, cutting him off and finishing the thought for him. “We’re at General Quarters, you may have noticed. I have declared a full military alert.”
“We don’t yet know that the Bluestar is hostile. Until we do—”
“Until we do what we know is I just lost a ship full of Marines and I am using my best judgment. Now shut your mouth, Mr. Noyer, or I will have you ejected from the bridge. ExComm! What’s the range to that thing?”
“We’re estimating 8 AUs. That’s assuming it didn’t jump again after it swallowed that gunship.”
That was the problem with attempts at tactical planning across interplanetary distances. Every astronomical unit of distance meant a speed-of-light time lag of eight minutes twenty seconds. There was no way of knowing what the enemy was doing now.
Noyer was back in his seat, figuratively watching over St. Clair’s shoulder. St. Clair could feel him fuming. C’mon! Give me a reason to toss you out of here, St. Clair thought, but Noyer held his tongue.
Well, the man was ex-Navy and a combat vet. He knew there could not be two commanders on a bridge, and he knew that Ad Astra’s standing orders put St. Clair in charge during any military encounter. St. Clair gave the man points for not letting ego get in the way of judgment . . . even as he knew he might have hell to pay later.
All that matters right now is getting to “later.”
“We’re ready to disengage from the Tellus, Lord Commander,” Symms told him. “All personnel are clear from the juncture passageways.”
“Disengage.”
“Yes, my lord.”
Even though people often talked about them as such, it was easy to forget that the immense Tellus Ad Astra actually was two
distinct entities—the twin habitat cylinders of Tellus, and the much smaller tug Ad Astra. The Ad Astra had actually begun service as the strictly sublight drive and engineering module for the O’Neill cylinders; when the alien Coadunation had given Earth the secret of Shift technology, Ad Astra had received the upgrades that converted her to a full-fledged starship.
The intent had been to enable Ad Astra to haul the Tellus out to the alien capital at the galactic core. Instead, though, colony and tug together had found themselves marooned in this remote and alien future.
Past purpose didn’t really matter, though. What mattered was that Ad Astra was a military ship, this was a military operation, and so long as St. Clair held command, he was going to command, damn it. There was no room on a starship bridge for politics or divided leadership. The civilian leadership, he felt certain, would be unhappy at his abandoning them here . . . but they were under the protection of Ki, for whatever that was worth.
And St. Clair was not going to stand by and watch Ad Astra trapped here against the ringed, alien planet by mysterious forces that seemed to find it okay to make one of their gunships disappear.
The Ad Astra backed gently clear of the twin habitats. The connectors, a pair of enormous struts that gave the ship the appearance of a flattened V spanning eight kilometers when viewed from ahead or astern, slipped clear of the two colony access ports. Symms gave a command, and the vessel swung clear, oriented herself on the actinic gleam of the Bluestar, and accelerated.
“Ad Astra is clear to maneuver,” Symms told him.
“Very well, ExComm. Let’s see what that damned thing out there is.”
The gunship Black Hawk hurtled through streaming currents of light, the vibrations around her building until her hull rang and shrieked with the unaccustomed stresses. Westfield, his nervous system jacked directly into the ship’s primary circuitry, felt himself overwhelmed by raw sensation, a torrent of incoming data as electronic buffers overloaded and firewalls failed. Olegski . . . where was Olegski? And Salvador? Westfield’s organic senses had been jackhammered into oblivion by the sensory flood.
But with the flood came a measure of comprehension. He could see the gravitational currents around him, like currents in turbulent water, see how the flow of dark matter twisted local space into topologies of more than three dimensions. When seen from this angle, space was empty and dark; when seen from that angle, light exploded out of emptiness in a storm of tortured photons, illuminating dim and shadowy half-glimpsed shapes defying sane geometries hidden within the depths of impossible dimensions.
Yes, the gleaming pearl was indeed a gateway of sorts, possibly a wormhole to someplace else . . . and that someplace was made of more than the familiar dimensions of width, length, and depth. Westfield had been determined to keep the Black Hawk from falling into that unwinking eye . . . but something had happened in those pearlescent confines, and the Black Hawk now was dropping through unutterable strangeness. Stars—the tattered, streaming arms of the Milky Way and of Andromeda, the gleam of the local sun—all had been wiped away. The background now was one of shifting red-and-gold clouds, a vast and encircling web of eerie light and dark. At the center of it all was . . . a structure—vast, indescribable, enigmatic, a thing of planes and curves and surfaces the size of a planet that seemed to be unfolding and blossoming as the Black Hawk swept toward it.
The central pearl was still there, he saw, but astern . . . darker than before, reflecting the deep reds and dark golds of its surroundings.
“Where are we?” Olegski asked aloud. “I don’t recognize anything!”
There he was. Westfield still couldn’t hear his XO over his electronic link with the ship, but at least he could still hear him with his ears. He blinked and became aware again of the tiny gunship control deck, more cockpit than bridge.
“We might be halfway across the universe,” Salvador replied from her acceleration couch behind him.
“Hell,” Westfield said, “I’m not sure we’re in the universe at all anymore. Give me more power, Sal!”
Black Hawk was drifting toward the shining sphere. Westfield hoped they would be able to get into orbit, at least. But he was already thinking that the only way out might be back through that bloody eye astern . . . or through that nightmarishly vast and eldritch structure just ahead.
“Initiate shift!”
At St. Clair’s command, Ad Astra slipped momentarily into the realm between the universes, the timeless and eternal non-space called the Bulk by physicists. There was the briefest of shimmers to the surrounding starscape, and the ringed planet and the cluster of nearby worlds all vanished. Ad Astra had just transitioned across eight astronomical units.
The local sun now was wan and shrunken, barely showing any disk at all. Instead of Ki and her artificial rings, a swirl of immaterial space created a whirlpool effect just ahead. The Vera Cruz hung in space a few tens of thousands of kilometers distant, roughly halfway between the Bluestar whirlpool and the Ad Astra.
“General Wilson on-line, Lord Commander,” Symms told him.
“Put him through.”
“My lord!” Wilson’s voice called in St. Clair’s mind. There was heavy static in the background . . . interference, perhaps, from the Bluestar. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“Just providing some backup, General. Proceed with your orders.”
“It’s not safe here, my lord. We’re picking up feeds from Black Hawk’s drones. Looks like they got sucked into that thing up ahead. Definitely hostile action.”
“Possible hostile action, General,” St. Clair said, correcting him. “The gunship might have just been too close.”
“With respect, my lord, fuck that. The thing jumped him. It was a deliberate attack!”
“Let me see.”
“The feed’s coming through now, my lord,” Symms told him.
A smaller window opened against the backdrop of St. Clair’s awareness, and the vid recorded by Black Hawk’s unmanned drones streamed into Ad Astra’s sensor arrays and into his consciousness. He could see the whirlpool, the central opalescent sphere . . . and the tiny sliver of the gunship Black Hawk hanging above. Then the spiral . . . lunged was the only possible description. It shot forward, seeming to open in some indefinable way . . .
. . . and Black Hawk was gone.
“My lord!” Wilson’s voice called. “Are you seeing this? My God . . .”
The gleaming sphere was once again opening. Unfolding. . . .
And something, something as big as a planet, was coming out.
Chapter Ten
St. Clair watched the unfolding structure with emotions boiling somewhere between fear and awe. Was that thing designed to open that way, or was he witnessing a natural topology moving through multiple higher dimensions?
Likely it was both. He tried to follow what was happening, but his brain couldn’t quite manage the trick. The shape, overall, was that of a tesseract—a cube inside a cube with the corners connected by straight lines, defining eight cubes in all, but with six viewed through sharp distortions of perspective. The faces of each geometrical construct were opaque . . . and yet somehow St. Clair could see the entire structure as though the faces were transparent. As he watched, the smallest, innermost cube seemed to move forward, expanding as it did so until it was the largest cube and what had been on the outside was now the smallest, innermost cube.
St. Clair blinked and shook his head, trying to clear it. Solid objects shouldn’t move that way. . . .
“All stations, hold your fire!” he ordered. He was assuming the tesseract was hostile, but he didn’t yet know. And that uncertainty, for some reason, held his hand.
He glanced back at the pair of armored Marines floating to either side of the main bridge entryway. “Sergeant?”
“Lord Commander, sir!”
“Stand ready with your weapons. Special Order One.”
“Aye, aye, sir!”
“My lord!” Symms warned. “Dark Raiders!”
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br /> He saw them, a black cloud emerging from the larger, writhing structure. “Shit! All stations, weapons free, repeat, weapons are free!”
He’d wondered why the Dark Raider needleships had broken off their attack so readily in the confrontation earlier, and now he had at least a partial answer. Either the first attack had been simply scouting out the Ki system, or they’d withdrawn to await reinforcements.
These reinforcements.
“General Wilson!”
“My lord!”
“Let’s see if we can hurt those needleships before they disperse!”
“My idea exactly, my lord. Shipkillers followed by zoomies. We’ll try to englobe them.”
Zoomies was the Marine slang both for fighters and for Marines wearing Mk. III MCA armor with wings and gravitic thrusters deployed. The thought of individual troops going up against such numbers brought a sour scowl to St. Clair’s face.
“Okay, but be ready to pull your people back the instant I give the word, General. If things go wrong in a hurry, we’ll need to get out of Dodge like yesterday.”
“Yes, my lord.”
St. Clair couldn’t help wondering if things had gone so badly wrong already that it was too late to do anything about it at all. That swarm of needleships issuing from the alien construct boiled into open space like a cloud of black smoke. Strangely they were moving slow . . . until he realized that he’d been fooled by the scale. The needleships were emerging by the millions, by the hundreds of millions, and that meant they were moving fast.
“Weapons!” he called. “Hit them! Hit them now!”
“Aye, my lord!” Subcommander Davis Webb, Ad Astra’s weapons officer, replied. “Engaging with all weapons!”
Thermonuclear destruction streaked out from the Ad Astra’s launch tubes, arcing out along broad curves and accelerating as they closed on the alien threat from several directions. The Vera Cruz opened up as well with missiles and high-energy beam weapons, slashing into the cloud with devastating effect. Flashes of dazzling light blossomed in complete and deadly silence across the unfolding panorama ahead. Even in those first few seconds, St. Clair knew with a sickening finality that they weren’t going to be able to stop that onslaught, those clouds of alien needleships emerging from the structure ahead like a swarm of angry wasps. Nuclear fire scoured across the surface of the alien world-ship, pinpoints winking into existence and vanishing in an instant against a sterile backdrop of black-and-gray, and yet none of it seemed to matter.
