Dark Matter

by Ian Douglas

  “That begs an interesting question, though,” Eskow pointed out. “Based on reports from the Battle of Enceladus, we estimate that the Grdoch are within a century or two of us in terms of advanced tehcnology. That puts us smack up against the Limited Tech paradox again.”

  Koenig nodded, thoughtful. He’d already been wondering about that. “It doesn’t seem reasonable that the Grdoch are so close to us in technological levels.”

  “Exactly,” Eskow replied. “If the Grdoch were part of the Sh’daar Collective, it would all be part of the same picture. But they’re not. And that’s a bit of a conundrum.”

  The universe was 13.7 billion years old. Xenosophontologists generally assumed that the first technological civilizations within the galaxy could not have appeared before, say, 8 billion years ago. While it was possible that intelligent species had arisen earlier—­life forms based on organized plasmas within the atmospheres of stars, for instance—­civilizations comprehensible to humans—­with fire, metallurgy, and spacecraft—­could only evolve on the surfaces of rocky planets. Rocky, terrestrial-­type planets, in turn, could only form around stars with a high degree of metalicity—­that meant, in astronomical terms, they possessed elements heavier than hydrogen and helium—­and that meant second-­ and third-­generation stars born after the deaths of the galaxy’s first generation of stars. It was those early dying stars that had cooked heavier elements like carbon and oxygen from the primordial hydrogen and helium—­everything on the periodic table up through iron, in fact—­and exploding supernovae that had created everything heavier. Even life forms arising in the atmospheres of gas giants, like the enormous, free-­floating H’rulka, needed elements like carbon, silicon, phosphorous, and iron to give them form and to run their biologies.

  So . . . the first intelligent life, the xenosophontologists believed, must have appeared within the galaxy around 4 to 5 billion years ago—­or at just about the same time that Sol and Earth were forming out of the dust and gas of their primordial stellar nursery. Four billion years ago, the first starships might have begun exploring the young galaxy, and the first alien colonies were appearing on countless worlds.

  If those aliens were still around in any form that humans could recognize, they would possess technologies billions of years in advance of Humankind. Stargods. . . .

  Such species would have had time to colonize the entire galaxy—­every habitable world—­many times over. That was the basis of Enrico Fermi’s famous paradox: If technological civilizations had begun exploring the galaxy billions of years ago, where are they now? Why don’t we see evidence of their existence? A technology that advanced might be capable of anything—­including reshaping the order and arrangement of the sky itself.

  Fermi’s paradox had been formulated at the very beginning of Humankind’s search for neighbors among the stars. Eventually, a few centuries later, humans had encountered the Agletsch, and from them they’d acquired access to the Encyclopedia Galactica, a nested set of electronic records lising and describing many thousands of alien species scattered across both space and time.

  While the E.G. hinted at more-­advanced civilizations (the so-­called Stargods), however, all of the technologies encountered so far—­in particular the Turusch, the H’rulka, the Slan, the Nungiirtok, and the Agletsch themselves—­possessed technologies that were, at most, a handful of centuries in advance of humans.

  This was . . . mathematically preposterous. Against just the last billion years of galactic history, every civilization studied so far was within something like .0000005 of 1 percent of modern human technological levels.

  And that was generally agreed to be statistically impossible.

  Clearly, some unknown, unseen factor was at work constraining technological growth throughout the galaxy—­and over the past five decades, the assumption had been that that factor was the Sh’daar. By limiting the technologies available to their client races, they ensured that everyone stayed at roughly the same level, to within a century or two.

  Eight hundred million years ago, in the N’gai Cloud, a dwarf galaxy about to be devoured by the Milky Way, the ur-­Sh’daar, a civilization consisting of hundreds or perhaps thousands of separate species, had vanished in such a transcendence, leaving behind a remnant unwilling or unable to follow them . . . a remnant that had become the racially traumatized Sh’daar. Entering Humankind’s galaxy hundreds of millions of years ago, they’d set about creating their collective, spreading out slowly, conquering world upon world, and suppressing those technologies that might lead to another round of Transcendence.

  It made sense. There were no higher technologies—­the mysterious Stargods and the Rosette Aliens were the exceptions that proved the rule—­because the Sh’daar had enforced their rules against the tech that might lead to technological singularities.

  But then . . . why were the Grdoch so close to human tech levels? Their military and spaceflight technologies were somewhat beyond human abilities, to be sure; humans had experimented with X-­ray lasers, but problems in focusing and directing them had blocked their deployment. If the Grdoch had never crossed paths with the Sh’daar Collective, the chances that they just happened to be so close to human technology were quite literally something like one in a million, or even less.

  “Obviously,” Eskow told the group, “there have been other factors at work besides the Sh’daar. Our best guess at the moment is that there’ve been multiple technological singularities among countless races as they progressed technologically through the course of their histories. Millions of civilizations across the galaxy must have reached technological apotheosis, transcending physical evolution and instrumentality and developing into . . . something else.”

  “So in other words,” Koenig said, “there are no really advanced aliens out there, either inside Sh’daar space or beyond it, because the older ones all left to play someplace else.”

  Which led relentlessly to another, related and very interesting thought. Might it be that technological species tended to enter the Singularity as soon as they reached a roughly human equivalence?

  The answer to that question was vital. If the answer was yes, than humans could expect to enter their own singularity very soon, now.

  A chime sounded, and a door slid open in the middle of what appeared to be one of the conference room’s floor-­to-­ceiling windows, admitting six naval officers and a single, sour-­looking civilian.

  “Ah, Admiral Gray!” Koenig said. “Welcome to the briefing. I think you’re going to find this . . . interesting. . . .”

  Chapter Fourteen

  9 March 2425

  York Civic Center

  Jefferson Government Complex

  Toronto, USNA

  1410 hours, TFT

  As he walked into the large, open conference room, Admiral Gray was a bit taken aback by the crowd in the room, ­people both present and virtual. “Mr. President,” he said, facing Koenig. “Sorry to take so long. Building security.”

  “Understood. My security ­people are convinced that someone is going to sneak in here with a nuke stuck up their ass.”

  It was an exaggeration, given the minimum mass of fissionable material necessary for a nuclear device, but only a small one. There had been reports of suicide bombers using antimatter conversion units a few centimeters long, surgically implanted inside their stomachs, though that sort of thing was more a mark of the Rafadeen and the Islamic Theocracy than it was of the Confederation government. The scanning process in the Jefferson Building’s lobby had been excruciatingly and intimately thorough, including backscatter X-­rays, soft-­tissue fluoroscopy, and handheld MRI medical imaging scans.

  Gray came to rigid attention. “Sir! Command Constellation, CBG-­ 40, reporting as ordered, sir.”

  “At ease, Admiral, and shit-­can the kay-­det crap,” Koenig said. The President grinned at his discomfiture. “You are among fr
iends here.”

  Gray wasn’t quite sure whether to believe him. “If you say so, sir.” He looked at the crowd around the table, pinging their electronic IDs one after another. Some he knew, but only from the newsfeeds. God . . . the Secretary of State, the Speaker of the House—­what was she doing here? And SecSci, SecDef, the DSC and the DCI. Others he didn’t know . . . Dr. Lee, for instance. But his credentials were impressive. “I just wasn’t expecting such . . . such an august assembly.”

  “Grow yourselves seats and let’s get started,” Koenig said. “We need to decide how best to apply Task Force Eridani.”

  Gray and the others found empty spaces around the big table and thoughtclicked chairs out of the carpeted floor.

  “Phillip?” Koenig said, addressing the director of the Security Council. “You have something for us?”

  “Some background, Mr. President.”

  A large virtual screen shimmered into visibility at the end opposite Koenig’s place, and a world, the illuminated portion of the crescent enticingly blue, white, and orange-­gold, swam into view.

  “Vulcan,” an AI’s voice intoned. “A world so Earthlike that humans can actually live and work unprotected on its surface . . .”

  Alphanumerics on the lower right-­hand corner of the display showed that the image had been shot by the carrier Intrepid only a ­couple of weeks ago, then sent back to Sol by messenger drone. Vulcan’s sun, 40 Eridani A, showed in the distance to the right. Far to the left of the screen, almost out of the panorama, two closely paired stars gleamed brightly—­one ruby red, the other diamond white.

  “At last count,” the AI went on, “Vulcan was home to some eighty million humans, most of either German or Argentinean descent. The capital is the twin city of Himmel-­Paradisio, on the southeastern coast of Neubavaria, the principal continent on the planet. . . .”

  “Mr. President,” Valcourt said, petulant, “do we really need to sit through this . . . this melodramatic travelogue?”

  “We need to know what we’re stepping into, Madam Speaker. And we all need to be downloading the same page.”

  Gray suppressed a chuckle. In fact, the presentation, a piece prepared by Central Intelligence and put out over Govnet, was somewhat melodramatic, almost embarrassingly so. As the interior voice continued, Gray turned down the volume inside his head. He knew the basic stats of the place, had been studying them now ever since the place had popped in the set of highly confidential advance orders he’d received out at Enceladus. The world, though nominally a Confederation colony, was in fact politically independent, and seemed to have provided very little to the Confeds’ struggle with the breakaway USNA. Industry appeared to be limited to what was necessary just to support the world’s population—­no shipyards, no weapons nanufactories, no shipments of scarce minerals or biotics, no large standing army. Vulcan’s principal export, apparently, was information . . . mostly on its alien biology.

  And, in fact, information was by far the main item of all interstellar trade. There was very little in the way of goods or raw material worth the cost of shipping it across light years, especially when nanufactories could grow almost anything conceivable from the rocks freely available in every star system. The Agletsch, he reflected, had become experts at finding, quantizing, and shipping information across large swaths of the galaxy. The Encyclopedia Galactica was a well-­known result of this trade. Increasingly, now, human traders were doing the same.

  The travelogue wound to a close, and the scene shifted to a computer graphic detailing the outline of the entire 40 Eridani system. Alphanumerics identified the light star carrier Intrepid and her three escorts as they entered 40 Eridani space. Planets followed blue orbital paths—­six of them—­as red trajectories arced out from the second planet and closed on the four green icons identifying Intrepid and the destroyers with her. Each missile followed a separate, far-­arcing path, so that they came in on the USNA Task force from all directions.

  “We don’t have a clear idea of what happened, exactly,” Phillip Caldwell’s holographic image said. “Intrepid’s squadron appears to have been hit hard, however, shortly after it entered the 40 Eridani system.”

  On the screen, one destroyer, the Emmet, vanished in a white flare of light. Moments later, the second destroyer, Fitzpatrick, died as well. The Intrepid took several hits as she struggled to accelerate, to break free of the system. The last destroyer, Tomlinson, hung back, apparently trying to shield the far larger carrier and give her time to get clear.

  The image froze, then, at the instant that Intrepid stopped recording battlespace data and launched it Solward in a message drone.

  “We presume that both Intrepid and the Tomlinson were destroyed moments later,” Admiral Armitage said. “The Joint Chiefs are recommending that we send the new task force directly to 40 Eridani, with orders to find and rescue survivors, if any, to launch a retaliatory strike against Confederation assets in the system, and . . . to deal with this.”

  On the screen, the image of the star system shifted left and down, centering, after a moment, on a bright scarlet dot hanging above the blue-­and-­white icon representing Vulcan, then zoomed in, the magnification increasing thousands of times. An instant later, the view locked onto an egg-­shaped, bright scarlet ship apparently identical to the one captured at Enceladus.

  “That’s the same alien ship,” Sharpe said, “the one that showed up at Enceladus.”

  “Actually, no,” Eskow said. The secretary of science brought up a series of shifting bars next to the image, a graph of power usage. “The energy readouts transmitted from Intrepid suggest that this is a different Grdoch ship . . . larger, more powerful. It may be over a kilometer long.”

  Gray studied the magnified image with mingled interest and concern. Star carriers like America were about a kilometer long overall . . . but their bodies were long and slender, a pencil of a spine extending aft 800 meters from beneath an umbrella-­shaped shieldcap. There was nothing slender about the Grdoch ships, however. Massive, bulky, and squat, they contained hundreds of times the volume of a star carrier, and massed many hundreds of millions of tons. This one was more smooth-­polished asteroid than it was starship. Koenig could well understand how a number of Grdoch—­and the titanic beasts they’d been feeding on—­had not been discovered within the ship captured at Enceladus until long after the fact. A ship that big was a small and self-­contained world, like a human O’Neill cylinder, or some of the colonies constructed within hollowed-­out asteroids.

  “And of course now we know that that Grdoch ship has attacked its erstwhile allies,” Koenig said.

  Gray looked up sharply at that. “Sir? They’ve changed sides?”

  “We have some hot new intel, Admiral. Here you go.”

  Gray opened the download window in his mind, and saw the intercepted message from Geneva. As a kind of footnote, Koenig appended a message listing what was known about the first Grdoch attack on Vulcan, information derived from a cyberaid made a few days ago.

  There was a lot there to digest.

  “So, Mr. President,” Gray said slowly, “the Grdoch. Are they our friends now? Or are they still . . . foes?” He’d almost said targets, but stopped himself at the last moment. There was too much heavy-­lift rank in this room to let him be flip or casually humorous.

  “A wonderful question, Admiral, and one that I’m sure we’d all like to resolve. You’ve received your full orders for this operation from HQMILCOM?”

  Gray nodded. “They came through yesterday, Mr. President.”

  “And they are?”

  “I am to take command of Task Force Eridani,” Gray replied, his tone as crisp and as no-­nonsense as he could make it. “Four or possibly five star carriers, with a large number of warships in support, twenty or twenty-­five, if we can manage it.

  “Task Force Eridani will investigate Vulcan, at 40 Eridani. Our immediate priori
ty will be to find and rescue survivors from the Intrepid’s task force, if any. If we encounter Confederation Fleet elements, we are to engage those, unless, in my judgment, the enemy forces in-­system are so strong that attacking them would result in unacceptable casualties. We are also to survey Vulcan itself, to determine if the Confederation has posted fleet or surface elements there.”

  “And if you encounter Grdoch forces?” Koenig prompted.

  “That, Mr. President, HQMILCOM seems to be leaving to my best judgment. Yesterday, the presumption was that they are allies of the Confederation and therefore hostile. But . . . this new intel changes that, doesn’t it?”

  “We don’t know yet, Admiral,” Koenig told him. “Assuming the old adage that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, there may now be room to consider forging an alliance of our own with the Grdoch. But it’s equally possible that the Grdoch can’t really distinguish among Earth-­human political factions.”

  “In other words, we all look alike to them,” Vandenberg put in. Several at the table chuckled.

  “If I may, gentlemen, ladies,” Dr. Truitt put in, “I have had some small experience with the Grdoch . . . at least with the Grdoch we captured at Enceladus. Their psychology is . . . unusual, to say the least, despite their being so similar to us.”

  “Excuse me, Dr. Truitt,” Koenig said. “What do you mean, ‘so similar’? The reports I’ve seen suggest that they define the word alien.”

  “Their biochemistry is nearly identical to ours, Mr. President. We’ve run biochem studies on them with a portable lab on the captured ship. Their biochemistries are based on dextro-­sugars and levo-­amino acids, just like terrestrial life, and that alone is a one-­in-­four possibility. They use RNA, like life on Earth, which isn’t completely surprising, since RNA is a fairly common organic building block. They also use DNA. Different sequences, obviously, but the same base pairs: adenine, guanine, cytosine, thymine. I’ve searched our databases. We haven’t yet encountered any exobiologies as similar to ours as these.”