by Ian Douglas
And Koenig himself wondered if the scientists with the expedition might not be exhibiting a certain amount of anthropocentric nearsightedness. Discussions about the Vinge Singularity had gotten him thinking about what the next stage in human evolution might be—especially when that stage might represent some sort of merging of biological with electronic life. At the moment, he and several hundred officers and scientists with the America battlegroup appeared to be adrift in empty space a few hundred light years from an immense, slightly flattened globular cluster of stars, with the blue-limned glow of the galactic spiral arms spread out below—a virtual reality created by America’s AI software. An uploaded intelligence might well have plenty to do besides simply think. The artificial universe available to such sentients might well be larger, richer, and more varied than reality . . . whatever that was.
The entire history of Humankind was an uneven march of change in how humans perceived themselves—from special creations of God to the pinnacle of evolution to one form of life among countless many. Even the basic definitions of life and intelligence had been rewritten many times, from the opening chapter of Genesis to the creation of AI software agents.
Liu could well be right. It might again be time to rethink certain basic assumptions, this time about the nature of civilization.
“Whether those ruins are the Sh’daar or not,” Koenig said after a moment, “the fact remains that hostile forces—presumably the Sh’daar—now occupy the space on the other side of the TRGA cylinder. The problem is how to get in there with the fleet . . . or even if we should attempt to go through.” He manipulated the imagery around them, returning their viewpoint to where they’d begun, somewhere near the heart of that titanic globe of teeming suns. The TRGA cylinder was visible in the distance, slowly dwindling in apparent size until it was lost among the stars.
“Lieutenant Gray was able to record these ships on the other side,” he continued, and a cloud of gray and silver leaf shapes arrowed through that dazzling sky, momentarily surrounding the disembodied viewers, and then streaming away like a school of coral-reef fish and vanishing into the distance. “He also detected a body that his AI designated as an anomalous infrared source—AIS-1.”
The magnified image of a low-resolution disk appeared, a blocky mass of purples and dark blues. “It is still some tens of thousands of kilometers away from Gray’s fighter,” Joseph continued, “and he was not able to pick up much detail, but it appears to be a dwarf planet, probably a free body ejected from its parent star system eons ago. The data he transmitted suggests that the body has a diameter of less than two thousand kilometers, and a surface temperature very close to absolute zero. There’s one really interesting point, though.”
The blue-and-purple disk expanded under extreme magnification. Two bright, white stars appeared against the featureless blue backdrop. One was a simple point; the other, slightly larger, had a white core, with thin bands of yellow and green trailing off rapidly into the surrounding cold ultramarine.
“This,” Joseph said, indicating the single point, “appears to be the large spacecraft that was approaching Gray at the moment he released his battlespace drone. This larger, less-defined heat source may be a base of some sort located on the planet’s surface.”
“By God,” General Joshua Mathers said quietly against the silence. Mathers was the commanding officer of MSU-17, the battlegroup’s fleet Marines, some twelve thousand men and women embarked on the assault carriers Nassau and Vera Cruz. “A target at last!”
“Maybe,” Koenig said. “But it’s going to be sheer hell getting at it.”
Trevor Gray
Omega Centauri
1005 hours, TFT
Gray was still in his fighter, but imprisoned. He knew he’d been taken aboard a gigantic alien vessel, knew that outside his Starhawk, now, was an empty blackness and hard vacuum. The fighter appeared to be resting on something, and Gray could feel the reassuring drag of a gravitational field—roughly half a G, he thought. But there’d been no movement, no change, no attempts to communicate of which he was aware, nothing, now, for the past sixteen hours.
His dark gray skin suit and the bubble helmet he wore could double as a pressure suit, but there was no point in his leaving the Starhawk and wandering around in the dark. Radar pings broadcast over the past several hours suggested that the open space he was in was large—perhaps a hundred meters across—and there were suggestions that the walls were convoluted and broken by openings within which he could easily get lost. His life support would keep him supplied with air, water, and food more or less indefinitely by nanotechnically recycling his wastes, with the addition of only small quantities of trace elements and water from time to time. His life support reserves would keep him going for months.
He was not carrying a hand weapon, of course. Even if he had been, it was hard to imagine what he could do about the alien inhabitants of this vast ship.
If there were inhabitants. He’d seen nothing so far that indicated that the vessel was crewed. Repeated transmissions of both radio and laser-com signals and even the flashing of an external light on the decked fighter, counting out the first five prime numbers, had all been ignored.
Sixteen hours. What the hell were the aliens waiting for?
“Lieutenant Gray,” his fighter’s AI said in his head. “I may be picking up an attempt to communicate with us.”
The announcement startled Gray. He’d been dozing, on the assumption that since there was nothing practical he could do but wait, there was no point in worrying about it.
“What do you have?” Gray said. His heart was pounding now.
“A laser transmission from the far end of the compartment within which we currently reside,” the AI replied. “They are using protocols we’ve established with the Agletsch.”
Which made sense. The Agletsch had been the alien species, interstellar traders in information, with which Humankind had been in communication for almost a century . . . and from which humans had first learned of the Sh’daar thirty-seven years ago.
“What is it?” Gray asked. “Vid? Audio only?”
His AI hesitated, a humanlike affectation that was probably for Gray’s benefit and not a reflection of any limitations within the software. “It appears,” the software told him, “to be a full virtual simulation.”
“Of what?”
“That I cannot say. Do you wish to accept the communication?”
Gray thought about this. Sims—fully interactive virtual realities—were used routinely for conversations both between humans and with aliens, like the Agletsch, who possessed the appropriate electronic know-how and implants. They were safe enough, at least in theory, though there were periodic rumors of people who’d come out of a sim with serious cardiovascular or emotional problems if they’d “died” while in a virtual reality. Occasionally, you heard stories of people who’d been trapped in-sim permanently, though those were almost certainly technophobic urban legends. Growing up in the Periphery, a Prim living in the Manhattan Ruins, Gray had heard plenty of such tales.
And since joining the Navy and receiving implants of his own, he’d worked hard to banish those legends, because to accept them would have been to surrender to utter and complete paranoia.
The offer of an in-sim communication might be an attack, but surely if they wanted to kill him they had ways of vaporizing his fighter here and now. Why even bring him aboard? The nanomeds coursing through his bloodstream and chelated throughout the muscle tissue making up his heart would protect him from heart attack if he received a really sharp shock, and his AI would be monitoring the transmissions and should be able to buffer him against any growing mental or emotional instability.
Yeah, it meant depending on advanced technology, something that still left him as uncomfortable as a Prim in a VirSim, but he should be all right.
“Okay,” he told his AI. “Go ahead. I accept.”
“Place your palm on the pad contacts, please.”
Gray
flexed his left hand, then placed it on the pad set on the armrest of the seat that embraced him. Simple and routine sim-feeds—such as the AI’s voice, com links with other pilots, and most navigational data—were transmitted through connections in his skin suit either at the base of his spine or at the back of his neck. A full-sensory connection, however, required the labyrinthine tangle of microscopic contacts grown into the skin of the palm of his hand. Matching contacts in his skin suit allowed a direct connection to the fighter’s communications electronics—and the reception of the simulation now flowing into his cerebral implants.
The darkness of the interior of his Starhawk’s cockpit gave way to a deeper, more profound darkness.
And then . . . there was light. . . .
CIC
TC/USNA CVS America
TRGA, Texaghu Resch System
1015 hours, TFT
At some point, they’d begun calling the thing the tunnel.
The word was less clumsy, and far more evocative than “TRGA” or “cylinder” or even “Triggah.” And it seemed perfect to describe the immense artifact—a star’s mass compressed into a tiny tube connecting two points in space removed from each other by more than eighteen thousand light years.
Admiral Koenig stared at the alien structure adrift in space a few thousand kilometers from America and the other members of the battlegroup. From here, through the feed provided by a remote probe hovering directly in front of the tunnel’s open maw, the carrier’s CIC crew could actually look through the rotating cylinder and glimpse, far off, as if in the tunnel’s depths, the unwinking glow of myriad, close-packed stars.
They’d sent a dozen unmanned probes of various types through the tunnel already, but no signals had threaded their way back through to the fleet. Since starlight was passing through the tube, the silence suggested that something had happened to the probes on the other side—that, or the distance was a lot farther than appearances suggested. Dr. Raymond Clark, head of America’s astrophysics department, had pointed out that the interior of a Tipler cylinder was likely to cause odd distortions to space and possibly to time as well. The starlight emerging on this end might be centuries, even millennia old, and if that was the case it would be a long time before they heard anything from the probes.
Far more likely, in Koenig’s opinion, was the possibility that the probes had been intercepted on the other side by enemy ships and destroyed.
Koenig was a fan of Occam’s razor, the age-old proposition that states that the simplest explanation is probably the correct one.
The Sh’daar fleet, if those had been Sh’daar warships, had given in far too easily. Their maneuvers had suggested that they’d been being guided by software, not organic intelligence . . . and rather low-grade software at that. After taking heavy losses, every one of those gray and silver ships had vanished down that rotating tube. The smart money said they would now be on the other side, probably heavily reinforced, waiting for the Confederation fleet to follow them.
And if the CBG did so, it would be a slaughter.
The problem was the tactical situation in which the battlegroup would find itself after traversing the TRGA cylinder—a situation analogous to a primitive warrior faced with entering an enemy’s tent, with the only access provided by a low and narrow door that required that he stoop and crawl. The interior of the tunnel was only about a kilometer wide, as wide as America was long. The ships of the battlegroup, all but the smallest frigates and destroyers, would have to go through in single file, and they wouldn’t be able to see what was waiting for them on the other side. The enemy would be in position to swarm in on each vessel as it emerged and destroy it, annihilating one ship at a time. An alerted enemy could be expected to have the far end of the tube covered by a hellstorm of nuclear warheads and high-energy beams, as well as those deadly weapons that appeared to collapse matter into neutronium. Unable to shield or to maneuver, unable even to fight back, the battlegroup would not have a chance against that concentration of firepower.
But there might be a way. . . .
He’d dismissed the fleet conference earlier, giving orders to the tactical departments throughout the fleet to work on possible approaches to the problem and report back to him by 1030 hours.
Koenig checked his internal time readout. It was nearly time. . . .
Chapter Fourteen
30 June 2405
Trevor Gray
Omega Centauri
1018 hours, TFT
He stood on a flat and barren plain of gray ice, beneath a celestial dome of radiant light. In places, the ice was smooth enough that it reflected the light from above, like an imperfect and distorted mirror showing smears of blue-white light. Most places, however, the ice was pitted, as if by eons of sandblasting.
He knew he was experiencing this in simulation. He appeared to be wearing Navy utilities, but was without helmet or gloves. His AI remained with him, a voice in his head, explaining that the surface was water and ammonia ice at a temperature of approximately twenty degrees Kelvin—twenty degrees above zero absolute. Unprotected, his physical body would have frozen in an instant or two and shattered as it fell. In his mind, he walked the frigid surface unprotected, and seemed to be breathing hard vacuum with no discomfort whatsoever. Gravity appeared to be the half G he’d been feeling inside his cockpit, though a world like this one probably had an actual surface gravity much lower. Pluto, he knew, back in his home solar system, had a surface gravity of less than seven hundredths of a G.
Why had he been brought here? Why was he being shown this frozen desert?
Well, if he was going to meet with his captors, he had to be somewhere, even if it was all an illusion created by software running in his head. This might be an attempt to show him where they came from, or where they were now . . . or it could simply be a useful starting point.
Those stars overhead were so beautiful, so closely spaced that very little black showed between them in the most thickly populated part of the sky. In other directions, he could see empty space. Clearly he was inside a very large and massive globular star cluster. His AI had not yet been able to figure out which one.
He hoped the far more powerful computers in the battlegroup were able to make sense of the data he’d sent them, and perhaps pinpoint his location. Right now, though, all he knew was that the nearest other human being to him must be some thousands of light years away at the very least.
It was not a comforting thought.
And then he became aware of another human figure on the plain.
It was a man, shorter than Gray, wearing flight utilities with an America VQ-7 patch animated on his upper right chest. His skin suit’s electronics transmitted his name and rank: Lieutenant Christopher Schiere.
“You’re our missing Sneaky Peak,” Gray said.
The other nodded. “Got sucked through that damned alien straw. You?”
“Me too. Looks like the bad guys are collecting pilots. Have you seen any of them?”
“I don’t think so,” Schiere replied. “There were some transmission attempts, high-band stuff . . . but my AI was pretty much fried when I came through. I couldn’t make anything of them.”
“You still in your ship?”
“Yeah. Been there—here—for a day and a half, now.”
“So if your AI got fried, how did you get on-line to sim?”
“I’m not sure. I think the aliens are still learning about our AI systems, how they work. My Shadowstar took a hit from something that crumpled the whole aft end down to nothing. Took out my quantum power tap, of course, which left me with batteries. I had just a glimpse of the TRGA as I was getting pulled in . . . and then I was in the dark, literally. My AI is still running, I think, but at a very low level. All of the higher functions are gone. I could feel things happening to the ship—changes in acceleration, bumps and thumps, that sort of thing, but I have no idea where I am.”
“According to my AI,” Gray told him, “we’re inside a globular star clust
er. Don’t know which one.”
“Friggin’ great. That means we’re only a few tens of thousands of light years from the fleet.” Schiere’s sarcasm was acid.
“I managed to get a sitrep and a navscan off to the battlegroup after I fell through, but before they grabbed me,” Gray said. “I’m hoping there’s enough star data in there to let them figure out where we are.”
“Yeah? So you really believe they’re going to come get us? Risk the entire battlegroup for two lost streakers?”
Gray didn’t know how to answer that one. The question had been nagging him at the back of his mind for many hours, though.
“If they can, they will,” Gray replied. “In the meantime, we need to see what we can do to communicate with the Sh’daar . . . or whoever the hell it is who’s running this show.”
“It is our duty,” Schiere said, “to resist interrogation. We can’t cooperate with them.”
“Frankly, Lieutenant, I think that’s going to be the least of our worries.”
Their captors, clearly, were controlling their simulated environment. That meant that they had a good-enough understanding of human AI technologies and nanomedical implants to get at their memories whether Gray and Schiere put up a fight or not. Both men had molecular-electronic data storage in their brains designed to enhance their original organic wetware. It wouldn’t be hard for the enemy to download whatever they wanted from both of them, and do it in such a way that they didn’t even realize their personal storage had been tapped.
Gray was afraid that they might use this access to torture the two of them—not, necessarily, to force them to reveal data that they could acquire electronically in any case, but simply to find out what made humans tick, what they might fear, how they might react to threats. They might be watching the two of them now, trying to figure out how two marooned humans dealt with the appearance of standing on a plain in hard vacuum at a few scant degrees above absolute zero.
