by Ian Douglas
“What happened? They changed how?”
For answer, the images began flowing once again.
He walked the streets of a civilization far in advance of his own. Intricate structures towered into the sky, or floated serenely overhead. Enormous domes enclosed hidden facilities kilometers across, and fluted, sponsoned, twisted towers of alien design stretched tens of kilometers into the air. Gray saw a dozen cities on a dozen worlds, the products of a dozen mutually alien minds, from the subsurface crystal caverns of the troglodytic Zhalleg to the shape-shifting nanotechnic dreamscapes of the Adjugredudhra to the etched cliff faces of the Baondyeddi.
He saw . . . beings, intelligences utterly unlike anything with which he was familiar, save that all possessed keen and curious minds, and all used various forms of technology to shape and reshape their environment . . . and themselves.
One species bore the Agletsch name of Groth Hoj, though their own name for themselves was based on subtle changes in the colors and luminescence of certain of their cephalic tentacles. The Groth Hoj had pioneered the use of robotics beginning some 300,000 years earlier, and now possessed bodies of advanced plastics and ceramics that never died and never wore out. Some few Groth Hoj were ultra-traditionalists, however, who’d never made the transition from organic bodies to invulnerable robotic shells. The assumption, as the millennia passed, was that these Refusers, as they were known, would pass into extinction.
Another species was the Adjugredudhra . . .
The stack of sea stars with twisted, branchlike arms and tendril eyes Gray had seen earlier.
They’d made astonishing advances in the science humans know as nanotechnology—the ability to build tinier and tinier machines and computers—until they could literally remake their bodies from the inside out, replacing worn-out organic parts cell by cell until they achieved true immortality. Eventually, the Adjugredudhra began abandoning their biological shapes, weaving their organic being into cybernetic organisms that mingled flesh and inorganic components.
Again, however, some of them rejected the technological path, and became Refusers.
The F’heen were yet another species, marine swimmers that had evolved in the shallow, suns-lit seas of their world, with telepathic gestalt minds, school-group organisms perhaps similar in some ways to the group intelligence of a termite mound on Earth. These were the flashing, weaving, shifting spheres of fishlike creatures Gray had seen before. A million years earlier, they had formed a technological alliance with another species, the F’haav, dry-land organisms like swarming masses of angleworms, also with group minds. These were semi-intelligent only, but adaptable and pliable and possessed of minds enough like those of the F’heen that they could be . . . guided.
Gray resisted the urge to use the word enslaved.
The F’heen-F’haav symbiosis allowed the marine F’heen to breed new varieties of the worm masses, ultimately developing metallurgy, computers, and spacecraft. Nanotech gave them the ability to manufacture vast numbers of small ships—the gray and silver leaf shapes seen at the tunnel—which possessed genetically altered F’haav pilots “ridden” telepathically by distant F’heen swarms.
And eventually the F’heen began linking telepathically with their machines and with their slaves.
And, yet again, there were F’heen swarm that rejected the robotic and genetic evolution. They became Refusers.
The Sjhlurrr—
Their own name for themselves was an unpronounceable rumble of multiple vocal sacs . . .
—were the eight-meter red-and-gold-colored slugs. Their slow and ponderous bodies offered certain disadvantages, especially when they began voyaging to other worlds. Less wedded psychologically to a specific body image than many, they focused much of their intellectual attention on genetics, ultimately using nanogenetic manipulation to create thousands of new somatoforms, smaller, for the most part—more nimble, quicker.
But one branch of the Sjhlurrr feared losing the original shape of the species, and bred “pure blood” versions to maintain a link with their genetic past. Refusers. . . .
The Baondyeddi were the flat, circular, many-legged beings with countless sky-blue eyes around their rims. They too took genetic manipulation to undreamed-of depths, reshaping their own bodies to specific patterns for alien environments. In time, those manipulations created smaller Baondyeddi designed to merge with inorganic components, becoming cyborgs that looked very little like their progenitors. After a million years or so, many began transferring their minds to vast computers nanotechnically etched into solid rock, vanishing into artificial realities indistinguishable from, and far more pleasurable than, real life.
Gray remembered the rust-stained cliffs on Heimdall.
Again, those who rejected the shape-shift ideologies were the Refusers.
The Agletsch referred to the transcendence as the Schjaa Hok, the “Time of Change.” It had begun slowly, but then began accelerating. Millions, then billions of individuals simply . . . stopped. Died, perhaps, though the evidence was that each individual organism’s three non-physical elements, their tru’a, dhuthr’a, and thurah’a had survived, passing on to elsewhere and leaving behind only the lifeless shell of their body.
Gray stood on an alien plaza, surrounded by towering buildings of glass and less readily identifiable materials, watching as the robotic bodies of a pair of Adjugredudhra froze, suddenly, in mid-movement. Others in the crowd nearby appeared to notice, stopped . . . and then they too stopped moving.
And more . . . and more . . . and still more, a rippling wave of transformation spreading out from that center through a crowd of tens of thousands, until the entire plaza was filled with motionless statues, some plastic replicas of the original columns of organic starfish joined in columns, others in floating shells of molded, iridescent materials in myriad shapes, left floating above the pavement, apparently lifeless.
The city, Gray realized, had become utterly and profoundly silent.
The Adjugredudhra had been the first, but they’d swiftly been followed by the Groth Hoj, who also now occupied robotic bodies, and by the F’heen, most of whom teleoperated vehicles piloted by gene-altered F’haav.
The Sjhlurrr were still organic beings, but they were part of an intelligent network linking the entire species through nanotechnic implants similar to the implants used by Humankind. The intelligent component of that network vanished; the Sjhlurrr who depended upon the Net and the technology behind it died.
Gray saw a city transformed, a city burning, as wandering mobs howled in the darkness beneath the horizon-to-horizon sprawl of the galaxy filling the sky.
The Refusers, those left behind by the apparent desertion by their more technologically focused and oriented kindred, found themselves trapped on worlds no longer benign, in cities no longer compliant to their will.
As insubstantial as a ghost, Gray watched the mobs destroy the graceful towers, the immense domes, the intricate spires and floating habs and alien architectural wonders. He saw the fires . . . saw the mobs looting and then turning on one another in spasms of mindless, despairing violence. He saw floating cities crash to earth, saw shimmering green sea domes cracked and flooded, saw the destruction of a galactic culture almost overnight.
It was extremely difficult to get an accurate sense of time. Thedreh’schul couldn’t or wouldn’t explain how much time had actually passed. The transcending, the Schjaa Hok, seemed to happen almost literally overnight, but the narrative might well be showing a time-lapse element. Gray had the impression that the change had taken at least several years, and might well have extended across several thousand.
But in the end, the ur-Sh’daar were gone.
“But where did they go?” Gray wanted to know.
“That . . . is a difficult question, yes-no?” Thedreh’schul replied. “And it may be that the question has more than one answer. A parallel universe, a higher dimensional reality, a singularity pocket in spacetime, an alternate reality branching away from this o
ne, computer-generated simulated worlds, a noncorporeal existence within this universe, even the paradisiacal alternaties of religion and myth . . . all of these have been suggested as possibilities. The most favored theory suggests that wherever they went, they are no longer a part of this universe, and so, by definition, they are beyond our powers of observation and of description.
“Most . . . you would say materialists, those who reject concepts like the tru’a, the dhuthr’a, and the thurah’a, suggest that they uploaded themselves into certain vast and complex computers, some embracing most of the surface of entire worlds, where they continue to live in artificially generated realities.”
Gray thought again of the Dolinar sim set on Heimdall.
“That hardly seems likely,” Gray said. “What gets uploaded would be a copy, not the being’s actual mind.”
“By that time, what was thought of as mind was so entangled with machine processes, it’s impossible to say what was likely or possible or not, yes-no?
“In any case, civilization fell. The Refusers were left behind to start over. More time passed . . . ten thousand years, perhaps? No time at all when compared to the pace of entire galaxies, which wheel slowly compared to the span of organic lifetimes. The immortals, those with machine bodies and those with altered genetics, were gone. The Refusers, the Sh’daar, rebuilt their civilization and reached out once again for the stars.”
“And they found the TRGA cylinders still there,” Gray guessed. “And they were able to use them.”
“Yes. But the Sh’daar had been . . . scarred. Broken, for a time, in mind and spirit. They developed anew the old technologies, or found the sources of those technologies waiting for them in places like the volume of space warmed by the Six Suns, but they feared taking them too far. What had happened to their civilization once might happen again.”
“And what gives them the right to dictate to other species what they can do with their technology?”
“There is no right, so far as the Sh’daar are concerned. There is only fear.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
1 July 2405
CIC
TC/USNA CVS America
Omega Centauri
1545 hours, TFT
Emergence. . . .
America dropped out of her unfolding Alcubierre bubble in a flare of dazzling light. Koenig leaned forward in his seat, watching the main bulkhead displays as well as windows open within his mind.
On target. . . .
Ahead, the Six Suns spanned two degrees of arc, the diameter of four full moons seen from Earth. Their glare was so bright they erased even the blaze of cluster stars beyond and behind it, and the AI handling the carrier’s imaging systems had to stop the sensor feeds far, far down. Had any human beheld those suns without optical shielding or other protection, they would have been instantly blinded.
Against the glare, silhouettes drifted in the sea of harsh light—at least three small worlds showing visible, black disks, and a scattering of closer artificial structures—deep space bases or manufactories, possibly, orbital fortresses, space habitats of some sort, perhaps. Two widely separated knots of gold and blue-white haze appeared to be a pair of artificial singularities like the TRGA cylinder.
And, at the moment, at least, only a handful of starships were visible, most of them apparently moored to far larger orbital docking facilities.
There was far too much going on, too much to see across the entire surrounding sphere of the heavens, to take it all in at once.
“Admiral,” his personal assistant murmured in his head. “We are picking up the transponder signals of the two lost pilots.” One of the big CIC screens showed the worldlet enclosed by green bracket graphics, and a pair of winking red points of light appeared on the surface. Accompanying blocks of data identified the world as AIS-1—Anomalous Infrared Source One—and gave its distance as just 1.31 million kilometers.
“Any sign of either the Nassau or the Vera Cruz yet?” Koenig snapped.
“The Nassau has appeared four light seconds below and to starboard,” the PA replied. “The Vera Cruz has not yet registered on our scanners.”
“Open a link with the Nassau.”
“Transmitting.”
“General Mathers! This is Koenig. Execute Plan Bright Thunder.”
There would be an eight-second time delay before Koenig could expect to hear a reply.
During the acceleration period leading up to the last Alcubierre transit, Koenig and his tactical team had worked for hours with Mathers, the CO of MSU-17, and Colonel Murcheson, the commander of MSU-17’s planetary assault Marines. They’d devised a number of alternate combat plans depending on what they might actually find when they emerged within the habitable zone of the Six Suns. Bright Thunder assumed that at least one of the two Marine assault transports would emerge from metaspace close enough to AIS-1 to effect a landing and secure a beachhead.
It was an assumption for which no one in the battlegroup would have given decent odds. While the CBG had adhered close to the observed line of flight of the mobile planet, the so-called habitable zone for the Six Suns—the region surrounding those stars where ambient temperatures were between the freezing and boiling points of water—was extremely deep, several hundred astronomical units at least. The battlegroup had been targeting the outer regions of that habitable zone, about three thousand AUs from the gravitational center of the Six Suns. This allowed them to emerge within a flatter gravitational metric, It also minimized the chances of materializing out of their Alcubierre warp bubbles within the same volume of space as a Sh’daar ship or world.
And apparently, the Sh’daar mobile planet had been operating according to the same general set of rules. The battlegroup had been extremely lucky.
But despite good luck, the CBG had still been scattered, the inevitable result of tiny discrepancies in course and speed and mass and local metric when each vessel dropped into metaspace for the microjump. Even across so relatively tiny a distance as half a light year, Nassau had emerged four light seconds away from America, and as the seconds crawled past, more and more of the battlegroup members were appearing on-screen as the photon dumps of their emergences finally crawled across intervening space to America’s sensors.
“America, Nassau,” a voice said in Koenig’s head. “Nassau copies. Executing Bright Thunder.”
“Admiral,” his PA said. “Vera Cruz has just appeared on-screen. Range fifteen light seconds, high, astern, and to port.”
“Pass them the same message.”
“Transmitting.”
It would be another thirty seconds before he heard a response form the second Marine transport.
“How many ships are linked in?” he asked.
“Twelve ships so far, Admiral, at twenty-three seconds after Emergence. Now fourteen ships . . .”
About half the battlegroup, then, emerging within a sphere less than thirty light seconds across. Not as bad as it could have been . . .
“Make to all vessels on the fleet net,” Koenig said. “We will target AIS-1 in support of Operation Bright Thunder. Initiate acceleration now.”
“Now,” of course, was a relative term, since the order would take time to crawl its way at light’s snail pace out to the other ships. The frigate Badger, closest to the America, began accelerating first, followed by the half dozen or so other vessels that had emerged close by—the destroyers Fitzgerald and Adams, the heavy cruisers Lunar Bay and the Pan-European Frederick der Grosse, and the Marine assault carrier Nassau.
America would delay acceleration until her handful of fighters was away.
“CAG,” Koenig said. “You may launch all fighters.”
“Aye, aye, Admiral,” Wizewski shot back. “Launching all fighters.”
And the fleet battle was joined.
Captain Barry Wizewski
Dragonfires
Omega Centauri
1547 hours, TFT
“Dropping in three . . . two . . . one . . . drop!”
At half a G, five meters per second, Wizewski’s fighter fell from the drop tube and into open space. In moments, he was clear of the carrier’s shield cap and accelerating toward AIS-1. “Form up on me, Dragonfires,” he ordered. “Nighthawks, take formation astern.”
All of the SG-92 Starhawks from the Dragonfires, the Black Lightnings, the Impactors, and the Death Rattlers—a total of just fourteen fighters—were now flying as Dragonfires. The remaining fourteen obsolescent SG-55 War Eagles of the Nighthawks and the Star Tigers were flying now as Nighthawks.
Two heavy squadrons . . .
“What about CSP, CAG?” one of the Nighthawk pilots asked. “We’re leaving America pretty naked.”
“Orders, Paulson,” Wizewski replied, “straight from the admiral. What’s important is that we get down on the deck and cover the Marine landings. The carrier will take care of herself.”
Wizewski himself had protested those orders earlier that afternoon, when the admiral had laid out for him the various alternate battle plans. He’d protested again just minutes ago, when Koenig had told him that it would be Dawn Thunder. Traditionally, going all the way back to atmospheric fighters and wet-navy carriers, fighters had performed in numerous combat roles—offensive, defensive, and reconnaissance. Key to the defensive role had been Combat Air Patrol in the wet-navy days, Combat Space Patrol beyond planetary atmospheres. Carriers of either type, cruising oceans or space, had never been heavily armed and were vulnerable to attack. CSP was the first and best line of defense for modern space carriers.
Generally, that had been a role relegated to the older War Eagles. Defending the space around a carrier didn’t require speed, high-G maneuvers, or the morphing abilities of a nanomatrix hull, and SG-55s weren’t at the same disadvantage there as they were in long-range strikes against heavily defended enemy targets.
But Admiral Koenig had been adamant. “If we do find AIS-1 in there,” he’d told Wizewski, “we’re gong to need all of the long-range firepower we can muster over that planet as quickly as we can get it there.
