by Ian Douglas
“Not that much,” Gregory told her. “It takes two hundred fifty million years for our sun to go around the galactic center once. Twelve million years is . . . nothing.”
“It’s still deep time.”
“I usually think of that term associated with the past.”
“Depends on how you use it,” Connor said with a shrug that did delightful things to her upper torso. “Twelve million years . . . you know, we’re probably post-human out here. The average life span for a species is . . . what? A million years?”
“For mammals, yes,” Gregory said. “For intelligent species, it could be shorter . . . a hundred thousand years or so.”
“Or it could be much longer,” Connor countered. “A truly advanced galactic species might be immortal. And they would break all the rules about species life spans.”
“Well, we won’t know unless we make contact with our remote descendents in there, now, will we? I doubt the admiral’s going to be up for any long-range sightseeing.”
“Probably not. Maybe the aliens here can fill us in.”
“Maybe.” He frowned. “And maybe . . .”
“What?”
“I’m just wondering about the Tushies coming through the Triggah here . . . working with the Glothr, but twelve million years after our time. It . . . paints a kind of a strange picture, y’know?”
“Strange how?”
“A Sh’daar empire, or whatever you want to call it—a polity, an associative—that’s spread across an entire galaxy, and also across millions of years of time. I’m trying to imagine—I don’t know—an intragalactic and intertemporal network . . . trade, military assistance . . . trillions of sapient beings, millions of worlds, across millions of different times . . .”
“God. Talk about thinking big . . .”
“It just makes me wonder what we’re really up against here,” he told her.
She reached for him . . . carefully to avoid the hand of Newton. “I want to be up against you. C’mere.”
And they clung to each other once more, adrift in beauty. . . .
Admiral’s Quarters
USNA Star Carrier America
Invictus Space, T+12 MY
0320 hours, TFT
“Bridge, this is Gray. I’m turning in, now.”
“Go ahead, Admiral,” Gutierrez replied. “We’ve got it covered here.”
“Quarters,” he added. “Call me at oh-seven hundred, please.”
“Acknowledged,” the room replied in his head. “Zero-seven hundred wake-up call.”
Normally he had the room wake him at 0600 or even earlier, but he’d just put in a very long day. Even with electronic sleep-aug he was going to be bumping into bulkheads when he regained consciousness. Three and a half hours just weren’t enough.
“When’s reveille?” Taggart asked him from the bed. She was gloriously naked, her brown hair spilling across the pillow in an unkempt riot. He told her, and she groaned. “Too early . . .”
“Yeah, but the Glothr may not feel that way,” he said. “I don’t know. Do jellyfish sleep?”
“I don’t know, but I sleep!”
“Well, that’s because you’re a mammal.” He gave her a deliberately salacious grin. “Obviously so.”
He padded across the deck and climbed in beside her.
“Obviously. But maybe we shouldn’t do anything about it,” she said. “Not if we’re on duty again in less than four hours.”
“Don’t be mad at me. Yell at the Glothr. Or the Tushies.”
“Who’s on the flag bridge?”
“Captain Gutierrez. She came on second watch, and she’s going to keep an eye on things until oh-eight hundred. She’s going to need sleep-aug at that point, too.” Hell, they all would. There was no day or night in space, and though America and the rest of Task Force One operated on Terran Fleet Time—which at the moment was reading almost four in the morning—in fact ships’ crews were scheduled to man all stations at all times. The awkward part of that was that the ship’s captain and the fleet’s admiral both were on duty 24/7, and that meant they caught sleep when they could.
In Taggart’s case it was just that she’d chosen to stay up through the midnight duty after putting in a full day on deck . . . and that made it her own damned fault.
“You didn’t have to stay on duty, you know,” he told her, reaching for her.
“What, and miss all the excitement? I wanted to see the Guard ships arrive.”
“Yes, and they didn’t. I’m worried about them.”
“What are we going to do about it?”
“First, I’m going to get some sleep. And when I get back on the flag bridge later . . . well, then we’ll see. Depends partly on how far along the task force repairs are by then.”
“They were reporting good progress. That was inspired, dismantling the Tush hulks.”
“Tell me that when we know it’s worked. Meanwhile . . . come here . . .”
“I thought you wanted to sleep!”
“I do, but I’m all keyed up. I need something to relax me.”
“You can program the sleep augmentation for that.”
“Yes. Yes, I can.” His hand slid down the curve of her belly. “But this way is so much more fun. . . .”
And the room’s electronics, infected now with a virus disguised as a harmless maintenance subroutine, recorded every move . . . every gentle moan . . .
Chapter Eighteen
7 August, 2425
Place of Cold Dreaming
Invictus Ring
0515 hours, TFT
“God . . . why is it so dark?”
“We don’t understand your question, Ambassador. What do ambient light levels have to do with anything?”
“Just let us have a little light. . . .”
“You are bathed in light, Ambassador. Let us stay on the topic of current discussion.”
Seven-one-cee-eight waited for a reply, studying the line of humans suspended in their sealed plastic tubes through broad-spectrum analyzers. There were six of them in a line, immobilized in their containers, glowing with their own heat. Conduits and piping connected each, maintaining the hellish environmental conditions these creatures appeared to require. Oxygen . . . Seven-one-cee-eight gave the Glothr equivalent of a shudder, its mantle rippling as a wave of emotion pulsed around its circumference. And a metabolic temperature well above ambient normal. Seven-one-cee-eight was comfortable at a temperature of four degrees Celsius, though its measuring units were different and it used a base 24 numbering system; body temperature for humans appeared to be thirty-seven Celsius. They radiated heat, rather than absorbing it from the environment; in fact, they were radiating so much heat that it was dangerous for Glothr to come anywhere close to one of them.
Fortunately, the god-robots weren’t affected by the hot little aliens, and Seven-one-cee-eight could watch from the comfort of its saltwater-ammonia quarters. The robots were designed to tolerate far more extreme environments than a room filled with hot oxygen-nitrogen gas.
“We shall begin again,” Seven-one-cee-eight told them. “Tell us why humans reject the gift of belonging. . . .”
Seven-one-cee-eight hoped the translation was adequate. The humans appeared to understand what it was saying, but sometimes there were . . . nuances and shades of meaning that were as slippery as ammonia ice melting at the bottom of a pool. The worst part of it was that humans appeared to have no electrosense at all . . . and that made communication a decided challenge.
Their speech did not depend on sound waves, but on precise and subtle modulations in the electrical fields generated by their bodies. Seven-one-cee-eight’s name—those four characters were the first of a much longer string, while cee was twelve in base-24 notation—referred to specific sequential frequencies in a fluttering electrical field. Their na
me for themselves, which began with the characters En-jay-three-kay, numerically encoded the term Abyss Kin. “Glothr” was the name given to them by other aliens within the Sh’daar Collective.
The humans appeared to be completely insensitive to Kin modulations of electrical fields, which made them not only dumb in terms of communication, but blind as well. The Kin possessed light-sensitive organs, but sight was a relatively minor sense, one of twelve they possessed, and useful primarily for gathering emotional data from the color shifts and pattern changes of other individuals. The physical nature, shape, mass, and movement of their environment and what was in it all were perceived as changes in the surrounding field. The humans, with painfully weak electrical fields running over their integuments and apparently no means whatsoever of actually detecting them, must perceive the universe around them in a very, very different fashion than the Kin indeed.
In fact, humans seemed to be crippled in a number of respects—no magnetic sense, no lateral-line pressure sense, no group movement sense, no . . . it was impossible even to translate three of the concepts. To compensate, humans appeared to rely far more heavily than did the Kin on light perception. One other sense that seemed to be important to them as well, though similar to sensing pressure waves in the water, had no exact corollary among the Kin. Apparently, they used it to detect the pressure waves that they generated as a form of communication. Numerous Sh’daar races had evolved this sense, though it was difficult to understand how sound waves could carry anywhere near the informational content of an oscillating electrical field.
“Gift . . .” the human said, as though struggling with the concept. “I don’t . . . understand . . .”
Seven-one-cee-eight gave the equivalent of a sigh—a flutter of green and yellow exasperation. How could it be sure of the quality of the translation? Human metabolism—and, in consequence, the speed of their thinking—appeared to be on the order of two to three times faster than the Kin. And the difficulties of translating fluctuations in an electrical field into pressure waves, and back again, were almost insurmountable. The only way the task was possible at all was through the intermediary efforts of powerful artificial intelligences, and of the robots.
Seven-one-cee-eight increased the power with a thought. “Tell us why humans reject the gift of belonging.”
Like many sapient species across the Galaxy, these humans were partly organic, partly machine. Imbedded within their brains, and elsewhere throughout their central nervous systems, was nanotechnically chelated circuitry that incorporated computers into their flesh-and-blood makeup. Kin software agents had tapped into the machine part of this combination, linking directly to memory, operating system, and the software AI running there. Through that link, Seven-one-cee-eight could communicate directly with the humans . . . though certain contextual or cultural concepts continued to prove difficult. It couldn’t tell for sure how much of that was due to genuine fuzziness in the translation programs . . . and how much was due to stubbornness on the part of the humans.
“It’s so . . . dark. . . .”
“Why would you need light?”
“Because I can’t see!”
The word translated for Seven-one-cee-eight as “perceive visible light.” It worked at the implications of this for a moment, then came to a startling realization: that the aliens, evidently, were sensitive to electromagnetic wavelengths, and that this sense was far more important to them than to the Kin. Perhaps it needed to see . . . or became emotionally distressed when it could not.
“I do not understand what you’re saying. In any case, you do not need to perceive light to answer my questions . . . Ambassador.”
“Ambassador” was another incomprehensible concept. The first humans to be contacted directly, the ones that called themselves the Terran Confederation, had spoken of ambassadors, as though a special type of being was necessary to achieve meaningful communications. Its superiors had directed Seven-one-cee-eight to play along with the humans when it made first contact with them on their world . . . but the alien’s strange customs were fast becoming a hindrance rather than an aid to a clear exchange of information.
Seven-one-cee-eight increased the power of its signal again.
It had no other reasonable alternative.
USNA Star Carrier America
Invictus Space, T+12 MY
0940 hours, TFT
Gray drifted in the midst of the USNA fleet, the ships spread out around him like glittering toys. They weren’t that close to one another in reality, of course. The AI facilitating the briefing had pulled the separate images together across several million kilometers to create a composite panorama, allowing the human viewpoints gathered in virtual space to survey the entire task force.
The repairs were almost complete. A chunk of Turusch wreckage hung alongside the Vulcan, its green-and-black outer hull armor gone, now, the remaining structure dwindled to an amorphous gray mass as clouds of nanodisassemblers continued to take it apart, atom by atom, and haul them in continuous streams into the repair vessel’s multiple storage bunkers. Larger worker ’bots swarmed around several of the other ships, applying repair nano and raw materials shipped across from the Vulcan, patching gaping holes, reapplying surface armor, and serving as large-scale 3-D printers to nanufacture new gravitic projectors, weapons, and sensor arrays layer by molecule-thin layer.
“How about fighter recovery?” Gray asked.
“We still have three missing fighters, Admiral,” CAG Fletcher said. “We have long-range probes looking for them, of course, but this long after the battle . . .”
She let the thought trail off, unfinished. A dead fighter was so terribly minute when lost within that aching gulf beyond.
“Keep on it,” Gray said. “As long as possible. What else?”
“We’re low on reserves of radioactives, sir,” Talbot said. “And we haven’t found any in the Tushie wrecks. That puts a cap on the number of fission warheads we can assemble.”
Gray nodded understanding. An m-type asteroid would be rich in most heavy metals, including uranium, but salvaging wrecked ships wouldn’t score that kind of bonanza unless they happened to recover the dead ship’s magazines.
“Also, some of the ships report they’re still short of water,” Talbot went on. “What’s floating around in local space is too widely dispersed to make it worthwhile scooping it up.”
None of the wrecks they’d investigated so far possessed intact water reservoirs. Usually, when a ship was torn apart by a charged particle beam or a nuke, any water stores on board were gushed out into hard vacuum, where they froze into flecks of ice—each the size of a grain of sand—and rapidly dispersed. Unless a large cloud of nanocollectors was released very quickly, it simply wasn’t worth the effort to try to gather them all up.
“How bad a shortage?” Gray asked.
“We have about one third of her original stores,” Captain Benjamin McFarlane, New York’s CO, reported. “We stopped the leak before all our water was gone.”
“The Northern Cal is at about half, Admiral,” her captain, Janet Davis, said.
The other damaged ships were at similar levels: none low enough to preclude fleet ops, but something on which to keep a watchful eye.
There would be water at Invictus, of course, far more water than on all of Earth. Hell, the Glothr swam in the stuff, literally. But just now it seemed highly unlikely that the aliens would be willing to share their bounty with the Earth-human fleet.
It was frustrating. Normally, it would be a simple matter to find just one kilometer-sized iceteroid, which would be big enough to provide ample reaction mass for the entire fleet. They had enough—and a bit to spare, perhaps—for a battle or two more on this side of the TRGA, but Gray hated running things so close to the wire.
“Maybe we should go back,” Captain Ray Mathers, of the light cruiser Columbia said.
“What, an
d leave our people here?” That was the commanding officer of the Marine contingent on board the Marne, Colonel Joseph Jamison. “Unacceptable!”
“We may have no alternative,” McFarlane put in.
On the surface, the safe play was to pull out, to go back through the TRGA to the Beehive cluster, where there would be plenty of loose chunks of ice in the Oort clouds of some hundreds of nearby suns.
Gray deeply mistrusted that option, though. While that Turusch fleet might have come through from a different place and time than Task Force One, the likeliest scenario seemed to be that they’d followed the human ships through from America’s home spacetime, and that the survivors of the recent battle had broken through and gone right back to where they’d come from. They might have reinforcements waiting over there, and if so, they almost certainly would be waiting to ambush human ships coming through the cylinder one at a time. Task Force One might find itself in the same severe disadvantage that the Turusch had faced on this side of the TRGA.
“There’d damned well better be another option,” Gray said. “Our drones still haven’t returned.”
Hours ago, to test whether or not the Turusch were waiting on the other side of the TRGA, Gray had ordered three of America’s battlespace drones to thread their way back through the cylinder at thirty-minute intervals, take a look around, and return with vid images and scanner readings of what was waiting on the other side.
But none of the drones had turned around and come back, which was . . . suggestive. It wasn’t definitive yet; drones often had trouble threading the wildly fluctuating spacetime matrix of a TRGA, or the bad guys might have left a single ship over there on guard, while the rest headed home for repairs. Still, it was enough to give Gray pause.
And Gray wasn’t ready to risk a one-at-a-time encounter with a large and very angry Turusch battlefleet waiting in ambush.
“Do we have any alternate Triggah pathways mapped for this one?” Captain Mendoza, of the Illinois, asked.
