by Ian Douglas
It was a tactic they’d practiced at Alphekka, when they’d passed the alien factory complex at high speed. Organic reaction times were simply too limited to allow humans to participate in such a battle when they were crossing the diameter of the Earth in eight tenths of a second. Weapons were under the direction of the various fleet AIs, with the software operating in an accelerated mode that took advantage of the fact that computers could process data far more swiftly and efficiently than could their designers.
Under AI control, then, forty-one combat vessels hurtled toward the TRGA cylinder, pivoting to bring their weapons to bear. The remaining fleet elements—the stores ships and logistics vessels—had continued decelerating, and now were more than twenty minutes behind the shooters.
And yet it swiftly became apparent that the battle would become something of an anticlimax. While the fleet was still 10 million kilometers out, long-range telemetry made it clear that something was happening. All of those millions of silver-gray ships were pulling back, were re-forming into a vast cloud surrounding the near end of the TRGA cylinder, and as minute followed minute, the cloud appeared to be dwindling.
The Sh’daar ships were retreating, withdrawing back into the cylinder from which they’d emerged hours before.
Twelve seconds to intercept—180,000 kilometers. “We got ’em!” Commander Sinclair yelled over the CIC intercom. “We got the bastards on the run!”
“Yeah, they can’t stand up to a real fight!” Wizewski called. “Even at those odds!”
“Belay that!” Koenig snapped. “Continue with the firing run!” Even with the machines in charge of the actual aiming and firing, humans were needed in the loop to assess the damage and reassign targeting parameters.
The last few seconds flickered away, and the CBG swept through the battlespace, every ship firing at the same precise instant.
This time, the AIs had up-to-date targeting data to work with, and better still, the enemy was concentrated in a swarming, gleaming cloud at the TRGA artifact’s mouth. It was impossible to guess how many of the Sh’daar vessels were still on this side of the gate, how many were vulnerable to the CBG’s particle beams and lasers, missiles, and KK warheads.
But a volume of space perhaps a thousand kilometers across flared into a tiny, intensely brilliant nova as thermonuclear missiles erupted in a devastating concentration of raw, blossoming energy. Vid receptors throughout the battlegroup blanked out under that assault of blinding radiation.
The fighters accompanying the capital ships joined in as well, their pilots slaving their control and weapons systems to the tactical net linking each vessel in the battlegroup. As they passed, their AIs targeted that cloud of alien ships and loosed missile after missile, following the fusillade with bolts from the fighters’ particle-beam projectors.
The battlegroup was already tens of thousands of kilometers away from the holocaust before the human crews could even react. Within seconds, there was little to be seen, aside from the fading smear of radiance, and an expanding cloud of white-hot debris.
On board the America, the CIC crew broke out in wild cheers as the magnitude of the victory became clear. In a single, lightning stroke, millions of enemy warships had been obliterated, and not a single ship in the battlegroup had been hit.
Admiral Koenig did not join in with the jubilant celebration, however, though he let his people blow off steam in the aftermath of those long, tense hours of the approach.
From what he could see, the battlegroup’s tactical situation had suddenly become infinitely more complex.
Recovery Craft Blue-Sierra
SAR 161 Lifelines
Texaghu Resch System
0125 hours, TFT
It had taken twenty minutes of hard maneuvering, but LeMay had at last jolted her rugged craft into a reasonable intercept vector with the VR-5 probe. She had it on visual now, a wan spot of light on her forward screen, circled by a flashing green targeting reticule. Her AI recommended cutting thrust and closing at ten meters per second.
“Yeah, yeah,” she said, thoughtclicking the appropriate icons. “Keep your electronic pants on.” She still didn’t like being sidelined, as she thought of it, ordered to go herd chunks of lifeless metal when there were pilots—people—who needed her attention in the Void.
Closer now. Under a magnified optical feed, she could see the VR-5 now. Usually, the things were flattened ellipsoids about fifty centimeters long. This one looked like something had stepped on it. She wondered if even half of the thing was still there and intact.
“Okay, fella,” she told it. “You’d better be worth it.” Under her direction—not the AI’s, which she didn’t quite trust—grapples unfolded from a hatch beneath the tug’s nose, extended, and snared the tumbling artifact. “Gotcha. . . .”
The arms brought the object inside, and LeMay rotated the tug and engaged thrust, angling toward the battlegroup, now some 18 million kilometers away. Ahead, she could see the local star, blindingly brilliant. And off to one side, bright enough to overcome even that nearby star’s glare, a tiny pinpoint of light, she saw, had just appeared. Moment by moment, the pinpoint grew brighter until it was actually outshining the light from the nearby star.
Tuning in to the battlegroup’s general frequency, she could hear chatter among ships, punctuated by cheers and shouts of triumph. From the sound of things, the battle was going better than expected.
“Contact made with the probe’s systems,” the strange AI reported. “Integrating.”
And in a window open in her mind, Jessica LeMay saw . . . stars. . . .
Chapter Thirteen
30 June 2405
Briefing Virchamber
TC/USNA CVS America
TRGA, Texaghu Resch System
0945 hours, TFT
M illions of stars . . .
“This is from a fighter on the far side of that cylinder?” Koenig asked.
“Dragonfire One, yes, sir,” Wizewski said.
The command and science teams from all of CBG-18’s ships were united electronically within a virtual reality created by America’s principal AI. Within their minds, they were adrift in space, surrounded on every side, above and below, by a shining wall of stars. Hundreds of people were present, together with the AIs from each vessel; rather than representing that entire mob, however, Koenig was aware of only a handful of humans—their electronic avatars, actually—seemingly adrift at the heart of that titanic globe of swarming suns. The representations of the others seemed to shift and fade, to come and go, depending on who was thinking, who was up- or down-loading information, and sometimes simply at the whim of the AI guiding the simulation.
The virtual projection had been integrated with America’s navigational department, and was fully interactive. The officers immersed within the illusion could move through it, as if it were an immense 3-D map, or they could follow the movements of Dragonfire One from Trevor Gray’s point of view as it fell through the TRGA cylinder and into this new and alien space.
They could see the moving clouds of Sh’daar ships, the distant dark shadow ahead on Gray’s line of drift, and the approach of the immense spacecraft that swallowed him. The record was cut off as the fighter was pulled inside an alien vessel the size of a small world.
“So where the hell is he?” Koenig wanted to know. He let his gaze sweep across that dazzling panoply of stars. “The galactic core?”
“No, sir,” an older woman said. She was Dr. Ann Joseph, America’s senior astrophysicist, a civilian serving on board as a science advisor. “That was our first thought too. I think a lot of us were expecting the Sh’daar to be residing inside the center of the galaxy, somehow.” Her electronic avatar smiled. “Where else do you put the capital of a galaxy-spanning interstellar empire?”
Several in the mostly invisible crowd chuckled.
“Gray’s record enabled us to get a fair idea of the star cloud’s size and makeup. It gave us a good enough picture to know we were dealing with globular cl
uster . . . though an unusual one in several regards.”
Koenig looked at the surrounding stars, and wondered. He knew about globular clusters, of course, though no human—until now—had ever approached one. The nearest was many thousands of light years beyond the limits of Humankind’s galactic explorations to date. But a globular cluster also seemed like an unlikely place for the birth of a star-conquering civilization like the Sh’daar. Globulars, he knew, were composed of what astronomers called Population II stars; they were among the oldest stars in the universe, 12 billion years or so old, and they were impoverished when it came to elements heavier than hydrogen and helium—those elements like carbon, oxygen, and iron necessary to build planets.
Possibly the Sh’daar had migrated to a cluster, but it was hard to imagine why. Lots of stars, all hydrogen and helium, no planets . . . what would be the point?
Joseph waved her hand, and several dozen of the stars surrounding the group appeared haloed by green circles. Those specific stars shifted in their color, some becoming red or orange, others green or blue. “Enhanced spectral contrast,” Joseph explained. “We were able to pick out a number of the brightest stars in this cluster, and match their individual spectra with our stellar database.
“Lieutenant Gray,” she continued, “has fallen into the very unusual galactic cluster we know as Omega Centauri.”
Koenig opened a data channel in his mind, and let streams of information flow in from America’s library.
Omega Centauri, also designated as NGC 5139, was unusual among known globular clusters. For one thing, it was one of the largest known—the largest globular of all such in Earth’s galaxy, and second only to the Andromeda’s Mayall II in the entire local group of galaxies. It was one of very few globulars actually visible to the naked eye, appearing as a fuzzy patch in the skies of Earth’s southern hemisphere just 17 degrees northeast of the brilliant and relatively nearby Alpha Centauri. Normally, it was visible from Earth as a fuzzy, third-magnitude star. When viewed in an absolutely black rural sky far from Earth’s cities and megopoli—or from orbit over Earth’s nightside—it appeared to be as large as Earth’s full moon.
And it was massive—equivalent to 10 million suns like Sol, which made it ten times as massive as normal globulars. Since the early twenty-first century, astronomers had known an intermediate black hole lurked within its heart, one massing perhaps twelve thousand suns. The stars of the cluster, swarming like bees, were rotating fast enough to flatten the entire sphere somewhat.
Like normal globular clusters, Omega Centauri was orbiting the center of the galaxy; unlike most globulars, the spectra of its stars showed a broad range of metallicities . . . a word astronomers used to mean any element heavier than hydrogen and helium. That meant that the cluster contained stars of many different ages. The oldest were, indeed, ancient and metal-poor Population II stars, but it also contained younger Population I stars, stars containing a percentage of heavier elements and, possibly, attended by planets.
What all of this meant was that Omega Centauri quite likely was not a globular cluster at all . . . but the stripped-naked core of a dwarf galaxy devoured by Earth’s Milky Way untold hundreds of millions or even billions of years in the past.
“Omega Centauri,” Dr. Joseph went on, “is one of the very closest globular clusters to Earth—about fifteen thousand, eight hundred light years.”
As she spoke, the surrounding stars seemed to rush past the disembodied observers, falling together into a huge, flattened sphere of swarming suns that itself dwindled into the distance. The image froze with the cluster seeming to hang just above the broad and soft-glowing sweep of one of the Milky Way’s spiral arms. Above, sparsely populated by the faint and hazy smears of other galaxies and clusters, yawned the emptiness of the intergalactic Void; below glowed the Milky Way, a vast spiral viewed from just above the blue-hued curve of the galactic arms, with the core visible off to the left, a swollen bulge of faintly red and gold suns in the distance.
“Currently,” Joseph continued, “it’s positioned just above the plane of our galaxy, and orbiting the galactic core retrograde to the local stellar population, including our sun. As you can see on your data channels, we now believe it to be the core of a small galaxy that was absorbed by the Milky Way. We’ve known for a long time that large galaxies like ours can be . . . cannibalistic.”
So Omega Centauri once—how long ago, in fact?—had been a separate galaxy, a member of the Local Group that strayed too close to the young and voracious Milky Way and was swallowed. It would have been tiny compared to the Milky Way, an irregular or spherical mass of stars a few thousand light years across, compared to the hundred-thousand light year diameter of the Milky Way. Gravitational interactions would have ripped away the outer stars of the morsel, stripped off the gas and dust, and left behind this remnant of a galactic core, orbiting the Milky Way’s center as a satellite cluster with a period of a few hundred million years.
“We’ve actually had a close-up look at one of Omega Centauri’s stars,” Joseph went on. “Just thirteen light years from Sol, there’s a small, very old red dwarf, Kapteyn’s Star. Studies of that star’s motion—which is retrograde to Sol’s, incidentally—and of its composition suggest that it actually came from Omega Centauri.”
“So Kapteyn’s Star was originally from a different galaxy?” Captain Harrison of the Illustrious put in. “Interesting.”
“I visited Kapteyn’s Star once,” Captain Buchanan added, “when I was a young and very callow lieutenant on the Zumwalt. The Dolinar Expedition. When . . . twenty-five years ago?”
Koenig had downloaded docuinteractives on Kapteyn’s Star, and on Bifrost and its arid and ruin-haunted moon Heimdall. The hair at the back of his neck prickled. Billion-year-old super-civilizations and nano-etched planetary computers in the rocks.
“I wonder,” he said, “if there is a correlation between the beings who left their ruins on the surface of Heimdall and the Sh’daar.”
“A distinct possibility,” Joseph told him. “Those ruins on Heimdall have been estimated to be approximately one billion years old. That is, very roughly, when we think the Omega Centauri dwarf galaxy was torn apart and its stars assimilated by Earth’s larger galaxy.”
“Impossible,” another voice said. The speaker was Dr. Phillip Lethbridge, and he was chief of the science department on board the United States of North America. “No civilization could possibly survive for a billion years.”
“The exposed ruins on Bifrost,” Dr. Amanda Fischer, of the Science Department on board the Nassau, said, “are absolutely inert. No power, no means for data to be dynamically stored or accessed. Most of them are little more than metal stains in the rock.”
“The idea is preposterous,” another voice added—that of Lieutenant Commander Adams of America’s biological sciences department. “Evolutionary pressures alone would result in a species changing out of all recognition in that period of time. Think about it! A billion years ago, Earth was home to nothing more advanced than single-celled life, cyanobacteria and such. Every complex multicelled creature, from sponges to sequoias to humans, has evolved since the end of the Proterozoic . . . say, six hundred million years ago. And a billion years from now, there will be nothing even remotely like humans on Earth. As for an AI civilization? Uploaded mentalities? God, what would they think about for a billion years?”
“Such a civilization would have to be completely static,” Fischer said. “No change whatsoever, over geological eons.”
“Worse than that,” Lethbridge added. “A span of even a few thousand years would guarantee major changes to the civilization’s structure. A million times that? It will have changed out of all recognition.”
Koenig wondered if Liu was put off by the sharp responses to his question from the Americans, but Liu was still present within the virtual matrix, still a part of the conversation. “It may,” he pointed out gently, “be necessary to rethink some of our assumptions about the possible longevit
y of galactic civilization.”
The Chinese, of course, had always thought in terms of enduring civilizations. The Middle Kingdom had flourished in various guises through more than four thousand years of continuous history. Compared to them, North Americans and even Europeans were rank newcomers on the stage of human civilization.
But compared to a species that might be a billion or more years old, there was no difference whatsoever between the Chinese and the Johnny-come-latelies of the Martian Republic.
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.
