by Ian Douglas
A long moment later, the surrounding ice plain faded away, replaced by a more familiar cold desert of broken, ocher cliffs, immense boulders, and distant glaciers. A vast, faintly striped red, yellow, and golden arc stretched high into the sky from the horizon—the illuminated rim of the gas giant Bifrost. Behind that bow of reflected light, the system’s sun shone, tiny and ruby-red: Kapteyn’s Star.
“. . . and we are now certain,” the image of Dolinar said, as though continuing in interrupted mid-sentence, “that Kapteyn’s Star originated in the star cluster we call Omega Centauri—originally a dwarf galaxy that was captured and consumed eons ago by our own Milky Way.” The Dolinar image flickered, and then spoke again. “. . . and we are now certain that Kapteyn’s Star originated in the star cluster we call Omega Centauri—originally a dwarf galaxy that was captured and consumed eons ago by our own Milky Way.” And again. “. . . and we are now certain that Kapteyn’s Star originated in the star cluster we call—”
“Stop program,” Gray said, and the figure froze once more.
“Why are they showing us this?” Schiere asked.
“Possibly because they’re telling us we’re in the Omega Centauri cluster?” Gray hazarded. He thought about that. “Maybe they’re identifying themselves with the civilization that built the ruins there. They’re awfully old.”
And the landscape of Heimdall changed.
Bifrost and the pinpoint ruby-hued sun still hung above the horizon, but the glaciers were gone, along with the smaller scattered patches of carbon-dioxide snow. The deep, deep violet-blue sky lightened to a hazy azure, suggesting a much thicker atmosphere, and a city appeared in the distance, dozens of rose-tinted domes and drifting spheres, as insubstantial as soap bubbles, that seemed to echo the vaster sweep of the gas giant. The rugged and forbidding broken landscape softened. Instead of boulders, there were masses of vegetation; at least, Gray assumed it was vegetation . . . or something that served the same purpose in this alien ecosphere. Things like violet feathers and broad fans made of individual waving filaments appeared instead, balanced on supple stalks that seemed to be twisted to capture every photon of red light from the distant sun.
Gray noticed another change, too. The sky, now a pale violet-blue, was still transparent enough, and the sunlight dim enough, to reveal a backdrop crowded with stars. Most looked as bright or brighter than Venus when it appeared in the daylight sky of Earth . . . but there were thousands upon thousands of them, enough that their combined radiance was casting nearly as much illumination as the red sun.
“It’s Heimdall,” Gray said, “but ages ago, when Kapteyn’s Star was a part of the Omega Centauri cluster.”
“How long ago was that?”
“I don’t know. But the program told me that Heimdall hasn’t been inhabited for something like a billion years.” He pointed. “That city looks like it’s inhabited.”
“We don’t know this is Heimdall.”
“The terrain is different. But Bifrost is the same. And the red sun.”
“Sure, but we can’t trust anything we’re seeing. They might be feeding us . . . disinformation.”
“For what possible purpose?” Gray asked. “I think they’re manipulating our stored data in order to communicate with us.”
“I suppose you’re right. A billion years . . .” Schiere hesitated. “Shit. Check your downloads. Omega Centauri used to be another galaxy, not a globular cluster.”
“What?” Gray requested information from his implant on Omega Centauri, and a window opened, filling with text.
OBJECT: Omega Centauri
ALTERNATE NAMES: NGC 5139, GCl 24
TYPE: Globular Star Cluster
COORDINATES: RA: 13h 26m 45.89s Dec: -47˚ 28' 36.7"
MASS: ~ 5 x 106 Sol; RADIUS: 115 LY; APPARENT MAGNITUDE: 3.7
NUMBER OF STARS (est.): 1 x 107
DISTANCE: 15,800 LY
AGE: 12 billion years
NOTES: Omega Centauri, unlike more typical globular clusters, shows evidence of several distinct stages of star formation. Where traditional clusters consist of extremely old Population II stars, Omega Centauri includes both Population I and Population II stars in its makeup, with stars ranging in age from 9 to 12 billion years. The presence of metals in some stellar spectra suggest that as long ago as the late 20th century, Omega Centauri was in fact the surviving central core of a dwarf galaxy partially destroyed through repeated collisions with our own Milky Way. Similarities in stellar spectra suggest that Kapteyn’s Star, just 13 light years from Sol and traveling retrograde to the local stellar stream, is in fact a former member of this lost dwarf galaxy. . . .
There was a lot more, but Gray broke off reading, closing the window. Old news. He remembered going over much of this with the Frank Dolinar avatar, in the Heimdall docuinteractive. Looking up, he stared at and through the dome of stars behind the sky, wondering if this was a recorded image from an era, eons ago, when the dwarf galaxy was still outside Sol’s far larger galaxy, before it had been captured and devoured.
It would have been incredible to be able to see the Milky Way’s spiral from outside . . . but he could see nothing but the cluster’s stars. Either the Milky Way was hidden by the bulk of the planet itself, or the local star background was just too thick.
But there was something else. . . .
Gray walked a few meters forward, looking for something—and found it behind a nearby mass of feathery purple vegetation. As he pushed the plants aside, he revealed one of Heimdall’s cliff faces, just a meter and a half tall, polished and smoothed into a gleaming wall of silver, with what appeared to be circuitry diagrams imprinted in the metallic face. In his era, this cliff was much higher, heavily eroded, and looked like nothing more dramatic than a shelf of exposed rock with odd patterns of metallic stains, only just recognizable as the product of technology. But this . . .
He reached out and touched the surface, his fingers dragging lightly across the imprints. The face felt very slightly warm. Though he’d said as much to Schiere moments before, he was only just beginning to realize, to really feel that what he was seeing here was alien data somehow superimposed on the docuinteractive in his memory.
And that meant . . . the aliens were communicating with him. Telling him something. Showing the two humans something about themselves or their civilization as it looked a billion years ago.
“Gray?” Schiere said. “I think you should turn around and see this.”
Gray turned.
The sim of Frank Dolinar had vanished. In its place was an alien.
Gray felt a shiver of anticipation . . . mingled with fear, and a bit of wonder as well. Was this one of the Sh’daar, revealed at last?
The entity was small, if the simulation was scaled appropriately for Gray’s electronic avatar—about a meter high, or so, and perhaps thirty centimeters wide. It was radially symmetrical, looking, he thought, like a stack of six or eight terrestrial starfishes the size of dinner plates, but with flexible arms that looked like shredded yellow leaves, twisting branches, and weaving tendrils. Its overall color was a pale cream-yellow, with black splotches throughout and with the outermost tips shading to a dark rust. Within the tangle of arms, he saw, were some tendrils that might be tipped by bright red eyes, some ending in suckers, some with highly mobile appendages that might be hands or might be flattened tentacles. The being oozed along on its lowest set of arms; Gray had the impression that it could also have stretched out on the ground and inched along horizontally as well, like a worm or a millipede.
There was nothing at first glimpse to suggest intelligence . . . but then Gray saw the glint of metal and plastic—a finger-sized device of unknown purpose apparently embedded in the thing’s flesh against its central column between two sets of arms. The thing was technic . . . or, at least, had been given some sort of technological prosthesis.
“Are you one of the Sh’daar?” Gray asked.
He didn’t hear the answer in words. Indeed, how the creature co
mmunicated with its own kind was anyone’s guess. But a dozen or so of those weirdly stalked berries that might be eyes twisted around to point in his direction, quivering, and he wondered if it was responding to his question somehow.
An image appeared in his field of view . . . a tightly packed mass of colored dots, each one a different hue. One dot, a bright blue one, emerged from the rest, standing apart, and then the image faded away.
One out of many . . .
The thought was Gray’s, not words from an alien mind, but Gray had the impression that it had just answered him with the animated diagram. The meaning, though, was still ambiguous. Was it saying that there were lots of Sh’daar, and that this entity was one individual? Or that many distinct species made up the Sh’daar, and the entity represented one member species of a larger group?
As if in direct answer to his unvoiced question, Gray saw other . . . beings.
They winked into existence in front of the two humans, dozens of them. He thought they were all living beings, members of an array of alien biologies, though they might have been trying to show him something else entirely, something indescribable that he simply was not capable of grasping. The display of mutually alien entities was both awe inspiring and bewildering.
There was something like an immense garden slug eight meters long and three high—but covered with fur striped red and gold, its front end identified only by a semicircle of seven obsidian-black organs that might be eyes. There was a two-meter-wide pancake on myriad feet, with weaving pale tendrils and sky-blue eye-spots around the leathery rim, like the sensory apparatus of a terrestrial scallop. There was a tight knot of small, dark-colored flying creatures, a close-knit swarm of birdlike or fishlike or flying buglike things writhing together to form a rough sphere, which appeared to be trying to turn itself inside out as the schooling life forms moved. There was a tripod-thing with dangling tentacles and what might have been stalked eyes. None of the entities looked anything like any alien species with which Gray was familiar.
Each entity was so . . . different that Gray was having trouble even recognizing what he was seeing. Most were evidently alive—well, all save one thing that looked more like a branching lump of crystalline quartz than anything biological—but some were so alien that his mind stubbornly resisted making out the details. None of the things was even remotely like a human.
But after a churning moment, his gaze swung back to that one twisting, dark swarm of flying creatures. There was something . . .
It was difficult trying to understand them out of context. He couldn’t even be certain of the size. The writhing sphere of organisms appeared to be a meter across, but could as easily have been a few centimeters wide, and magnified, or kilometers, with the image reduced. The twisting, organic knot reminded him most of schooling swarms of closely packed fish . . . but were they actually swimming, like fish, their image projected into air? Or were they truly flying in air, like birds? The outer surface of each was dark gray, but as they turned their surfaces caught the light en masse, showing waves of reflected light sweeping across the collective surface of the school as it turned and writhed. The movement reminded him strongly of something, something other than a school of fish, and it took him a moment to realize what it was.
The clouds of flashing, silvery alien spacecraft in front of the TRGA opening, then again after he’d emerged in this new and star-crowded space—the creatures moved, they felt like these aliens, somehow.
“All of these . . . these beings together,” Gray said after a moment, “are the Sh’daar. An entire galaxy of worlds and civilizations, working together in something like our Confederation, but a billion years ago.”
A small, bright blue disk appeared against Gray’s vision. A moment later, a second disk, identical in every way, appeared alongside the first, and both began moving back and forth in perfect unison before vanishing again.
“Does that mean yes?” Gray asked. “An agreement?”
The blue disks repeated their performance.
“Does what mean yes?” Schiere asked.
“I think they’re trying to communicate,” Gray replied. “But not with spoken language. When I said that I thought these beings together were the Sh’daar, they showed me a blue circle, then a second blue circle exactly like it. I think that’s supposed to be agreement. Identity. Ah. They’re showing the circles to me again.”
“I don’t see anything.”
“Maybe because your AI was damaged. Or maybe they just singled me out for some other reason, or even just by random chance.” He grinned. “I don’t think they’re deliberately ignoring you.”
Schiere gave a nervous-sounding laugh. “Yeah, I don’t think they want to talk to me.”
Gray looked again at the silently waiting ranks of alien beings in front of them. That dinner-plate stack of tendriled segments—how did it communicate with its own kind, to say nothing of communicating with that writhing mass of fish-bird-insect things, or with that lump of crystal . . . or with the thing like a mottled brown-and-white octopus balanced precariously on three partly coiled tentacles?
“You know, when you think about it,” he said, thoughtful, “the biggest problem in communications between mutually alien species may simply be finding a common mode for transmitting information. Even just on Earth, we have humans using speech . . . while some whales share stuff through song, squids use changes of color in their skins, and honeybees communicate inside the hive through a kind of waggling dance that shows both the direction and distance to a food source. We’re partial to making sounds that carry meaning . . . but that’s due to a chance twist of evolution.”
“Yeah.” Schiere nodded. “Even with species that use spoken language—words—it can be tough to match sound with meaning. The Agletsch can talk with us using those electronic translators they wear, but I downloaded once that their actual speech is made by burping air directly from their stomachs through their abdominal mouths. They can’t form a lot of the sounds we use in English . . . and they’d be completely lost trying Mandarin.”
“Most people I know are lost with Mandarin,” Gray pointed out, “including me. That’s why we have translator software.”
“Maybe we need an Agletsch here,” Schiere suggested. “They seem to be the galaxy’s universal linguists.”
“Maybe so.” Gray kept staring at the virtual-sim aliens. “We know there are Agletsch inside Sh’daar space. Maybe they can get one, bring her here.”
“Her?”
“Agletsch males are tiny parasites on the females, like leeches. Not intelligent.”
“Oh. How do we tell them that?”
Gray was already searching through his implant memory. He had some recordings in there somewhere. . . .
There. He used his implant to pull up a memory recorded . . . was it only yesterday? His AI took the memory and projected it into the virtual reality around them.
A number of humans in naval uniforms stood in a semicircle around two Agletsch. Avatar images of himself and Shay Ryan approached.
“Hey, Dra’ethde,” Gray’s twin said. “What brings you down here?”
The Agletsch on the right twisted two of its eye stalks around for a look. “Ah! You are the fighter pilot Trevor Gray, yes-no?”
“Yes. We met at SupraQuito, remember?”
“We do. We are delighted to see you again. And Shay Ryan as well! We remember you as well.”
Gray let the simulation focus on the two Agletsch. The sim froze, and the human figures vanished, leaving only the two spider-like aliens. After a moment, Gray had his AI zoom in on one of the translator units imbedded in the leathery skin of one alien’s thorax.
A blue disk appeared, superimposed over one of the Agletsch, matched a moment later by a second, identical disk. Both jittered back and forth in perfect synch.
“Okay,” Gray said. “I’d say we’ve just been given a ‘message received.’ ”
“I wonder how long it will take, though.”
“Yo
u sound worried.”
“I am. We know the TRGA provides a shortcut back to our vicinity of space—Texaghu Resch, right?”
“Yes.”
“Suppose that’s the only shortcut?”
Gray saw what Schiere was getting at. He’d been assuming that the TRGA cylinder was one isolated part of an extensive intragalactic transportation system, possibly built by the Sh’daar, possibly merely used by them. But only one was known, connecting the Texaghu Resch system with the heart of the Omega Centauri cluster. And the other end of that cylinder was now under attack by the carrier battlegroup.
If there were no other cylinders, the Sh’daar here might be cut off from the rest of their empire. Their client races possessed faster-than-light drives roughly as efficient as those used by the Confederation; without one of the spinning cylinders, America, capable of traveling at around 1.9 light years per day on her Aclubierre Drive, would require twenty-seven years to cross 18,500 light years.
He sincerely hoped that he and Schiere wouldn’t have to wait that long while their captors imported an Agletsch from some other distant part of their empire.
Chapter Fifteen
30 June 2405
CIC
TC/USNA CVS America
TRGA, Texaghu Resch System
1224 hours, TFT
“Admiral Koenig? The last of the SAR tugs is coming on board now.”
The voice was CAG Wizewski’s. On one of the CIC monitors, Koenig could see the UTW-90 space tug, a clumsy, black beetle with a crippled Starhawk grasped tightly in its forward gripping arms, approaching Landing Bay Three.
“Who is that?” Koenig asked.
“Lieutenant Ryan, Dragonfires,” Wizewski replied. “SAR snagged her from a trajectory that was taking her into the sun.”
“God. Is she okay?”
“Should be, sir. The tug’s med-AI reports radiation exposure and dehydration, but they’ll have her in sick bay in a few minutes.”
