Galactic Corps

by Ian Douglas

  14

  0415 .1102 Company Office, Bravo Company

  UCS Hermes

  Cluster Space

  0910 hrs, GMT

  “What the hell is a Dyson sphere?” Garroway wanted to know. Even as he asked the question, he was already opening a channel to Hermes’ computer net and beginning to download the data.

  “Named after the pre- space physicist who first thought of it,” Captain Maria Loren told him. “Freeman Dyson. The idea was that an advanced civilization, one trying to create a lot of living space for itself, or one that wanted to utilize every erg of energy from its sun, might do so by disassembling its planets and building a hollow shell around the local star.”

  “Got it,” Garroway said as he followed the downloaded information streaming through his awareness, scanning rapidly through reams of data. “The shell would capture most of the heat, light, and other radiation from the star for industrial purposes. People could live on the inside of the shell if they had a means of generating artificial gravity. Or instead of a solid shell, it might be a Dyson cloud, with trillions and trillions of separate habitats and industrial complexes enveloping the star.”

  “I wouldn’t want to be the AI that had to keep track of that many separate hab orbits,” Lieutenant Ramsey put in.

  The meeting was taking place in Captain Loren’s office on board the Hermes. Two entire bulkheads plus the overhead had been set to display a view of outside. The local star continued to dominate the sky, an intensely hot, arc- brilliant pinpoint encased in shells of rapidly expanding nebula. The Galaxy hung in the far distance, the subtle tones and shadings of its spiral arms nearly lost in the glare from the nova. In a different direction, outward, a nearby globular cluster hung against Night Absolute, a frozen swarm of red-hued suns. More remote galaxies were lost in the novalight, but the nearest stargate spanned a quarter of heaven.

  Present were Captain Black and his command constellation, including Garroway and a dozen other Marines, volunteers for a secret op, a sneak-and-peek, that had been dubbed Operation Heartfire. The N-2 contingent, Ramsey and six other men and women from 1MIEF’s intelligence division, including Captain Pollard, had joined them, as had Captain Loren and several members of General Alexander’s command group.

  Maria Loren was a naval officer with fifteen years’ experience, a member of 1MIEF’s se nior command constellation, and the officer in charge of the expeditionary force’s Tactical Operations Division. She’d summoned the others to her office just abaft Hermes’ combat center to brief them on Heartfire.

  Also present were the artificial intelligences Smedley, Cara, Thoth, and Athena, though these last were necessarily invisible, and spoke to the humans present within their minds. A large viewall at the far end of the chamber displayed an image of the Galactic Center, a swarm of teeming suns, a spiral of gas and dust, and the enigmatic, vaguely spherical structure at the precise center of the Galaxy’s heart.

  “The Dyson sphere or cloud at GalCenter,” Athena pointed out, “cannot be enclosing a star. Studies of mass distribution force the conclusion that it encases a black hole of two to three million solar masses, and with an event horizon radius of approximately 7.8 million kilometers.”

  Eight million kilometers—between five and six times the diameter of Earth’s sun. Large, perhaps, so far as pipsqueak dwarf stars like Sol were concerned, but a pinpoint alongside giant stars like Antares, which had a diameter fifty times greater.

  And within that relatively tiny volume of space, compressed by the inexorable laws of gravitation, the mass of two million or more stars warped the laws of space and time into bizarre and wildly twisted new shapes.

  The external shell, the Dyson sphere, appeared to span some ten million kilometers, just large enough to accommodate the super-massive object inside.

  “Okay, so why a Dyson sphere around a black hole?” Garroway wanted to know.

  “That’s the question, isn’t it?” Loren told them. “One idea, going way back, suggests that an advanced civilization might build a complex of cities and factories around a large black hole in order to solve all of its energy problems. By dropping mass into the black hole—whether that mass is pieces of planet, stray asteroids, or their house hold garbage— they generate a flash of energy, X-rays, mostly, that could be captured and stored.”

  “I don’t buy that,” Captain John Black said. “Not in this case. They have QPT technology, probably better than we have.”

  Garroway nodded. “Exactly. They wouldn’t need something that elaborate just to raise energy.”

  QPT—the acronym stood for quantum power tap—had been the preferred means of generating large amounts of energy, both on and off-planet, for centuries. The so-called Quantum Sea, a kind of base state for all matter and energy, was envisioned as a froth of elemental paired particles constantly coming into existence and immediately annihilating one another. Artificially generated micro-black holes were used to capture a fraction of these particles before they could snuff out their mates, a process that appeared to liberate large amounts of free energy out of apparently empty vacuum.

  “Don’t be too sure of that, gentlemen,” Pollard told them. “A two-million- solar-mass black hole might raise vacuum energy on a literally astronomical scale. And that’s what has the brass worked up into a lather. Here. Check this.”

  Pollard opened a window for them, containing a brief historical file. Centuries before, it seemed, a physicist named Richard Feynman had estimated that within every single cubic centimeter of empty space lurked energy enough to boil all of the oceans of Earth. John Wheeler, one of Feynman’s colleagues, had disagreed, suggesting that the actual amount of energy was something like 1080 times greater . . . enough, perhaps, and if a way could be found to apply it, to annihilate the entire Galaxy.

  Perhaps, Garroway thought, it was just as well that Humankind hadn’t yet learned how to generate or wield that kind of power. By harvesting a tiny, tiny fraction of the vacuum energy theoretically available in an empty cubic centimeter of space, he could accelerate ships to close to light speed, phase- shift into quantum space or bypass normal space at FTL velocities, and generate antimatter by the metric ton . . . all very useful, and all deadly on a planetary scale.

  Garroway thought about the Commonwealth Senate with the power to destroy hundreds of millions of stars, and suppressed a shudder.

  But if humans weren’t to be trusted with that kind of power . . . what about the Xul?

  “Sir, you’re saying the Xul are using the Galactic black hole to generate really big amounts of energy?” Garroway asked. “Like . . . enough to destroy the Galaxy?”

  “It’s a distinct possibility, Gunny,” Pollard told him. He opened another explanatory window. “Another possibility is that they’re trying to access the base- state reality for the entire Galaxy.”

  The second window shocked Garroway even more deeply. In the 23rd Century, physicist Alaina Mauldin had pointed out that it might be possible to tamper with the Quantum Sea in such a way as to literally change reality . . . or to erase it. Within the froth of virtual particles that made up the Quantum Seas, she’d argued, were standing waves—regions where particle-anti-particle pairs came and went with a persistence that preserved information, if not material reality. Those information waves represented mass and energy in the more familiar universe of human experience—electrons and protons and photons and everything else that was. What humans were pleased to call “solid reality” was, in fact, an illusion; electrons, neutrons, and protons were not fundamental pieces of matter so much as they were persis tent patterns of information.

  Given enough energy, Mauldin had suggested, it should be possible to cancel out large numbers of those standing waves . . . and in so doing simply blink civilizations, worlds, stars, even entire galaxies out of existence.

  Certain mental disciplines—notably the weiji-do martial arts discipline practiced by Marines and some other elite units—could shift reality on a small scale, guiding Marine
s through the maze of a Xul huntership, for example, or meshing together the individual members of a combat team for greater efficiency. What Pollard was suggesting was far more deadly and far-reaching than that. Given control over the black hole at GalCenter, perhaps the Xul could control reality on an infinitely greater scale, deleting worlds, suns, and civilizations at a whim.

  The thought was chilling.

  “Sir,” Staff Sergeant Ivan Tomlinson said, “the xenosoph people have been saying for years that the Xul have a kind of hard-wired fear or hatred of anyone or anything who might be a competitor. If that’s true, if they have the power to change reality on that grand a scale . . .”

  “Precisely,” Captain Loren said, nodding. “We don’t know exactly what the Xul are doing in there, but any of the possibilities we’ve been able to imagine would be bad, very bad. It might be a doomsday device, and if the bastards get paranoid enough, they blow up the entire Galaxy, themselves with it, just to wipe us out. Or they might have a way of targeting just our planetary systems, and vaporize them all at once from twenty-five thousand light years away. Or they have a way to push a button, and Earth and all of Earth’s colonies and all humans everywhere simply cease to exist.”

  “The hell of it is,” Pollard added, “we don’t know what they’re up to.” He sounded unhappy with the situation, as though it were a personal affront. Intelligence officers were supposed to know—or at least be able to make a good guess about—what the enemy was up to.

  Pollard gestured toward the viewall, and the image of the Galaxy’s center. Newborn stars, some of them supernovae, gleamed in blue-white splendor. With a thought, he shifted the frequency of the displayed light, sliding down into the infrared. Blue stars glowed orange, then in somber reds; the background of gas and dust became sharply visible, a thick mist almost obscuring the enigmatic objects at the center.

  Starkly visible, now, were a number of beams of light stretching out and away from the Dyson sphere. At infrared wavelengths, they took on a solid appearance, rigid, straight, and extending across tens of light years in a complex spider’s web of energy.

  “The images brought back by Athena suggest they’re building something enormous in there,” Pollard went on, “something utterly beyond human comprehension. But we’d damned well better learn how to comprehend it and figure it the hell out . . . because if and when they get it working, whatever it is, we’re not going to like it!”

  “That . . . that structure,” Lieutenant Ramsey said. “The beams of light? It looks like it covers a pretty large area.”

  “Almost seventy light years,” Pollard told them. “And we think those energy beams are anchored somehow in the Quantum Sea.” The view zoomed in on the Dyson object at the center, fuzzy behind the thick haze. “Our best guess is that the sphere, or whatever it is, is locked in place. It’s actually in two halves. You can see the accretion disk—that spiral of dust and gas—circling in from the outside. It passes through that gap between the two sections to reach the black hole inside. The Xul probably control the infall of matter somehow, so that they can feed that monster at a steady rate.”

  “How in the hell do we fight something like that?” Garroway wanted to know. “The entire MIEF would be a dust mote next to that thing!”

  “We’re not going to fight it,” Captain Loren said. “A least, not at first, and not unless we absolutely have to. There’s the Senate’s peace mission to consider, after all.”

  “Why do I get the feeling,” Sergeant Carl Gonzales asked with grim humor, “that we’re going to be in the position of fleas trying to bargain for peace with a Great Dane? If they decide to scratch, there won’t be much we can do about it.”

  “Right,” Captain Black agreed. “If we’re lucky, they won’t even notice us!”

  “Actually,” Loren said, “we’re hoping that that is literally true. . . .”

  Black raised his eyebrows. “What, going in under their radar?”

  “More or less,” Pollard told them. “The environment inside the Core is . . . unusual. And extreme. We’re looking at ways in which we can take advantage of it.”

  “Here,” Loren added, “is the plan so far as TacOps has worked it out for Operation Heartfire. . . .”

  The plan, Garroway noted, was both complicated and daring. Essentially, a Navy- Marine ITF, an intelligence task force designated Group Henderson, was to be inserted into the Galactic Core. The insertion would be covert, requiring the unit to slip in past numerous Xul bases, ships, and fortresses to reach S-2/I, where they would dig in and establish a long-range observation post.

  Heartfire incorporated three mission objectives. Their first would be to take a close look at Sag A*, in hopes of determining exactly what the Xul were building there. At the same time, they would be taking very precise gravitometric and radiation readings of Core Space, providing the data necessary to allow the Pax Galactica and her escort to translate into the area.

  Their third mission would begin as soon as the Pax appeared, providing back- up support for the peace mission just in case the Xul decided to attack. If they encountered anything in the deep core that would preclude Pax’s mission, they would warn the Senatorial ship off.

  Or try to. Garroway and the other enlisted Marines hadn’t seen much of General Alexander in the past couple of weeks, but the scuttlebutt was that he was locked in an ongoing battle with elements of the Commonwealth Senate over the supposed peace mission. Senator Yarlocke, in partic ular, was rumored to be pushing the general hard.

  The details didn’t matter, and the politics, thank the gods of battle, were up to others higher in the Corps hierarchy. Fighting the Xul, Garroway reflected, might be preferable i n some ways to faci ng t he demons of Com monwea lt h politics.

  Of more pressing concern was how the ITF was going to carry out its mission.

  “Just how the hell,” Garroway asked, “are we supposed to get to S-2/I without being spotted by every Xul huntership in the Core?”

  “Yeah,” Ramsey said. “Does this have anything to do with our new toy parked alongside the Hermes?”

  That “new toy” had been the object of speculation and scuttlebutt for days now, ever since Navy tugs had brought it alongside. Almost one kilometer long and less than eighty meters abeam at its widest point, it was a Type I Xul huntership, one among some hundreds of enemy vessels found adrift within Cluster Space after the MIEF had detonated the local star. The ship appeared to be relatively intact, but was quite dead, its computer network burned out by the radiation wave front blasting out from the nova, its Xul crew—once resident patterns of data stored on that network—gone to wherever it was that data went when a system crashed so completely that the data were irrecoverable.

  The captured huntership, with a typical Marine sense of history, had been named the Intrepid, but so far, details of what was intended for the prize, as well as an explanation for the repair yard now embracing the derelict, had been kept a close secret.

  “Obviously,” Loren told them, “we’re going to have to approach the deep core in stages. We can’t translate the Hermes or the Pax into the area until we have detailed readings on the local grav metrics.”

  A window opened in their minds, displaying a schematic view of the principle Core structures, the view pulling back until Sagittarius A* and the various objects in the deep Core had dwindled to a single, distant point.

  “That means,” Loren continued, “that we have to go in through a stargate, but the closest gate to the center of which we’re aware is this one, designated Gate Hub-1. It’s connected to at least one of the stargates here in Cluster Space, so we have a straight shot in to the galactic hub. However, it’s still over seven hundred light years from Hub-1 in to Sag A-Star. Hub-1, of course, has a Xul fortress nearby, and is heavily defended.”

  Garroway struggled to maintain in his mind the scale of what he was watching. The gulf between Gate Hub-1 and Sagittarius A* was more than twice the span of the entirety of Human-colonized space. The most dista
nt Commonwealth colony was a research outpost on Madoc, two hundred fifty light years from Sol. The Islamic Theocracy was thought to have some colonies even farther away, out in the direction of Scorpius and Libra, but for obvious reasons they tended not to share galactographic details of their empire with the Commonwealth.

  The scale of the spaces and objects they were dealing with at the Core was huge.

  “As Lieutenant Ramsey has suggested,” Loren said, “the Intrepid is going to be our ticket past the outer Xul defenses. The shipfitters are going through her now, hollowing out a portion of her interior and wiring in life support for a human crew. They’re also installing a carrier bay for a squadron of AV-110 Tarantulas.”

  “Our penetrator missions have recorded extensive sequences of Xul ship-to-ship communications,” Cara added over their internal link with the ship’s net. “We believe that we can enter the stargate, inform the Xul fortress at Gate Hub-1 that we are damaged and experiencing communications difficulties, and proceed under FTL to the deep inner core. Once there, we can approach S-2/I and debark the Marine and Navy OP personnel.”

  “What do we know about this planet?” Black wanted to know.

  “Very little, so far,” Pollard told him. “We haven’t seen it at optical wavelengths, and inferred its existence from anomalies in the background radiation. S-2/I itself is a red giant trapped in a close and highly elliptical orbit around Sagittarius A-Star. The planet, we can assume, will be hot in at least two senses of the word . . . with a daytime surface temperature above the boiling point of water, and a background radiation count high enough to fry any unprotected life forms or circuitry. That whole inner core region is bathed in high-energy cosmic rays and X-ray radiation, both from frequent supernovae and from the effects of all of those black holes.”