by Ian Douglas
DEDICATION
For Brea
My Light
CONTENTS
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Epilogue
About the Author
Also by Ian Douglas
Back Ads
Copyright
About the Publisher
PROLOGUE
The night before the Tellus Ad Astra left Earth Clarkeorbital, her commander, Lord Commander Grayson St. Clair, had gotten into a shouting match with CybDirector Veber. The exchange hadn’t exactly been career-enhancing . . . but, then again, St. Clair didn’t feel like he had all that much to lose. The Ad Astra command was more punishment than plum. The United Earth Directorate was trying to get him out of the way, after all.
“My Lord,” Veber said, almost sneering. “You are missing the import of this expedition. Through this diplomatic exchange, Earth and Humankind will be accepted as full equals within Galactic circles!”
“Bullshit.”
“Lord Commander!”
“Bullshit!” St. Clair repeated, more forcefully this time. “We will be, at best, very, very junior partners. They want our help in a war, and they don’t want to get their hands dirty. Nothing more.”
They were at a party—a diplomatic reception, actually, taking place in the spin-gravity section of the Clarkeorbital UE Naval Base. Some hundreds of political and diplomatic dignitaries were present, along with a handful of Medusae delegates representing the Galactic Coadunation.
“Accept reality, Lord Commander,” Veber said. “Things have changed. First Contact with the Coadunation has utterly and fundamentally transformed the course of Humankind’s existence!”
“Yes, it has, my lord. And we haven’t had a damned thing to say about that change, have we? I think I liked it better when we still had the paradox.”
The enigmatic veil of the Fermi Paradox had been pierced at last, late in 2088, when the new lunar radio telescope array first detected radio frequency leakage from a highly advanced machine intelligence located at HD 95086, some ninety light years from Earth. Direct contact had come in 2124, when the United Earth Survey Ship Oberth encountered the Coadunation fleet investigating Sirius, eight and a half light years from Earth. The Galaxy, it turned out, was far larger, far more complicated, and far more populated than humans ever had believed possible.
The Great Silence of the Fermi Paradox was now, at last, understood: the Orion Spur was a backwater wilderness, little explored, seldom visited, and ignored or overlooked by the repeated waves of interstellar colonization sweeping out from the Hub. Too, the Galaxy’s communication nets used technologies far more efficient than radio. Masers beamed data across interstellar distances point to point, making eavesdropping impossible unless you happened to be precisely on the line of sight between two inhabited systems. Hell, until the Coadunation had shown humans the trick, Earth’s technologies had not been able to detect tightly focused neutrino channels at all, and those carried the bulk of data transmissions for the galactic civilizations.
“Damn it, man,” Veber said. “Are you afraid of the Coadunation?”
“Any sane man would be,” St. Clair replied. “Humans fear what they don’t understand . . . and we don’t understand them at all.”
“Primitivistic thinking!”
“Sure. And compared to them we’re primitives. You know . . . I’m still convinced that all of our airs—our lauded Imperium, the anachronistic titles and rank and ‘my lord’ nonsense—it’s all just smoke and mirrors.”
“What do you mean?”
“Humankind was doing okay on its own up until 2088. Then we learned we weren’t alone. Worse, it hit home for us that anyone Out There was going to be more advanced than we were—a lot more advanced. After all, we just became a technic species a few centuries ago. They’ve been out there building interstellar empires for millennia.”
Veber shrugged. “So what? We’re a part of all that now. Look at what the Coadunation has already taught us, in just twenty-three years of direct contact!”
“With respect, my lord, I have a feeling that we’re not going to like it when the bill comes due.”
“I don’t think I like your attitude, Lord Commander.”
St. Clair shrugged. “You don’t have to, my lord. Tomorrow, Tellus Ad Astra leaves for the Galactic Hub. And I’ll be out of your way. . . .”
The Galactic Coadunation.
The word coadunation referred to a biological concept: the merging of separate entities into a larger, united organism—a fair description of galactic civilization, as it turned out. A decade had passed before human and Medusan AIs learned to talk with one another, and even longer before humans began to understand something of the political complexities surrounding them in their isolated little pocket of space.
According to the Medusae, some ten thousand distinct sentient and highly technic species scattered across the Galaxy made up the Coadunation in varying degrees of cooperation, affiliation, and mutual support. And, it seemed, they were actively searching for potential new members. That was the good news.
The bad news was war.
CHAPTER
ONE
The United Earth explorer Tellus Ad Astra fell coreward, her military contingent at full alert. “Fifteen minutes to shift, Lord Commander.” The ship’s voice, cultured and precise as was only possible for an artificial intelligence, spoke within his head—electronic telepathy.
Its name was Newton.
Weightless, Lord Commander Grayson St. Clair pulled himself into the vast cavern of the Ad Astra’s bridge and moved into the horseshoe of his workstation. Around him, twenty other UE officers monitored consoles, holographic displays floating before intent faces. He seated himself and, with a thought, let his command chair lock to his uniform, gently tugging him into place. Light swam around him, star upon star upon uncounted star out of swarming billions within the Galactic core, projected into the volume of space surrounding the bridge. Ahead, the core nebulae loomed like the crenellated walls of a medieval castle sculpted from thunderclouds, all blue-black and green and glowering. Stars dusted the panorama like the gleaming droplets of a cascading waterfall, aglow with spectacular radiance.
How many of those suns, St. Clair wondered—not for the first time—shone on worlds filled with Life and Mind, with the brilliance of galactic civilization?
“Very well, Third Navigator,” he replied, opening his cyberimplants to the bridge electronics. “Are we still on-station with our nanny?”
“The Coadunation monitor is fifty-seven kilometers off our prow, sir. We’re closing at three kilometers per second.”
St. Clair checked the data for himself. Third Navigator had never been wrong with its reports before, but it was an AI robot, after all, and the very best AI was only as good as its programming.
The data were correct.
“So,” Executive Commander Vanessa Symm said, “just two more shifts, my lord. And the last one will just be a correctional nudge. Think they’re ready for us
in there?”
“Damned if I know, Van,” he told her. “I think the question is whether we’re ready for them. But I guess we’ll find out soon enough.”
“Ship is fully configured for shift, sir,” Carlos Martinez, the ship’s systems engineer, reported.
“Very well. Rad screens set to full, please.”
“Radiation screens are at full, my lord.”
By all reports, the central reaches of the galactic core behind the cloudwall were a seething cauldron of energetic particles, a deadly environment for any unprotected ship or organism.
And yet there were people—beings, rather—living in there, countless billions of them.
At least, that was what the Medusae claimed. Harmony, they called it. A capital, of sorts, for the sprawl of galactic civilization.
I guess we’re about to see, he thought.
The minutes trickled away as Ad Astra and the nameless alien ship ahead prepared for the transit into corespace. Those walls ahead, St. Clair knew, were molecular hydrogen clouds seasoned with a witch’s brew of organics, carbon monoxide, ammonia, and other compounds—all part of the Five Kiloparsec Ring, which encircled the center of the Galaxy some 15,000 light years out. The stars illuminating the clouds were hot, young, and brilliant; an observer out at the Andromedan Galaxy would see those stars and gas clouds as the Milky Way’s brightest, most prominent features.
Like thickly gathered curtains, the clouds masked what lay inside.
“Initiate charging.”
“Charging, my lord.”
Within Ad Astra’s engineering shell, quantum power taps pulled unimaginable torrents of energy from hard vacuum.
Two more minutes . . .
At St. Clair’s mental command, an image of the Tellus Ad Astra appeared against the star-thick backdrop before him. She was enormous—thirty-four kilometers long—and yet she looked like a toy all but lost within that immensity of stars and towering nebular clouds.
Tellus Ad Astra was a mobile O’Neill colony, a structure originally designed as an orbital habitat for one of Earth’s Lagrange points, but retasked five years earlier as a starship. Tellus, with her twin side-by-side megahabitats, each thirty-two kilometers long and six and a half wide, counter-rotated twenty-eight times an hour, providing her living areas with spin gravity equivalent to one G. The two cylinders were joined aft by the Ad Astra, the massive, T-shaped support framework of the ship, which was her command-control-engineering section, or CCE, including the clustered drive and command structures that served as the operational heart of the ship. It also housed the aft engineering shell, which held the Coadunation technology permitting jumps across tens of thousands of light years.
The Ad Astra’s bridge was located in the penthouse of a skyscraper-sized, angled tower rising from a platform connecting the aft ends of the two parallel cylinders, which were positioned almost eight kilometers apart. Below were the multiple flight decks for the vessel’s fighter squadrons, escorts, and service vessels. The Ad Astra was both naval base and fleet HQ, as well as being a mobile space colony with a current population of just over 1 million people. And for now, thought St. Clair, she was Tellus’s guardian and babysitter.
Ahead of the Ad Astra, the nameless Coad ship hung like a beacon against the frozen storm clouds of dust and stars, a squat, flattened sphere nine kilometers across, enigmatic, uncommunicative . . . and utterly and bewilderingly alien.
What the hell do we know about them?
St. Clair’s thought was bitter. He still didn’t agree with the World Government’s recent decisions regarding the Coadunation.
But, then, his agreement was not necessary. Since the collapse of democracy as a political ideal a century before, all that was required, all that ever was required, was obedience.
“The Coads are signaling,” the bridge communication officer announced. “They are—”
The Coad ship vanished from the display.
“Lord Commander,” Ad Astra’s tactical officer, Senior Lieutenant Vance Cameron, called over the Net. “The Medusae vessel has shifted.”
“So I see, Lieutenant.” St. Clair took a deep breath. This was it. “Initiate shift.”
The towering thunderheads frozen against the starscape forward vanished, wiped away in an eye’s blink, and the Tellus Ad Astra emerged . . . elsewhere.
Ad Astra was adrift within what seemed to be a hollow shell, surrounded by millions of stars—thousands of them brighter than Venus as seen from Earth. Most had a reddish hue, though there were plenty of hotter, brighter, younger suns squeezed from the core nebulae by gravitational interactions. Streamers, clouds, and arcs of gas stretched across the sky against a pale red haze of stardust.
“Sagittarius A-Star is directly ahead, my lord,” Subcomm Carla Adams, the first navigator, reported. “Range is approximately five light years.”
“Bang on target, then,” St. Clair said. “Nice work, people.”
The object—designated by astronomers as Sagittarius A*, with the asterisk pronounced as “Star”—was unremarkable compared to the sweep and drama of the surrounding view. The object itself was invisible even from this close in, but it was surrounded by a handful of bright stars orbiting it at extremely high velocity.
That object was the supermassive black hole—the SMBH in astronomical parlance—that occupied the center of Earth’s Galaxy. An invisible sphere nearly as wide as the orbit of the planet Mercury containing mass equivalent to some 4.3 million suns, it was a sight—or not—to behold.
A second object lay off to port, about three hundred light years from the first. Designated as 1E1740.7–2942 but popularly called the “Great Annihilator,” it was the intermittent source of highly energetic X-rays at the 511 keV range characteristic of the annihilation of electrons and positrons—matter and antimatter. Although the jury was still out as to what exactly the Great Annihilator was, most astrophysicists suspected a stellar-mass black hole passing through a wisp of molecular cloud as it orbited Sag A*.
Much closer to the center—only about three light years from Sagittarius A*—lay another black hole: GCIRS 13E, massing 1300 suns and marked by a clustering of seven bright stars. Current thought held that it might be the center of a globular star cluster partially devoured and scattered by the monster at the Galaxy’s heart.
None of that mattered to St. Clair at the moment. He stared up into the core’s brilliant light, awed. Though he’d been briefed on what was known of the astronomy of the Galaxy’s central regions, the reality was . . . overwhelming.
And very, very complex.
“Let’s have a close-up,” he said.
A window opened in the air in front of him, as powerful gravitational fields projected into the space ahead of the ship generated a temporary lens. The image was still blurred and low res; it looked like a pale haze backdrop behind a minute, black ring. The haze, he knew, was gas and dust above the black hole’s accretion disk; the ring was the Coadunation capital . . . the core habitat.
So that’s Harmony.
But at this range, even gravitational lensing couldn’t show any detail.
“Commander St. Clair,” another machine voice whispered in his mind. “The Coadunation liaison requests permission to enter the bridge to speak with you.”
“Can it wait?”
“The liaison says it cannot.”
St. Clair sighed. “Very well. Five minutes, no more.”
“What does the Squid want, anyway?” Symm wondered. She’d been included in the cyberlinked message as well.
“I don’t know, Van. Maybe a last reminder to mind our manners when we actually meet the masters of the Galactic Empire. Like not calling them squids,” he said with a smile.
“I’ll do that when you remember it’s the Coadunation,” she reminded him. “Stop thinking like a human.”
“But I’m so good at it. . . .”
“More likely,” Symm said, “it’s about their damned war.”
“I know.” He sighed. “I know.
”
All was not well in paradise.
And that wasn’t necessarily a surprise. Because twenty-three years earlier, a Medusan fleet had been searching the little-explored Orion Spur for emergent technological species that might be able to join them. And at Sirius they’d encountered humans, newly emerged from their home star system and just about as savvy, when it came to galactic politics, as a backwoods hayseed adrift in Manhattan Tower.
No, worse: snatch a Neanderthal hunter from his tribe and drop him among the slidewalks of New York Meg . . . That at least approximated the culture shock experienced by Humankind when it came into direct contact with a galactic civilization some hundreds of thousands of years in advance of it.
Humanity, St. Clair thought with a grim dash of gallows humor, was going to be a long time in recovering from the shock.
THE PROPOSED alliance looked good, at least on the surface. The Coadunation offered Earth so much, so very much, a heaven-sent opportunity for Humankind with a seemingly endless list of benefits and technology in exchange for membership. Assuming, of course, that the human species even survived the assimilation. The Earth directorate, St. Clair thought, was not exactly flexible. Hit it hard enough and it would shatter.
It wasn’t a secret that St. Clair didn’t like the idea, but even he was forced to admit that the Coad offer was attractive. The first Terran starships had used the Alcubierre Drive to achieve FTL travel . . . but within the past few years most of her ships had been refitted with Coad gravitic drives and hyperdimensional shift technology, enabling human vessels to bypass ten thousand light years in an instant. Suddenly, human ships could jump anywhere within the Galaxy . . . and were no longer limited to within a scant few light-centuries of home. Fusion power plants had been replaced by quantum taps that pulled seemingly unlimited energy from the hard vacuum of space itself.
And there were other technologies that suggested unimaginable possibilities for Humankind’s future. Antigravity that would make Ad Astra’s spin-gravity design seem quaintly archaic by comparison. Matter compression that would create any element at all from simple building blocks in a process that made helium-3/deuterium fusion look as primitive as flint and steel. New understandings of space, time, and energy. New understandings of mind and consciousness. Medical advances that would redesign the human form virtually from scratch, banish any disease, or correct any genetic shortcoming.
