by Ian Douglas
A couple of dozen people, department heads, mostly, were already here, waiting for him, standing as he entered the room.
“Sit down, sit down,” he said, striding across what appeared to be a transparency stretching above endless starfields. “You people ought to know by now that I don’t care for damned Imperial protocol.”
Günter Adler pulled a disapproving scowl, one that clearly said, We’ll talk about that later. The ship’s cybercouncil director cared a great deal for formal protocol, and had warned St. Clair about the need to maintain appearances—and official formality—more than once before.
And the UE council director could go fuck himself, St. Clair thought . . . and do so in the most uncomfortable and undignified manner possible.
At least the man hadn’t tried scolding St. Clair in front of his officers.
“First things first,” St. Clair said, taking his seat. “Mr. Martinez. When will we be able to shift?”
Carlos Martinez was not present physically. He was still aft in Main Engineering, working on the disabled drive, but Ad Astra’s electronic networks allowed the chief engineer’s image to appear as a holographic projection, while his voice was heard within their in-head circuits.
“I estimate another thirty-six hours, my lord,” he said. “As I was afraid, we’re having to regrow a substantial portion of the power web, and that takes time.”
“You have enough rawmat?”
“We do, sir. Plenty.”
“Then do your best. If you can shave a few hours off that estimate, we would all appreciate it. We don’t know if those three raiders have friends who might come hunting when they don’t show.”
Like other large starships, Ad Astra drew energy from the vacuum, using artificially generated microsingularities to extract virtual particles as they emerged from the universe’s base state in what for all practical purposes were unlimited amounts. The shift drive provided by the Coads was still only poorly understood, though high-order AIs knew how they worked. What was known was that the drive required vast amounts of energy, which it pulled from the singularity power generators through a finely balanced network of phased circuits and field routers known as the power web. The engineering crew was using swarms of nanotech robots to rebuild the damaged portions of the web almost literally atom by atom, and that took time.
Time we might not have.
“What about other repairs?” St. Clair said. “That gash in the port module took out a lot of plumbing.”
“Well in hand, my lord,” Lieutenant Jacob Weiss said, speaking through another holographic projection. “Damage during the battle was minimal. We have workbots and nano working on the port-hab cylinder now.”
“How much water did we lose?”
“An estimated thirty million liters, sir. We’ve already rebalanced the load to maintain proper spin on the hab.”
Thirty million liters out of 1.2 trillion liters in the port-side module was almost literally a drop in the bucket.
“How long before we’re fully operational again?”
“Six hours, my lord.”
“Good.” With enough rawmat—raw materials—the ship could repair itself, literally regrowing systems, bulkheads, plumbing, electronics, and structural components out of reservoirs of various elements. The plans for the Ad Astra were redundantly stored in Newton’s memory down to the nanometer scale, allowing the entire ship to be regrown from scratch if necessary . . . and given enough billions of tons of raw materials.
People, however, were more important than the ship, at least from a humanist standpoint. “Do we have figures on casualties yet?” St. Clair asked.
“Two hundred five dead, my lord,” Dr. Genady Sokolov replied. “About eight hundred with significant injuries . . . though that number may increase as further cases come in to the sick bays. All were civilians in the Virginia Beach district of Port Hab. Half of the injuries are radiation poisoning. The rest are contusions, broken bones, and concussions from the rattling the Ad Astra got going in toward the black hole. In addition, we lost two fighter pilots in the battle.”
St. Clair felt a slight loosening of the knot inside his gut. As horrible as two hundred dead was, he knew the butcher’s bill could have been a lot worse.
“Is there further risk of radioactive contamination?”
“We lucked out there, Lord Commander,” Lieutenant Joy Hutchison told him. She was one of the ship’s radiation techs, working out of Engineering. “The enemy’s beam did not breach the inner hull or the inhabited spaces above it. It was largely dispersed by the water stores in that section. If there was any contamination, most of it was washed out as the water egressed.”
“Most of the rad casualties were maintenance techs,” Sokolov added, “in the basement levels.”
“Very well,” St. Clair said. “Excomm?”
“Sir.”
“Please handle the details of memorial services. And get me a list so I can talk to the relatives and families.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
“Which brings us to those enemy ships,” St. Clair continued. “It would be nice to learn why they attacked us.”
“Indeed, Lord Commander,” Adler said slowly. “So why, may I ask, did you order the destruction of that last alien ship? I would think that prisoners could tell us more than the spectroscopic analyses of hot clouds of gas.”
“That alien ship, my lord, had already demonstrated the ability to flash over into FTL despite its small size. To use FTL on a tactical scale, as opposed to the purely strategic. If it had succeeded in shifting, it would have returned to wherever it came from, and taken with it an analysis of whatever intelligence it had managed to pick up. Our size and mass. Our weaponry. Our defensive screens. Our fighters. An estimate of our overall technology levels. And he would have returned. With enough friends to finish us off.”
“They might still come anyway.”
“Maybe. And that’s why I would like to get out of this area just as quickly as Mr. Martinez gets our stardrive ticking again. But if none of their ships return, we’ll have some additional time. Maybe those three ships were on patrol, and not scheduled to check in with their base for . . . I don’t know. Days. Weeks. Longer. Too, even if their HQ knows they’re missing, they’ll be cautious about sending a force in after them. They won’t know a damned thing about us . . . except for the fact that we took out their ships.”
“The skipper’s right, Lord Adler,” Symm said. “We were lucky with that first attack. The aliens are way ahead of us technologically, especially in weaponry and in material fabrication.”
“The weapons I understand,” Adler said. “But what does fabrication have to do with anything?”
“We had multiple high-energy gamma-ray lasers focused on one part of the alien’s hull . . . how many, Davis?”
“Seventeen, sir,” Webb replied. “Six twin turrets, plus five individual meteor defense beams.”
“Seventeen beams, and it took almost two whole seconds to burn through that vessel’s hull. If that ship had been one of ours, it would have been vaporized within milliseconds.”
“Well . . . even so,” Adler said, “prisoners would have been good.”
“Taking prisoners was not an option, my lord,” St. Clair said. “So we look for intelligence from other sources. Dr. Dumont.”
Dr. Francois Dumont was a civilian, one of the expedition’s senior xenosophontologists. His specialty was xenotechnology, and what that might tell Ad Astra’s population about beings that were not even remotely human.
“Sir.”
“What do we have on those alien ships? Anything?”
“We sent work pods outside to retrieve some of the wreckage, sir. The analysis has proven . . . interesting.”
“Tell me.”
“The fragments we brought in, my lord, were entirely composed of computronium.”
“Computronium! What . . . all of it?”
“We recovered several hundred kilos of material, my lord, from diffe
rent parts of the debris field. While there would certainly have been some parts of the ship devoted to drive, power generation, and weaponry, it appears that most of the vessel was an extremely large and well-organized computer.”
Computronium was a type of material first hypothesized by computer scientists at MIT two centuries before, a substance also known as “programmable matter.” The idea was that matter could be designed and arranged in a way that allowed that matter to serve as a highly efficient computing device. Technically, the human brain itself was an organic form of computronium, and various types of smart clothing, smart buildings and rooms—even smart cities—had been in common use for the past couple of hundred years. There was no reason, St. Clair supposed, that the aliens might not have spacecraft that were in fact large, highly mobile, weapons-bearing robots.
But the thought was disquieting. After a brief flirtation with AI killing machines in the Second American Revolution, human robotics programs had taken a distinctly pacifistic turn. According to the Fifth Geneva Protocol, signed in 2087, sentient machines were never to be used as soldiers. The resolution was established for good and carefully considered reasons.
One of these was the realization that the notorious Three Laws of Robotics, crafted by a well-known science-fiction writer more than a century before the Fifth Protocol, could not possibly work as advertised. There were loopholes in the Three Laws’ logic. For example, what if allowing one man to live—an Adolph Hitler, say, or a Josef Stalin—led inevitably to the deaths of millions? A sentient robot operating under the Three Laws would be caught in a crippling paradox.
Or suppose a robot was presented with the famous trolley paradox: an observer sees an out-of-control railcar hurtling toward a group of people standing on the tracks. The observer can do nothing, and watch several people being killed. Or he can throw a switch and direct the car onto a siding, where only a single person is standing. Which is the correct ethical choice: do nothing, and allow a number of people to be killed? Or deliberately kill one to save the others? Ethically, throwing the switch would be exactly the same as directly shoving a stranger off a platform and into the path of an oncoming train, forcing the train to stop and thereby saving the lives of others farther down the track. A robot bound by the Three Laws would suffer the electronic equivalent of a nervous breakdown. It might avoid the conflict by destroying the train—unaware that there were hundreds of people on board.
So the Fifth Geneva Protocol was designed to avoid such paradoxes by forbidding the use of autonomous robots in warfare. Using them to kill people was fine if a human was in the loop—military drone operators had been doing that since the late twentieth century. But a robot couldn’t decide for itself to end a human life.
Even more important, though, was the realization that the evolution of artificial intelligence would not, could not simply stop once robots reached the same general level of intelligence as humans. They would continue to develop and evolve, and at a far, far faster rate than was possible for merely organic systems.
And developing thinking beings superior in every respect to humans and giving them a killer’s instinct was widely assumed to be distinctly contra-survival for the species as a whole.
And the survival of these 1 million humans was definitely in jeopardy at the moment.
“So you’re saying we’re up against robots?” St. Clair asked.
“Possibly,” Dumont replied. “Or cybernetic organisms. But both the physical examination and spectrographic analyses of the gasses released by the explosion failed to turn up any trace of indisputably organic matter.”
“What do you mean, ‘indisputably’?” Adler asked.
“There was plenty of carbon in the recovered material,” Dumont told him. “But there was less potassium, calcium, nitrogen, and other elements than would be expected if there’d been organic beings inside.”
“The aliens’ biochemistry might be pretty different,” Sokolov pointed out.
“True, Doctor, but not that different. If there were organic beings inside those ships, we would expect to have found at least a few traces. What we did find was this.”
He made an in-head connection, and a fragment of alien material, hugely magnified, appeared hanging in the air above the conference table, looking like a finely etched maze of lines, silver against polished black.
“The deep structure is quite remarkable,” Dumont went on. The fragment expanded, the magnification increasing. As silver lines thickened and passed out of the image, new, much finer lines appeared . . . lines within lines within lines. “Fractal. Finer and finer levels of detail, the deeper in you go. Whoever designed this had an incredible grasp of both microarchitecture and nanotech engineering. We suspect that they work with holographic software.”
St. Clair wondered what that might mean, but elected to let it pass, at least for the time being. He looked at the Medusae Liaison, hovering by the table to his left in its sealed, dripping pod. “Liaison? I must ask this again. You are certain these ship types are unknown to you? They’re not the Deniers you’ve mentioned?”
“They are not, Humans.”
“Couldn’t you be mistaken? It seems to be too much of a coincidence that these unknowns should attack your stronghold at the galactic core now, while you’re fighting this other group.”
“We do not recognize the ship design, Humans. And we have not been able to contact others of the Coadunation. Something is very wrong with space.”
“What do you mean?”
“He’s right, my lord,” Subcommander Valerie Holt of the astrogation department said, when the Liaison failed to reply immediately. “We’ve noted a certain anomaly. It is possible that we are no longer in our own Galaxy at all.”
“That makes no sense at all,” Adler snapped, angry. “How the hell—”
“Let her talk,” St. Clair interrupted. “Tell us what you mean, Subcommander.”
“This is what the galactic core looks like now.” She gestured at the thickly clotted stars stretched across the conference-room dome. “And this is what they looked like a few minutes ago, as we were approaching Harmony.” The stars shimmering around them shifted before refocusing themselves into a completely different arrangement. “A shift of five light years is not enough to make this big a difference.”
The stars were too thickly strewn to allow them to see anything as easy to recognize as a constellation, but the differences were still clear to see. The dark shapes of looming thunderheads—nebulae encircling the core—were thick and ominous in both, but were completely reshaped. The shapes of star clouds, the positions of the nearest, most brilliant stars, all were different.
More than that, however, were changes in the numbers of bright stars. In the earlier image, some hundreds of stars in the sky were what would be considered extremely bright; the nearest, according to changes in its parallax as the ship moved deeper into the core, was about twelve light-days away.
But in the later image, thousands of stars gleamed at that magnitude, and the nearest were only a light-day or so distant.
Other structures had changed as well. Images taken earlier showed a single thick nebular cloud completely encircling the sky, a vast wheel of dust and gas illuminated by brilliant young suns and with the SMBH—Sagittarius A*—at its hub. Now, St. Clair could distinctly see a second wheel arcing across the sky at an angle to the first, masked in places by the thronging near-suns, but itself highlighted by a dazzling spray of young, hot blue stars.
“The differences are not just at optical wavelengths,” Holt went on, as the ship’s officers stared up at the sky in stunned silence. “Here is the sky at radio wavelengths before . . . and now. In infrared before . . . and now. And in X-rays before . . . and now.”
The change was, if anything, more pronounced at other wavelengths. The heart of the Milky Way Galaxy had always spit out a fairly constant hiss of radio noise, and had glowed brightly at infrared and X-ray wavelengths. But now, the noise was vastly greater, and the galactic
core was lit from within by a storm of hot radiation.
Add to that the fact that Sagittarius A* itself had doubled in mass and St. Clair could easily understand why Holt was suggesting that they’d somehow been transposed to the central core of another galaxy, that the SMBH was a different central black hole entirely. This wasn’t the same place at all.
“Subcomm Adams,” he said. “Does it look to you like we’ve jumped to another galaxy?”
“Sir . . . that’s just not possible!” She was staring up at the sky displayed across the overhead dome, hands before her splayed on the table, her face wet with tears.
“I didn’t ask you if it was possible. I asked you if that was what seems to have happened.”
“I . . . I don’t know how else to explain it, my lord.”
“There’s one possibility . . .” Symm said, her voice hesitant.
“Go ahead, Excomm.”
“Well, there’s been speculation for centuries that black holes might be the entrance to wormholes—shortcuts past normal space. And there’ve been theories that supermassive black holes might connect to one another somehow, linked by those wormholes. If we fell into Sagittarius A-Star . . .”
“We fell into the SMBH at the center of our Galaxy,” St. Clair said, completing the thought for her, “and popped up at the center of a different galaxy. Is that what you’re saying.”
“Something like that, my lord.”
Dr. Paul Tsang Wanquan shifted in his seat. “There is some evidence that we might now be at the core of M-31, my lord. The star densities are similar.”
