by Ian Douglas
“Or another possibility . . .” Tsang said. “Having the incoming black hole collide with us dead-on.”
“You know, I don’t much like that,” St. Clair said slowly. “It suggests that we were trapped at the ergosphere, not that we flew through a manifold gateway. It means . . .”
He let the words trail off. He didn’t want to voice the possibility in front of a room filled with the ship’s department heads, but it was something he’d been fearing since he first observed the two galaxies colliding: that Ad Astra would never be able to get back home.
That they had no hope at all.
“Where is Sol in all of that?” a small voice asked in the silence. “Where is Earth?”
The speaker, according to St. Clair’s in-head readout, was Sublieutenant Emila Buchanan, a junior naval officer posted to the Office of Xenolinguistics.
“Now’s not the time, Em,” Dr. Theodore Hatcher said. He was her boss, the head of the ship’s alien language department.
“As good a time as any,” Tsang said. He sounded tired. I know the feeling, St. Clair thought as the doctor continued. “Finding Sol in this epoch would be categorically impossible.”
“Why so?” St. Clair asked him. He’d been entertaining a growing curiosity about Earth himself. What had happened to Humankind’s birthworld in four billion years?
“Sol, like every other star in the Galaxy, orbits the galactic center,” Tsang replied. “At its distance from the core, our sun takes about 250 million years—a quarter of a billion years—to make one complete orbit. In the time that’s passed since the twenty-second century, Sol would have completed about sixteen orbits . . . and these aren’t nice, neat, predictable orbits like the orbits of a planet. They can vary tremendously from orbit to orbit. They’re affected by the movements of other stars, by masses of dust and gas, by local clouds of dark matter, and, most recently, by gravitational interaction with the Andromedan Galaxy as it came careening into ours. There’s a chance Sol got flung out of the Galaxy entirely . . . or that it’s already been swallowed by Andromeda. Earth could quite literally be anywhere in that mess out there now.”
“Quite correct,” Sandoval added, after a brief hesitation, “but rather beside the point. We don’t need to find Earth.”
“Why not?” Buchanan asked.
“Because we can be sure that there won’t be anything left there now. No people. No life. No water or air. By now, four billion years further along in its evolution, Earth will be as dead as the moon.”
Buchanan gave a small and strangled sob. St. Clair guessed that she must have family on Earth . . . had family on Earth . . . and was just now realizing that they were gone.
“The sun has been getting hotter,” Valerie Holt put in. “Is that what you’re talking about, Doc?”
“At a rate of roughly ten percent per billion years,” Sandoval said, nodding. “After just a billion years or so of that, a runaway greenhouse effect would have sent the surface temperature soaring, evaporating all of Earth’s oceans, which in turn would have trapped more and more heat and made it even hotter. The planet would have become like Venus, with all of its oceans turned to steam clouds in the atmosphere, and with its surface hot enough to melt lead. Life . . . well, it just wouldn’t have been able to adapt fast enough. It wouldn’t have survived, at least not on the surface. There might have been some water reservoirs deep underground with microbial life for, oh, another billion years or so. But by today, continued heating will have stripped away the atmosphere and, with it, the last of the steam clouds—all that was left of the oceans.”
“You do paint such a rosy picture,” Raul Avilla said. He was head of the maintenance department.
“Of course, there’s another possibility,” Dumont pointed out. “Godtech.”
The term was an informal one used by the xenotech department to refer to technology—either alien in origin or something developed by Humankind in the remote future—that was so advanced that it might as well be the work of gods. The Coad ring in the galactic core would have required such technology.
And if humans or the descendents of humans had survived the first billion years of the past four, what might they have accomplished?
“You’re talking about ideas like moving Earth into a larger orbit,” St. Clair said.
“Exactly. Or, theoretically, at least, it might be possible to engage in star mining—bleeding off the mass of a star. Reduce it in size enough, and it will burn cooler. That would also greatly extend the star’s expected life span.”
“Just how the hell do you bleed mass off from a star?” Hatcher asked.
“Well, if we knew that,” Tsang quipped, “it wouldn’t be godtech, now, would it?”
Some nervous chuckles sounded around the table.
“The point is, I think,” Dumont continued, “that we can’t take anything for granted. Humankind might have survived until now. Changed, probably, but it or something like it might have survived.”
“Dr. Dumont, do you know what you’re saying?” Symm said. “No civilization, no culture, could survive for even a million years! And we’re talking about a span of time four thousand times greater than that!”
“We don’t know that,” Dumont insisted. “Our species is immature. A truly advanced civilization might be immortal.”
“Nothing lasts forever, Doctor,” St. Clair put in, waving once more at the tableau on the screens around them.
“Then immortal for all practical purposes,” Dumont replied. “The civilizations of the Coad, for example. Many of them might still be around, or their descendents. They might have technologies that we literally can’t even begin to imagine. Even . . .” He hesitated.
“Yes?” St. Clair asked.
“Even time travel.”
“Time travel,” Sandoval said with the slightest of sneers, “is flat-out impossible.”
“Says the woman who’s just traveled four billion years into the future,” Tsang said.
“You know what I mean! Travel into the past is impossible. Too many problems with paradoxes.”
“So all our theories think,” St. Clair said. “But as Dr. Dumont suggests, we’re not going to take anything for granted. No assumptions. I would suggest that our first order of business will be to see if we can make contact with an advanced civilization in this epoch.”
“Like the one that built that moon-sized spacecraft?” General Frazier asked.
“Like the one that built the moon-sized spacecraft, yes,” St. Clair said.
He wondered if Frazier was leveling some subtle criticism at him, but he’d heard no irony or sarcasm in the words. When they’d encountered that huge ship, they’d not been aware that they were in their own future. Obviously, that ship was not connected with whoever had destroyed the Coad’s galactic ring.
But they still might be related to the three red-and-black robot ships that had attacked them shortly after their arrival here.
He dismissed the thought. There were just too damned many unknowns.
“Dr. Hatcher.”
“Yes, my lord.”
“Any progress with that missile or probe or whatever it was we picked up?”
“We’ve only just gotten it aboard, sir. Newton is investigating it, using teleoperational robots.”
“Newton?” St. Clair asked, raising his voice slightly. “Any progress?”
“None so far, Lord Commander. I suspect, however, that your initial impression was correct. The alien torpedo is most likely a device intended to aid communication with one or more galactic civilizations in this time period. The device, like those ships that attacked us, is pure computronium, with almost its entire mass devoted to information processing.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning, my lord, that it could be an extremely powerful computer dedicated to learning how to understand us, or to teaching us how to understand them. Probably both.”
That was an encouraging thought. They would need to talk to the civilizations livi
ng in this time. And one of those civilizations just might have provided them with the key to doing just that.
“Keep after it.”
“Of course, Lord Commander.”
St. Clair glanced across the table and caught Günter Adler’s eye. The man was physically present, not in virtual reality, surrounded by a coterie of secretaries, assistants, and attendants, looking every centimeter the proper Imperial Lord Director. His group took up several seats opposite the table from St. Clair, who wondered if there was going to be a confrontation.
The expedition’s charter practically demanded one.
“Lord Director?” St. Clair said. “You’ve been uncharacteristically quiet. Do you have anything to add?”
“No,” Adler said, curt. “At least . . . not at this time.”
Which was probably, St. Clair thought, about as clear a warning as he was going to get from the man. He just wondered when the ax was going to fall.
The problem he was thinking about, of course, was the question of command. Control of the expedition was a precariously balanced jury-rigging of rank and political power—and that was the case when everything was going as planned. St. Clair had been designated as the military commanding officer, the leader of the military portion of the ship’s orders. Primarily, that meant that he was in command of the ship en route from Sol to the Coad capital, and this was true even though the senior Marine on board—Major General Frazier—seriously outranked him. Since the two Marine divisions would be remaining with the O’Neill habitats at the center of the Galaxy, they were considered passengers rather than crew, and were not in Ad Astra’s line of command.
In point of fact, they and all the civilians in Tellus were cargo, and that cargo’s safety was entirely St. Clair’s responsibility.
Adler, as mission director, was technically in command of the entire expedition, including St. Clair . . . but St. Clair specifically had been given command authority over all Navy issues, which had included getting the ship safely to the Coad ring. Adler could advise in certain matters, such as suggesting where St. Clair should take the ship and who he should talk to, but St. Clair had the absolute and final say over the ship and the voyage itself.
At this point, however, the original mission was a thing quite literally of the past, as relevant now as a space elevator was to a fish.
All of which meant that, at some point, St. Clair knew, Adler was going to decide it was time to assert control—civilian control—over the entire expedition. He would let the Navy run things for now, so long as the situation was this fluid, with this many unknowns. Once they made peaceful contact with another civilization here, though, things would change.
And St. Clair would have to make a decision about whether or not he was going to let him.
But for now, that seemed to be a choice for the future. Symm once more brought him back to the present. “So what’s on the schedule for today?” the executive commander asked. “Where do we go now?”
“Seems to me we have a choice,” St. Clair said. “We can go back to the galactic core, and see if that moon-ship shows up again. Or we put out our ears and see if we can zero in on a high-tech civilization out here. Either way, we need to find someone. We don’t have a chance in hell of figuring out what’s going on without a solid First Contact.”
“A suggestion, my lord,” Cameron said.
“What?”
“We’re better off out here, away from the core.”
“What makes you say that, Lieutenant?” Adler said. “That moon or planetoid or whatever it was clearly wanted to communicate, and that’s what we need right now. Communication.”
“Yes, Lord Director, that’s true. But inside the core, we pretty much had our collective heads in a bag. We couldn’t see out. We couldn’t hear much of anything but static. Right, Vince?”
Subcommander Vincent Hargrove, the senior communications officer, nodded. “There were lots of signals in there, but mostly it was a hash of static. Cosmic rays, radio static, exploding stars—if there was anyone in there broadcasting something intelligent, it would have taken us a long time to sift it out.”
“Things are a little clearer out here?” St. Clair asked.
“Yes, sir. We’re picking up a number of signal sources in both galaxies. Quite a few of them, in fact. Most appear to be automated beacons of some sort or another. Some might be carrying messages. It will be a lot easier to figure that out away from the core.”
“I have to agree,” St. Clair said. He glanced at Adler, but the director didn’t appear to be digging in for an argument. “It also feels less dangerous out here. In the core, we ran into two different alien groups in the space of a few hours. One might have been trying to communicate with us, but the other was definitely trying to kill us. Until we can talk to anyone we meet, we should be cautious. And not make any assumptions that are going to turn around and bite us.”
“You’re missing one important point, though, Commander,” Adler said.
“Yes, my lord?”
“If that . . . missile, or whatever it is, if that is some sort of translation device, we can count on it helping us talk with the inhabitants of that moon. But why should anyone out here speak the same language?”
It was, St. Clair had to admit, a telling point. An electronic translator programmed in France would work in Tibet, but only because such devices connected to linguistic libraries and translation facilities in orbit. Unless that moon-sized ship was part of an empire spread across at least 15,000 light years of the Galaxy—and had vestiges four billion years later—the chances were good that no one out here would understand their language.
“Sir!” someone yelled from the crowd behind him. “Sir! The Liaison!”
The Liaison? Damn, I’d forgotten about the Medusan. “What’s the matter?”
“I think . . .”
St. Clair was out of his seat and facing the commotion. The Liaison’s floater pod was acting strangely, emitting streams of white fog and shaking. St. Clair stepped closer, trying to see the being’s face, but the transparency at one end of the pod was completely opaque, covered with ice. Frost coated the hovering cylinder.
“Xenotechs!” St. Clair snapped. “Get some help in here! Stat!”
“Alone . . .” the Liaison said. Its voice sounded strangled, weirdly distorted, as electronic circuits fried. “Forever alone . . .”
And then, with a sharp hiss of escaping gasses, the alien floater pod opened.
CHAPTER
EIGHT
The Medusan, apparently, had deliberately opened its travel pod. St. Clair felt the blast of cold gasses as the pod split apart, saw the entire length of the alien writhing in what to it was scalding hot and poisonous air. Patterns of color flashed and rippled along its wet body, vivid greens and purples and browns, as the cluster of tentacles at its head lashed spasmodically.
He heard it scream, high pitched and shrill.
“Newton!” St. Clair yelled. “Do you have the Medusae agent?”
“I do.”
“Bring it on-line.”
He heard the whisper inside his head. “We are here, Humans.”
“Your prototype is not,” St. Clair replied, also in his head. “And unless there was some kind of horrible malfunction to its pod, it looks like it killed itself.”
“There was no malfunction. The Liaison felt unable to continue with its mission. With life.”
“But why?”
St. Clair could almost feel the electronic entity shrug in his mind. “The Medusae are representatives of a group social mentality,” it told him.
“A hive mind, yes.”
“No. Not as we understand your term ‘hive mind.’ All Medusae together do not support a single intelligence such as that demonstrated by your ants and bees, or by the cells of your bodies. A group social mentality is a social order that requires other members of the group, either in close proximity, or in fairly regular communication.”
“But the Liaison was alone on the
Ad Astra!”
“Yet it also had the reasonable expectation of rejoining its fellows when it reached Harmony. Others of its kind were on board the ship Ad Astra followed into the galactic core. Individual Medusae can physically endure separation from their fellows, although it is not comfortable, and they do not willingly do so for long.”
“Why did it have to kill itself, though? It wasn’t alone—it had all of us!”
“Not really the same, Humans. You are alien, extremely different from the Medusae in the way you think, the way you act and react.”
“Even so . . . damn it! Ad Astra has plenty of room. We could have brought along a thousand Medusae if we’d known!”
“Such was not considered practical. In fact, the Liaison was in communication with its fellows—those on board the Coadunation vessel escorting Ad Astra. All Medusae have implants that allow physical communication with others within quite a large radius. As such, it was still in communication with them after the Coadunation vessel was trapped in the ergosphere of Sagittarius A-Star.”
“How . . . oh. An Einstein ghost.”
“Precisely. Its connection with its fellows was not severed as long as our perception of the Coadunation vessel was frozen by relativistic effects. Once we were knocked clear of the black hole, though, the Liaison lost all contact with its fellows. It didn’t know how to cope with that kind of loneliness.”
St. Clair looked at the alien’s body, clearly dead, its tissues rapidly turning black with exposure to the oxygen in the air. There was a powerful stink of ammonia on the bridge.
