by Ian Douglas
“Yes, my lord.”
“Prep an Elsie for a scouting run.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
“Lieutenant Watanabe!”
“Yes, my lord.”
“I want a dozen subNewtons out there. Give me a complete picture.”
“Yes, sir.”
Kazuko Watanabe was one of Ad Astra’s acolytes tasked with servicing Newton, working in the AI department. The so-called subNewtons were unmanned remote autonomous vehicles, or U-RAVs, that served as Newton’s eyes and ears while investigating unexplored and potentially hazardous areas.
St. Clair stared at the vast and silent platter for a long moment. There might be a living civilization down there. They might breathe a thin hydrogen atmosphere, or maybe they were living underground—troglodyte descendents of whoever or whatever had built that titanic structure.
But he didn’t think that was the case. The place felt empty. The only sign of life at all was the winking neutrino beacon, and that might well be an automated device set running eons ago and forgotten.
The problem with that, however, was the sheer improbability of the idea. How could a technic civilization capable of building an artificial world over 200 million kilometers wide fail? It didn’t seem possible. Those beings, whoever or whatever they’d been, had possessed atomic transmutation, the ability to manufacture incredibly strong materials—had thought on a scale so immense it beggared human description.
“Newton?” He called to the ship’s AI in his head. He didn’t want his bridge officers to hear this speculation.
“Yes, Lord Commander.”
“A civilization that could build an Alderson Disk . . . what could possibly destroy something that big and powerful?”
“A more powerful civilization, obviously. Perhaps an advanced predator species. A Fermi predator.”
Now there was a thought.
Before First Contact with the Coadunation, one powerful explanation for the Great Silence of the Fermi paradox was the possibility that an alien species might arise somewhere in the Galaxy that sought to protect itself by eliminating all possible competition. It would only take one Fermi predator with such a mindset to sweep through the Galaxy, exterminating more primitive civilizations and making star-faring races a rarity.
Contact with the Coadunation, mercifully, had put the idea to rest, but there was still speculation within the xenosophontological community about berserker civilizations preying on more primitive species. If anything, it made for sexier conferences.
And 4 billion years was a long time.
But something bothered St. Clair about such a theory. “I would think that once somebody became that advanced, they’d give up predation as a way of life.”
“That is a popular human point of view,” Newton replied, “and a naive one, if I may say so. An alien culture would be, by definition, alien. The urge to destroy other cultures might be hardwired into them. From a purely evolutionary standpoint, it’s less likely for a predator to change its predatory nature, especially if it’s eliminating outside catalysts that might cause such changes.” The computer paused, an extraordinarily human gesture. “I thought, Lord Commander, that the possibility of Fermi predators was your stated reason for opposing the opening of relations with the Coadunation.”
“Partly,” St. Clair replied. “But only partly. We didn’t know the Coad, and couldn’t know what we were letting ourselves in for. I just thought we should take it easy and maybe hang back a bit before wholeheartedly jumping into galactic politics. Especially when it turned out they were fighting a war.”
“Your belief ruined your career.”
That stung. “I suppose. They did tell me that command of the Ad Astra wasn’t punishment.”
“Yes, and you were on record as saying that command of the Ad Astra was equivalent to being given a space tug after you had commanded Class 1 military starships.”
“Well, yes. I was angry. I got over it.”
“Did you, Lord Commander?”
“When did you become my therapist, Newton?” I already seem to have an AI shrink at home.
“I am not. However, the mental health and stability of the humans commanding this mission are of considerable importance to me.”
St. Clair cracked a wry smile. “Meaning they told you to keep an eye on me, because I might be trouble.”
Newton didn’t reply, and St. Clair knew he was right. It didn’t matter. Lord Admiral Caruthers had basically told him as much, weeks ago, at Naval HQ in Clarkeorbit, when he’d received his orders. And in any case, command of the Ad Astra wasn’t a bad thing. It was a command. After his ill-advised public statements about the Coadunation, there’d been a very real possibility that he would never receive another command again. That he might even be forced to retire.
And that, truly, would have been punishment.
But Caruthers had been on his side, as had several other senior officers. “Pull this mission off and keep your big mouth shut,” Caruthers had told him, “and maybe when you get back, we’ll find you a proper command.”
Except that Lord Admiral Pauline Caruthers had been dust for 4 billion years now. And all he had left was the Ad Astra—and a million souls looking to him for answers.
He looked down on the Alderson disk and hoped he could find some.
“ALL RIGHT, MARINES!” Staff Sergeant David Ramirez bellowed in his best parade-ground voice. “We have been tasked with providing on-planet security for the double-domes! That means we move sharp, we move silent, and we move deadly . . . but we do not, repeat, do not shoot the first thing that moves down there. Am I clear?”
“Clear, Staff Sergeant!” chorused back at him.
“Ooh-rah.”
“Ooh-rah!” The second chorus rang from the bulkheads.
He nodded to himself inside the massive helmet encasing his head. Mk. III combat armor was more tank than body armor; the forty Marines packed into the cargo bay of the lander were anonymous in their blank-faced visors and black nanoflage plate. To compensate for that, in-head electronics identified each man and woman for Ramirez when he directed his attention at one for more than a second.
“Two minutes!” he told them. “Weapons check!”
With an echoing clatter, M-70 XP rifles were raised and chambers loaded, M-290–5MW laser pulse rifles charged and safed. The platoon was packing a hell of a lot of firepower—the heavy weapons teams were carrying one-kiloton nukes—but Ramirez was experienced enough not to trust appearances. If they ran into military opposition down there, all the nukes of Earth wouldn’t save them. Forty Marines couldn’t take on an entire planet, and he’d been told that that monster space platter out there was bigger than 50 million Earths.
So they would hit the beach, form the perimeter, and pray that whoever might be living down there didn’t decide to swat them like an annoying insect.
Ooh-rah.
On his in-head feed from the lander’s cockpit, Ramirez watched the surface rise to meet them. The scale was deceptive. Several times he thought they were almost down on an utterly flat and near-featureless plain . . . and then he would check the altitude swiftly dwindling toward zero at the lower right of the display and realize that they were still thousands of kilometers out. A red reticule appeared, enclosing a flashing point of light. That was their destination, the building or structure housing the neutrino beacon that had brought them here.
No sign of hostile response yet—no sign that the locals had even noticed the incoming lander at all. Ramirez did wish that they could have made the landing in a Marine vehicle—a Nassau LVTA would have been his preference. Heavily armed and nearly invisible with its adaptive nanoflage exterior, it didn’t pretend to be anything other than what it was: an instrument of war. The Argosy Mk. VII landing craft—“Elsie” in the Navy vernacular—on the other hand, was originally a civilian job—big, bulky, and about as maneuverable as a brick, despite its sleek saucer shape. Marines referred to them as LSTs, an acronym purportedly standing for
“large, slow targets.”
As he continued to watch, more and more detail became available. It looked barren down there, like a vast desert, with little in the way of vegetation that he could make out, and several large but dry river valleys. He looked for some sign of buildings or cities, finally spotting rectilinear formations on the dusty ground that might be what he was searching for: the foundations of buildings, the crumbled heaps of decay and wreckage, the geometry of streets or avenues or parks now partly buried.
Yet even with those, the place was as dead as Nineveh, perhaps more so. Ramirez had the feeling that he was looking at literally eons of decay and neglect.
He didn’t relax for a second.
“Ten seconds! Stand ready!”
The Argosy flared out on its descent, hovered a moment, then settled toward the ground as four broad landing legs lowered from the craft’s belly. Each leg incorporated a broad debarkation ramp. As the craft came to a rest, Ramirez bellowed the order. “Marines! Hit the beach! Movemovemovemove!”
Forty Marines streamed down the ramps, taking up defensive positions in a perimeter around the craft. Lieutenant Bradley, the platoon’s CO, came down the ramp last. “Sir!” Ramirez said. “Defensive perimeter established! No sign of hostiles . . . no sign of anything. Sir.”
“Very well, Staff Sergeant. Maintain the perimeter. Dr. Dumont! You and your people are cleared to debark, sir!”
“On our way, Lieutenant.”
Ramirez watched, emotionless, as Dumont and his team of xenosophontologists emerged from the lander. “Double-domes,” the Marines called the expedition scientists, the brains and high-IQ types. Rumor had it that most were genetically enhanced to give them super-genius minds. Ramirez wasn’t sure that was true, but he was willing to believe it. Certainly, they had cybernetic link-ups with the ship’s computer network that effectively made each of them brilliant.
They were dumb as dirt when it came to the practical necessities of planetary debarkation, though. You wouldn’t catch Marines standing around gawking like that. Even if there was no one home.
“Shit, Staff Sergeant,” Lance Corporal Wu said. “Where is everybody?”
“Dead,” Ramirez replied quietly. “Dead and gone for billions of years.” He stared at the desolate horizon, a landscape of rubble piles and debris sunken in dust. On one horizon, the sun shone orange, neatly bisected by the disk, casting long, black shadows. A blue-gray tower, ornate and organic-looking, rose half a kilometer above the landscape a few hundred meters away, according to the expedition’s sensors, the neutrino beacon was somewhere beneath it.
Gods of Battle . . . was that a statue in front of the tower? If so . . .
“At least I hope they’re dead and gone,” he added. “ ’Cause I sure as hell wouldn’t care to meet that thing up close and personal.”
CHAPTER
TEN
“What the hell is that thing?” St. Clair demanded.
He was on the bridge, staring into a holodisplay relaying camera views from the helmet cameras of the landing team. Dumont and his people had found something.
It might be a statue.
Four spindly legs, jointed like those of a spider, met at the top; a sinuously curved body, like a vase, hung from that joining, with segmented tentacles, four of them, hanging from the very bottom. Elongated ovals, like cabochons, were scattered around the body at irregular intervals, set vertically; if they were eyes, which was what they resembled, they would have given the being a 360-degree view of its world.
“What do you think, Dr. Dumont?” St. Clair asked, leaning closer to study the picture. “Is that one of the builders of the disk?”
“If it is,” Dumont replied, “I hope to hell the statue’s not life size.”
The statue was made of some dark, blue-gray material—not stone, not metal, so possibly some kind of dense plastic. It was standing on a broad, low pedestal that was more than half buried by dust, and towered at least ten meters high.
“No reason it should be,” St. Clair said. “Look at the Statue of Liberty. Or The Apotheosis of Man, in Quito.”
“Yeah, Doc,” a Marine’s voice added in the background. “Maybe the original critters were little guys, like the size of your fist.”
St. Clair doubted that. Beings a few centimeters across probably wouldn’t have large enough brains to build a world like this one. Probably. But he reminded himself that Humankind still had almost no experience at all with aliens. In a universe where coral polyps less than 500 millionths of a meter across had built the Great Barrier Reef . . . yeah, the Galaxy was certain to be filled with surprises.
“I don’t know about that,” the voice of one of Dumont’s xenosophontologists said. “You might expect a being ten meters tall to build an artificial world as large as an entire star system.”
“It doesn’t follow, Frank,” Dumont said, sounding skeptical. “When you look at the scale of this world, the difference between builders who are ten centimeters tall and ten meters tall is trivial. Inconsequential. Perhaps we can find records, though, in that big building over there.”
“Marines!” someone called. “Move out! Mackelroy! Get your PPC set up to cover that street to sunward.”
They were expanding the Marine perimeter around the grounded lander, the Marines breaking into four-man fireteams and dispersing across the area. There was no sign whatsoever of hostiles, but Lieutenant Bradley was playing it strictly by the book.
St. Clair wholeheartedly approved.
Several suited figures moved across St. Clair’s field of view: the science team in lightweight environmental suits, and their Marine escorts in massive battle armor that mirrored the grays and dull whites of their surroundings in shifting, abstract shapes. Although what was left of the city appeared dead, there was life. Something like trees grew everywhere—gnarled trunks and broad, flat canopies of deep blue ribbons—but every trunk was either leaning sharply or bent in a ninety-degree angle so that the top of the growth was facing the orange sun.
It made sense, St. Clair decided. On this world, the sun always appeared at the same place on the horizon, a direction that the landing team was already referring to as “sunward.” The trees, he noticed, were scattered about in odd clusters, avoiding the long shadows of buildings, walls, or irregularities in the terrain. For the most part, the landscape was depressingly flat and empty, broken only by the blue trees and the rare interruption of artificial structures. The ground was loose sand covered by a few centimeters of extremely fine black or dark gray dust. If there’d ever been pavement here, it had long since crumbled away.
“Is the sun going up or going down?” St. Clair asked.
“Down, my lord,” Valerie Holt told him. “But slowly. Newton estimates that the day-night cycle here is almost forty hours. We have at least ten more hours to sunset.”
“Huh. I wonder if that was how the builders designed it? Or if the sun’s motion has gradually slowed down over the past few million years?”
“Good question, my lord.”
“SubNewton-Eight is transmitting images of some really large weapons at the inner rim,” Lieutenant Watanabe reported. “Newton says they may be part of a star lifter system, but they could also be used to actually move the star.”
“A star what?”
“Star lifter. Star mining. It’s a way to pull mass off of a star.”
“Let me see.”
A new channel opened in St. Clair’s head, showing the transmission from one of the subNewtons. The image was in green and white, more CAD schematic than video, with grid overlays, highlighted areas, and blocks of alphanumerics giving range, mass, angle of approach, and other technic esoterica. The disk’s central hole appeared to be edged by a wall that likely was more than a hundred kilometers high. Machines—massive, dark, and brooding—lined the wall. Words flickered on and off, identifying components: MAGNETIC RING ACCELERATOR, GAMMA-RAY LASER TURRET, PLASMA CONDUCTOR.
“I’m not sure what I’m seeing,” St. Clair s
aid. “Can we get closer?”
“Sorry, my lord,” Watanabe said. “Time delay.”
One of the numbers on the display read 10:14, and represented the time lag for signals traveling between the unmanned drone and the Ad Astra. The drone was more than ten light-minutes away, the transmission sent that long ago. A command to move closer or even engage a telephoto lens for a close-up would take ten more minutes to reach the probe.
Fortunately, U-RAVs were quite intelligent, in a single-minded AI way, and could decide for themselves what was of interest. So it was likely already closing in, and new images might be coming back a lot sooner than ten minutes from now. Still, St. Clair was a bit embarrassed.
“Damn. Wasn’t thinking.”
“It takes some getting used to, my lord.”
Except that St. Clair knew this stuff, damn it, knew about speed-of-light time delays and all that they entailed. The problem, he thought, was that his brain had been overloaded by the sheer scale of this place. He wasn’t thinking straight.
“Newton thinks those turrets house gamma-ray lasers, extremely powerful ones,” Watanabe went on cheerfully. She seemed to be trying to let St. Clair save face after his gaffe. “Fire them at the star’s north pole, and they’ll superheat the star’s surface, blowing off a plume of plasma as massive as Earth’s moon. That translates as thrust, and would nudge the star south. If they have transmutation—and they’d almost have to, in order to build on this scale—they could also skim off the plasma with magnetic fields and manufacture heavier elements to order.”
“Star lifting.” He remembered the term now.
“Yes, my lord.”
St. Clair had read about the concept, but certainly never thought he would see an example. A civilization that could move stars . . . and mine them for whatever raw materials they needed.
“How do they keep the star inside the disk opening?”
“Magnetic fields, my lord. Extremely powerful ones. Newton thinks they set a toroidal field going in circles along the inner edge, and that that would interact with the star’s natural magnetic field. They might have used the system to generate electrical power, too. By balancing the lasers and the magnetic fields, they could keep the star bobbing up and down, providing regular cycles of day and night for both sides of the disk. When it’s day up here, it’s night on the other half of the world. . . .”
