by Ian Douglas
“I’d like to have a few subNewtons explore that other half, too,” St. Clair said.
“Yes, my lord. I’ve already dispatched four U-RAVs to do just that.”
“Good.”
St. Clair turned his attention back to the main science team, watching through the helmet camera of a xenosophontologist named Karen Mathers. Most of the civilian researchers were gathered now at the base of the large tower a couple of hundred meters left of sunward. Dumont and a few others were vidrecording the enormous statue. The alien it represented towered over what might once have been a plaza or courtyard, surveying the orange-lit ruins with blank, blind eyes.
One Marine with a massive pulse rifle over his shoulder approached the pedestal. “Hey, Doc.” He reached out a heavy gauntlet. “What is this stuff, anyway?”
“Don’t touch anything!” Dumont snapped . . . but the Marine had already laid his glove on the pedestal and shifted his weight to lean against it. To St. Clair’s eyes, it seemed as though the pedestal was made of wet sand, loosely adhering to itself until the Marine touched it, at which point it sagged sharply, then literally fell apart. The statue towering above him tottered, then collapsed in on itself in a slowly descending spray of dust. Pieces of spidery legs and sinuous body avalanched onto the street, some of them pelting the Marine.
The material, whatever it was, was so light and friable, though, that the Marine’s armor wasn’t even scratched. Each fragment exploded into dust on impact.
St. Clair groaned inwardly. Why was it that humans always managed to make a mess of what they found?
“Jesus, Patterson!” a Marine bellowed from off camera. “Leave it to you!”
“It’s okay, Staff Sergeant,” Dumont said. “It’s okay. Clearly, the material was so ancient it was ready to disintegrate if anything touched it at all. We’ll need to be careful moving around the buildings.”
“I’m not sure going inside any of those structures is a good idea,” St. Clair said.
“We’ll be careful, Lord Commander. The beacon is still functioning. That means some kind of functioning power supply. And that suggests building materials designed to withstand the ages.”
“How old do you think that city is?”
“I have absolutely no way of even guessing, Lord Commander. We’ll collect samples for study back aboard the Ad Astra. We may get some answers from radiometric dating. Uranium-lead, especially.”
“Carry on, then.”
Although appearances could be deceiving, the landscape felt ancient to St. Clair . . . terribly ancient.
It was also big: 50 million Earths, and that was just the temperate zone. Ad Astra’s million-plus civilian population could study this world for centuries and barely scratch the surface. It made Harmony look small, and before this moment, that had been the biggest manufactured thing he’d ever seen. He wondered if there might be intelligent life here, despite the fact that the place seemed dead. After all, they’d seen only this one spot. Maybe it had been abandoned a few million years ago, and all of the interesting stuff was happening elsewhere, on the flip side . . . or a million kilometers to sunward.
Where the hell do you even begin to look?
SUBCOMMANDER TOMASZ Jablonsky was head of Ad Astra’s AI department, but he didn’t think of himself as the senior man in the department. So far as he was concerned, Newton itself held that distinction. The shipboard joke held that the entire AI department consisted of an arcane priesthood serving an electronic god.
At least human sacrifice wasn’t a requirement.
Jablonsky was linked in with a computer subsystem at the moment, as Newton probed the artifact dropped by the alien starship. A number of other human minds were linked in as well—AI techs like him, for the most part, but also xenolinguists and sophontologists hoping for some insight into whoever or whatever it was that was trying to talk with them.
The artifact returned by the RS-59 was still known simply as “the torpedo,” though there was no indication whatsoever that the thing was intended as a weapon. The black mirror-smooth object continued to change shape. Its mass remained steady at 105.7 kilos; its overall length varied with the changes in shape from just under 1.9 meters to a little over 2.4 meters. It appeared to consist entirely of microcircuits—computronium—with a kernel at its heart that likely was a power source, though no one could yet figure out how it might work. Equally mysterious was how it might sense its surroundings, or interface with them on any level. Dr. Hatcher was of the opinion that the entire surface of the probe served as a sensory organ—that the torpedo was aware of them as they studied it. He also theorized that it quite likely possessed a superhuman intelligence as well.
How they might be able to communicate with that intelligence was still a mystery.
Their latest attempt, however, had proved promising so far. Newton had designed a computronium probe, a wand as long as Jablonsky’s forearm, which could be inserted into the semiliquid matrix of the torpedo. As Chief Zhang slowly inserted it into the torpedo’s midsection, numerous black tendrils had emerged from the larger artifact and embraced the wand, enclosing it and drawing it in. Their offering, evidently, had been accepted.
That had been five minutes earlier. The wand included a broadband communications link, not with Newton directly, but with a Newton emulation, a smaller and simpler copy of Newton’s primary software designed to keep the real Newton safe from potential alien viruses or hack attempts.
“I have contact with the alien,” Newton announced. “Language protocol one-A is now being transmitted.”
Jablonsky, wired into Newton, was aware of the sudden shift, the rippling flow of data moving both ways. Learning an alien language was always a major challenge, especially since language depended on cultural cues, assumptions, and worldviews that beings with radically different evolutionary backgrounds and biologies simply could not share.
But with meaning and syntax and symbolism being filtered by Newton, Jablonsky was aware of impressions: flashes of images and sounds and smells that might be memories, might be hallucinations, as fleeting as dreams, as accessible as an interactive download.
A great deal of what he experienced was utterly incomprehensible—and the sight of an enormous eye with a horizontal slit pupil set within a writhing, branching mass filled him with shrieking terror—but there were also snatches of brilliant lucidity, and what he was hearing seemed to be in English, for the most part, though some was in his native Polish. He wasn’t sure who was translating what.
But he knew that Newton and the alien had just agreed that a year equaled 31,558,150 seconds . . . a close-enough average, and that the Galactics measured time by means of something called a vemj, determined by the speed of light and very slightly shorter.
The Galactics called themselves Xalit Ta, which meant something like “Cooperative” or “All Working Together,” while the alien eyeball Jablonsky had glimpsed was one of 10 million star-faring races of the Xalit Ta, a culture that called itself Nassin.
Within the probe, according to a kind of electronic index, was a record of Xalit Ta history, and descriptions of the civilizations comprising the Galactic Cooperative . . . a literal Encyclopedia Galactica that spanned the Milky Way and beyond, and which reached back into the past at least a billion years. The Cooperative was old.
The probe was a Nassin device: intelligent, self-aware, and adaptable.
It, and its Xalit Ta creators, wanted to communicate.
In fact, they were desperate to do so. There was apparently something out there, something very large, something very (dangerous) (intangible) (implacable) (nightmarishly terrifying) that spelled doom for Life and Mind across hundreds of billions of worlds.
And the Cooperative desperately needed help.
PRIVATE FIRST Class Richard Patterson glowered at the red-stained sky. It was dark enough that quite a few stars were visible, despite the wan daylight, and his armor’s instrumentation was telling him the atmosphere was thin and cold—about minus twenty
degrees Celsius. A breeze was blowing from the direction of the sun, though the air was so thin it had no force to it. In the distance, a couple of dust devils, like two-meter-high tornadoes, swirled across the sere landscape. It felt so fucking empty here.
He was less worried about his physical surroundings, however, than he was by the staff sergeant’s promise to have him scrubbing toilets with his toothbrush once he was back on board the Ad Astra. Staff Sergeant Ramirez was not known for making idle threats.
Damn it, it had been an accident. Could have happened to anyone. Who could have guessed that the fucking statue would be that flimsy?
Ramirez had ordered him back to the Elsie to stand guard, a blatant bit of make-work to keep him out of trouble. It wasn’t fair. The Frenchie, the head double-dome, had said it was okay.
He heard a sound from inside the lander. What the hell?
Sound here on this bizarre world was weird: everything was faint and high-pitched. What he’d just heard sounded like a metallic chirp, but he couldn’t place it. The lander was empty of people, now; even the three-man crew was outside, helping the double-domes set up some equipment beside the curve of that alien tower off in the distance.
Gripping his laser rifle nervously, he turned and ventured up one of the landing ramps. “Who’s there?”
“Patterson?” That was Ramirez. “What’s happening?”
“Thought I heard something, Staff Sergeant. Something inside the boat.”
“You’re dreaming, Marine. Wake up.”
“No, Staff Sergeant! It’s for real!” There was a pause. “I’m not getting through to the AI.”
That didn’t sound good. The landing craft, like all vessels, had an AI on board—not as powerful or knowledgeable a system as the one that ran the Ad Astra, but a high-order network system, nonetheless, that should be aware of everything going on in or near the lander. Without it, they were going to have trouble getting back to the ship.
“Okay, Patterson. I’m sending Bronsky and Delvita as backup.”
Meaning Ramirez didn’t trust him. Well, fuck that.
“I’m going inside to check it out, Staff Sergeant.”
“Go ahead.”
He continued up the ramp. Back in boot camp, they’d drilled into his skull the time-venerated list of instructions known as the Eleven General Orders of a Sentry, requiring recruits to shout out each one by rote on demand and according to a specific formula that had not changed in centuries.
Recruit! What’s the first General Order of a Sentry?
Sir! The first General Order of a Sentry is, sir, “to take charge of this post and all government property in view, sir!”
He stepped off the ramp and back into the circular cargo bay where he and his fellow Marines had been packed in like sardines just a few hours before. The compartment was empty, just as they’d left it, with no sign of intruders.
And it felt spooky as hell.
Patterson mumbled the strictly unofficial twelfth General Order of a Sentry: “In case of fire, ring the bell! In case of trouble, run like hell!”
“What was that, Patterson?”
“Nothing, Staff Sergeant. Cargo deck is clear. I’m going up to the first deck.”
“Do it.”
The lander had three levels. Second Deck was the cargo level. First Deck was for passengers, the level occupied by the double-domes. Above that was the flight deck, for the lander’s crew. First Deck was also empty, a circular compartment lined with reclining seats, and a stairway against one curving bulkhead going up.
Patterson opened a channel. “Computer!”
There was no response. What the fuck was going on?
He heard it again: a long, drawn-out shriek, like metal tearing, like electronics dying, like . . . like . . . he didn’t know what it was like. And it was coming from topside, up on the flight deck.
He started up the stairs, taking them two at a time. “Computer! Respond!”
Patterson stepped into the narrow, console-crowded space of the flight deck and into alien strangeness.
“WE’VE GOT a problem on the Elsie, sir.”
St. Clair snapped back from his telepresence link to Ad Astra’s bridge. “What is it?”
Symm turned in her seat to face him, looking worried. “I can’t tell, Lord Commander. A Marine went up to the flight deck to check out a noise. We just lost contact with him!”
St. Clair opened a new channel and let his mind slide into the communications network centered on the lander below. There was an obvious problem with the visual feed: the lander’s flight deck—three acceleration seats crowded in among banks of consoles and instrumentation—appeared weirdly distorted, as if the image, pasted onto a flat, upright plane, had rotated forty-five degrees on its vertical axis and was now being viewed at that angle. There was a rushing sound, like a fierce wind . . . and an all-too-human sounding shriek that went on and on and on. Someone in Marine combat armor was hunched over on the deck at the top of the stairs, on elbows and knees, and the screams were coming from him.
Patterson. The Marine’s name was Patterson.
“Get some help in there,” St. Clair said.
“A couple of Marines are on the way,” Symm told him. “And Lieutenant Bradley has been alerted.”
“And reopen a direct channel to that Marine!”
“Okay . . . we’ve got it open, sir. Suit telemetry, anyway. But the Marine is just . . . just screaming, sir. He won’t respond.”
A scream is a pretty solid response, St. Clair thought, but he didn’t say it out loud. “Can you establish contact with the landing craft’s AI? Is the channel down?”
“Trying, sir,” Hargrove said. “It’s open, but what we’re getting is erratic. An anomaly.”
“What kind of anomaly?”
“Gibberish, my lord.”
“From the AI?”
“Yes, sir.”
So the AI was screaming too. St. Clair shifted to the AI-department channel. “Jablonsky?”
“He’s off-line, Lord Commander,” Lieutenant Watanabe replied. “I’m on it.”
“Find out what’s happening with that AI.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
And please, he thought, let someone get that Marine out of there fast!
PATTERSON COULD feel his mind going.
At first, it was like having his memories replayed on fast-forward. They came, in no particular order, in a storm of vivid impressions, of fast-glimpsed images, of snatches of sound, of bursts of aroma, of rippling sensations of touch and movement and vertigo and temperature differences and pain and pleasure and unexpected taste. And through and behind and above it all was a single intolerable, unending, mind-wracking shriek . . . and only as his throat turned raw and harsh did he realize that the sound was his own screaming.
Worse, far worse, far more consuming, were the emotions . . . fear and rage and joy and depression and relief, each coming hard on the heels of the last in a staccato series of feelings, totally beyond Patterson’s conscious control.
There was something there, inside his head with him. He could feel it . . . almost see it. He clawed uselessly at his helmet, trying to reach it.
If I can just get my helmet open . . .
ST. CLAIR HATED the feeling of abject helplessness. He could see the tragedy unfolding inside his head, but Patterson was tens of thousands of kilometers below, on the disk’s surface, and there was nothing he could do to intervene.
A second armored figure appeared on the stairs, pausing . . . then appearing to struggle against a strong wind. St. Clair could hear that wind behind the screaming, a shrill keening that meant the lander’s hull must have been breached, its atmosphere whistling out into the near vacuum outside. But he couldn’t see anything like a breach in the bulkhead, and there was no hint as to what might have caused that kind of damage in the first place.
The second Marine was trying to get a grip on the first Marine’s armor and drag him toward the stairs, but whatever he was fighting ag
ainst was making the attempt difficult, even impossible. A third Marine appeared behind the second, reaching past him, and together they began to drag the screaming man back off the flight deck.
“CAS!”
“Yes, my lord.”
“We’re going to need a second lander down there.”
“Yes, my lord.”
“Fast as you can. And an ambulance, too.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
There was, of course, a Navy corpsman—the Marine equivalent of a medic—imbedded with the platoon of Marines, but whatever had happened to Patterson was going to require more than a pressure dressing or a shot of anti-bleed nano.
He hoped they could get him back to Ad Astra in time.
CHAPTER
ELEVEN
“Hargrove!” St. Clair snapped. “Get me a different cam! I need a different angle on the lander’s flight deck!”
“Not a lot to work with, Lord Commander. That one angle is from a communicator screen above the stairwell. Wait—use Patterson’s telemetry! You can tap into his helmet cam!”
St. Clair shifted to a new channel, this one showing the view from a small vidcam mounted on Patterson’s armor. He’d been using the same sort of link with the other Marines as he’d followed events in the city outside.
The two Marines who’d just arrived had pulled Patterson up off the deck and were dragging him backward down the stairs to the First Deck. For just an instant, Patterson was staring back into the Flight Deck, still screaming, struggling against the other Marines’ grip.
And for just an instant, St. Clair could see what Patterson was seeing. . . .
A section of the flight deck forward, between the pilot and copilot seats, was oddly twisted, a flat image rotated to one side, an opening in midair. St. Clair had seen that much from the flight deck camera mounted high on the aft bulkhead. But from this lower perspective, he could stare into the vortex of movement and strangeness now occupying the area directly in front of the control console. The shrieking wind was becoming visible now as water droplets formed a swirling fog in the fast-dropping pressure. Within the cloud, three spheres shifted, expanded, shrank, merged—writhing shapes that challenged sanity. Illuminated by the Elsie’s console instrumentation, the three became two . . . then branched into four . . . to five . . . three again . . . apparently solid black objects defying the commonly accepted definition of the word solid.
