by Ian Douglas
“Is that a volcano?” Bronkowsky asked, sounding awed.
“Negative,” Dixon replied. “Not inside an artificial habitat!”
“But—”
“That’s Ad Astra,” Dixon said, “providing a little close fire support.”
The minute sun winked out, but the ground around the explosion continued to glow orange-hot. Large chunks of ground collapsed into the hole, flung out of the habitat, perhaps, by its rotation. The surge of radiation faded away, though that hole in the ground was going to continue glowing with its own heat for some time yet.
“Okay,” Dixon said, opening a channel to the entire Marine company. “Take it single file. Ad Astra just kicked open a door. That’s our way out.”
The Devil Toad banked hard, gained altitude, then twisted around into a vertical dive directly above the hole. Dixon could see a tiny, circular patch of black at the center of the glowing hole. Damn—this was going to be like threading a needle. The opening through a full five hundred meters of rock and subsurface infrastructure was only a hundred meters wide.
But the four Toads fell into single file as they dropped toward the glowing bull’s-eye below. Dixon’s Toad, in the lead, gave a savage burst of acceleration. Molten rock and metal blurred past on all sides . . . and then the lander FPC was out once again in open space.
Wasp fighters, their nanoflage hulls currently displaying their distinctive black-and-yellow parade livery, approached from several directions.
“Okay, Marines,” St. Clair’s voice said over the connection. “Let’s bring you all home.”
“Copy that,” Dixon replied. “We’re on our way in.”
THE MEETING of department heads hours later took place entirely in non-virtual, non-electronic space.
St. Clair was still feeling rattled. Modern, everyday life depended absolutely on the security and the integrity of virtual reality, the interplay of electronic systems and networks that filled so-called real space with layer upon layer upon hidden layer of alternate and additional realities. Every person on board Ad Astra had cerebral implants, which they used for everything from communicating with others to downloading information to opening doors. For a terrifying few minutes, there, St. Clair had wondered if they were going to have to abandon all network instrumentalities. They’d survived—thanks to Newton’s cyberwar skills—and the attacker had pulled back, but St. Clair was not sure he could trust the ship’s networks any longer . . . or risk linking in. Newton would be there, of course, and he would be able to download and display information if necessary.
But St. Clair was feeling uncomfortably like a cyberphobe. He knew he was going to have to link in to the network again . . . and the thought terrified him.
He caught Symm’s eye across the conference table and attempted a smile. She didn’t return it, and he shrugged. Everyone was on edge after the Battle of the Torus Knot.
Lieutenant Dixon, however, gave him a nod and what might have been a shy grin. Cameron looked grim. Jablonsky looked as unflappable as ever, the quintessential geek, oblivious to all save his machines. What, St. Clair wondered, was his secret? It had been his machines—the AIs within Ad Astra’s cybernetic networks—that had very nearly killed them all.
But, then again, those same AIs had fought the invader off. Maybe Jablonsky and his people simply felt that their faith in Newton and the other ship AIs had been perfectly justified.
Whatever it was, he hoped he could find that same faith, and soon.
“Thank you all for coming on such short notice,” St. Clair said to the crowd as the noise in the room died down. “We’re here to analyze our encounter a few hours ago. Encounters, I should say, because it’s clear now that we’re dealing with at least two different phenomena.
“Lieutenant Dixon’s people engaged the hyperdimensional creatures we first met on the Alderson disk, black, malleable creatures that appear to move within and through several higher dimensions, and which appear to consist of, at least in part, dark matter. Some of Dixon’s people, and most of us, encountered something else—an intelligently directed energy that appears to move through cybernetworks or communication nets, and causes damage to those parts of the brain hooked up to our cyberware implants. Are we all on the same page?”
There were nods and murmurs of agreement around the table. St. Clair pushed on.
“Dr. Sokolov?”
“Yes, Lord Commander.”
“What’s the butcher’s bill? How many people did we lose?”
The medical officer considered the question for a moment. “Deaths: eight Marines. However, at least seventy people have reported to sick bay since the battle, or been brought in by corpsman teams. A variety of symptoms—post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, various phobias. Four people in critical condition with major damage to their cerebral cortex—burns, apparently brought on by a partial melting of their brain implants. Five patients with extreme psychosis. They don’t know where they are, can’t relate to the world around them. It’s as if they’re in the grip of severe paranoid schizophrenia. Delusional, with powerful hallucinations. Two more are in complete catatonia.” He shook his head. “Very scary stuff.”
When a doctor says something like “very scary stuff,” you pay attention. “Can you do anything for them?”
Sokolov gave an expressive shrug. “Perhaps. It’ll take time. We can nanosurgically rebuild the physically damaged portions of the brains of the four in critical. For the others . . .” He shook his head. “As I say, it will take time. A lot of time.”
“Do what you can for them, Doctor.”
“Of course.”
“Mr. Cameron.”
“Sir.”
“Lieutenant Dixon’s report makes some damned unusual statements. Among other . . . improbables, he points out that the dark matter entities can be shot from certain angles, but that other angles allow you to see the entity but not hit it with a direct shot from a laser weapon. On the face of it, that sounds impossible. Would you care to comment?”
“I think Dr. Sandoval would be the appropriate expert to talk to about this,” the tactical officer replied.
“Dr. Sandoval is twenty-some thousand light years away at the moment, Senior Lieutenant. With the rest of the civilians.”
“I . . . I know, my lord.”
“Do your best. We don’t expect an academic dissertation on higher-dimensional physics.”
“Good, because you won’t get one, sir.” He sighed. “Okay, as I understand it, the aliens are vulnerable when they’re inside those . . . pockets, or tunnels, or whatever they are. When it looks like a door is opening in space, and you can see through into their space.”
“Go on.”
“It sounds impossible because light travels in a straight line, so if you see one of these critters, you ought to be able to hit it with a laser.”
St. Clair glanced at Dixon. “Is that substantially correct, Lieutenant?”
“Yes, sir. It was damned frustrating in there, I can tell you. Sometimes you could kill the buggers, and sometimes you couldn’t.”
“We had Newton analyzing that,” Cameron went on. “He suggests that there is a fundamental difference between ordinary light and a beam or a pulse from a laser. Ordinary light scatters, whereas the photons in a laser are all traveling parallel to one another, and with their frequencies in lockstep. It’s a laser’s defining characteristic.”
“That’s all well and good, Senior Lieutenant. But how can we see the thing when we can’t shoot it?”
“Like I said, ordinary light scatters. Light from our three dimensions passes through one of these doorways, okay? Some of it travels at just the right angle that it does interact with the dark matter—it reflects off of it, something it apparently can only do when higher dimensions are involved. As it does so, it scatters. Some comes straight back along the same angle it went in . . . and the rest comes out any which way. If it reflects at all, it carries back information about the surface that reflected it . . . even tho
ugh light traveling back the other way along that same path is going to pass right through the target as if it wasn’t even there.”
“I’m gathering this only happens inside these tunnels or openings into higher-dimensional space.”
“Yes, sir. Like I said, photons only reflect from higher-dimensional aspects of these things, and the gateways seem to be like tunnels or doors leading to higher dimensions.”
“What about when they just come out of thin air?” Symm asked. “They’re not using dimensional doorways then.”
“No, they’re not. We can also see the dark-matter creatures when they . . . when they intersect with our three-dimensional continuum. That’s when you get those weird, black spheres in midair.”
“That’s when they’re reaching down out of the fourth dimension and into our third,” St. Clair suggested. He was remembering the earlier briefing, and the discussion of higher dimensions in string theory.
“Exactly, sir. That’s how they can reach in and grab one of us, pull us out of this space and into theirs. . . .”
St. Clair was recording the conversation on his in-head electronics. He wished he could share it with Newton, but didn’t quite dare, yet, to link in. Damn it, he would have to, no matter what.
“All fascinating, I’m sure,” St. Clair said. “But does it get us anywhere? Can we use any of this to create weapons or tactics that will let us come to grips with these hellish things?”
“Actually, Lord Commander,” Cameron said, “I think it does exactly that.”
“Then for the love of God, Senior Lieutenant Cameron,” St. Clair said, “let’s hear it.”
CHAPTER
TWENTY
Lieutenant Christopher “Kit-Kat” Merrick drifted through emptiness, ten AUs out from the Kroajid matbrain. From here, the megastructure the Kroajid called Galactic Node 495 was almost invisible, a dark gray sphere smaller than the full moon as seen from Earth. There were tatters and rents in the cloak of habitats and power collectors, enough that a faint, bloody glow showed from deep within as some of the star’s light leaked out past the shells.
Beyond the matbrain, the stars of the galactic core shone in teeming vistas of light—in thick-clustered stars and tattered streamers of gas, in the faint ghosts of faded supernovae, the piercing blue-white gleam of young, hot suns newly awakened from stellar nurseries, the deeper glow of far more ancient stars banked thick and deep behind the crenellated rampart nebulae embracing the core suns.
The blaze and glory of the background stars were solid enough and bright enough that some of the light filtered all the way through the matbrain, which actually made it harder to see. Merrick and the other Stardogs were ignoring the structure for the most part. It was too large for them to get a real mental grasp of the thing . . . and the idea that a few trillion Kroajid spiders were virtual-dreaming away eternity inside was just a little too bizarre to think about. What the hell did a thing that looked like a two-meter-long spider dream about, anyway? Giant flies? Merrick shuddered.
“Hey, Skipper?” That was Lieutenant Rick Thornton.
“Yeah, Thorny,” Lieutenant Janis Colbert replied. GFA-86’s commanding officer sounded distracted.
“I’m getting some funny grav readings out here. You see ’em?”
“Affirmative,” Colbert replied. “I’m watching them now.”
“What the hell is happening?”
“I’m not sure. All hands—we’re getting high mass readings in Sector Three. Keep your scanners peeled.”
Merrick looked at the indicated sector, and saw immediately what the others were seeing. Nothing material was visible, not yet . . . but several more astronomical units out from the matbrain, space was bending, as if under the stress of something very large, very massive.
“Tellus Control, Tellus Control,” Colbert called over the squadron channel to base. “This is Eight-Six. We’re picking up a spatial anomaly out here . . .”
She continued speaking, listing the navigational coordinates and the strength of the sensor readings, which suggested something as massive as a large star. The problem, however, was that Tellus was some eighty-two light-minutes away. It would take that long for the warning, crawling inbound at the speed of light, to reach them.
Worse, the disturbance was 3.5 astronomical units out from GFA-86’s patrol area, which meant that what they were recording now had already happened almost twenty-nine minutes ago. That was the big problem in combat across planetary distances. By the time you identified a target, it had already moved, changed, or vanished—possibly a long time ago—and things were never quite what they seemed.
And that left the Stardogs hanging out here on the thin, cold edge of nothingness. Their patrol orders were to watch for any approaching threat to the Tellus habitats, and use their discretion about engaging the threat if that seemed necessary . . . but chances were good that anything they ran into out here was going to be a lot bigger than they could handle. Merrick thought that the CSP mission had been motivated purely by politics, a need by the politicians now in control of Tellus to be seen to be doing something.
Hence, the deployment of a CSP. The acronym stood for combat space patrol, and was the modern descendent of the CAPs flown by atmospheric fighters off of seagoing naval carriers a couple of centuries ago. The whole concept of a CSP was predicated on the assumption that once you spotted a threat, you could actually do something about it.
Now, though, they were reduced to pretending to do something useful, while the politicians back at the habs took credit for it.
“Fuck,” he told an uncaring cosmos. “Didn’t we fight a second revolution a century ago to kick out the damned politicrats?”
“What are you going on about, Kit-Kat?” Lieutenant Yun-Lutz asked him.
Shit. He’d not realized the channel was open. “Just wondering about the politicians and what we’re supposed to be doing out here,” he replied. “If something like that small, mobile moon shows up, what are we supposed to do . . . wave?”
“I don’t now, Kit,” Yun-Lutz replied. “Why don’t you ask ’em?”
Space ahead, at the center of the distortion, was opening.
It was like the vortex or hyperdimensional gateway that had opened in PriFly; Merrick had seen the recordings. This one, though, was far larger . . . perhaps a thousand kilometers across, and inside it something was emerging.
It was a ship. It had to be a ship, but it was fifty kilometers long and half that in thickness. Under extreme magnification, it showed a kind of pixelated effect, picked out in black and red.
Merrick had seen that color scheme before. “Dark Raiders!” he said. “Sliverships!”
“Can’t be,” Thornton replied.
“No way,” Lieutenant Timmons Howe added. “Those were little things! Fighters!”
“Look at them under high-mag,” Merrick insisted. “You can see them all bundled together.”
The pixelation effect was due to the huge number of forty-meter fighters melded together into a single super ship: a battleship comprising billions of individual sewing needles held together by glue or a powerful magnetic field. From a distance, the surface looked fairly smooth and regular. Close up, it was jagged and broken, resembling some sort of surreal 3-D fractal.
The immense monstrosity was moving at a quarter-c straight toward Node 495. As it moved, a faint wisp of smoke seemed to spread out from the surface . . . thousands upon thousands of individual sliverships breaking off from the main body and accelerating in a thin cloud.
“How the hell do we stop that?” Thornton demanded.
“We don’t,” Colbert replied. “We run for home, and hope our warning reaches them in time.”
The twelve Wasp fighters flipped around onto a new bearing, one aimed straight for the distant, spherical matbrain. “Back to the stable, people,” Colbert called. “Maximum acceleration. If those needle ships beat us there, we might not have a stable to return to!”
“AND JUST what do you expect of us?” Ad
ler asked. Leaning forward, his elbows on the polished surface of the conference table before him, he steepled his fingers, an unconscious gesture, but he smiled when he saw what he’d done. According to the psytechers, steepled fingers were a nonverbal signal indicating dominance or control of a situation, and it could be used to impress lesser humans and, perhaps, to manipulate them in a conversation.
The problem was, he was talking to the entity known as Gus, about as nonhuman a being as you could imagine. Gus didn’t have fingers to steeple, and his nonverbal signs, if he had them, would be literally unimaginable to a human.
Gus was filling much of the wall screen in Conference Room 5, which Adler had sequestered for this meeting. With him, sitting around the table, were a couple of dozen human secretaries and assistants, Ambassador Lloyd and people from his staff, and five corporate-Senate agents—the corpreps.
Perhaps, Adler thought, glancing at Lord Hsien, his finger-steepling had been intended for them. Those corpreps tended to imagine that they were calling the shots. He was going to have to keep them on a short leash.
The bristling facial hairs around the Kroajid’s clustered eyes were rippling and swirling quickly, producing their characteristic internal-combustion-motor purr. When the Kroajid became excited, the sound became a roar.
“Your help, Lord Adler,” the Kroajid said, its hair-rippling buzz smoothly translated by a Newton clone. “Your help in defending this Gateway from the Dark.”
On a private channel to Newton, Adler asked for elaboration. St. Clair had copied the AI resident within Ad Astra and left the copy behind in Tellus—standard AI procedure in this sort of situation—and Adler had not been able so far to detect any difference in the system at all.
“Gus is asking,” Newton told him, “for what amounts to a military alliance against the Graal Tchotch.”
“The Andromedan Dark.”
“Exactly.”
Adler wasn’t entirely sure he believed in the thing. An invisible monster, made out of dark matter, able to seep through alien dimensions and kill people from the inside out? He wasn’t yet sure what had killed Francesca or driven Patterson insane. He still thought it likely that the attacker had been some sort of automated defensive system within the Alderson disk infrastructure, a neat and orderly theory that fit the facts much better. The Andromedan Dark, he thought, was nothing more than some sort of alien boogeyman . . . perhaps a myth out of some ancient Kroajid cultural heritage.
