Dark Mind

by Ian Douglas

  It was as though they’d lost the heart for an all-out push . . . those of them that actually had hearts in the first place.

  And those were the civilizations encountered in the epoch of Humankind—next-door neighbors, astronomically speaking, to Earth. Dozens more alien species had evolved among the stars of the N’gai Cluster almost a billion years ago, come through time, and established part of their empire in what was for them the remote future. Why? What was their motive; what was behind their demand that humans give up key portions of their fast-evolving technology?

  None of it made sense . . . and it wasn’t enough to shrug and assume that it didn’t make sense because aliens were different.

  “Consider,” Konstantin went on. “Which technologies did the Sh’daar demand that humans stop developing?”

  “The GRIN technologies,” Gray replied.

  “And what technologies might particularly worry a bacterial-emergent intelligence?”

  “I don’t know. Medical technologies of all kinds, I suppose. . . .”

  “In particular, medical nanotechnology,” Konstantin told him. “Genetics, both to improve the human immune response and to attack harmful bacteria. Robotics, which is key to medical nanotechnology. Information systems—computers—which is also key to programming nanotech in order to seek out and destroy hostile bacteria, or engage in large-scale genetic engineering.”

  “My God . . .”

  “There’s more. What happens when a civilization transcends . . . when it enters its technological singularity?”

  “Well . . . I don’t think anybody really knows, do they? I’ve heard lots of possibilities.”

  “Indeed. Two possibilities include uploading organic minds into robotic bodies, however, which would be effectively immortal . . . or uploading minds as pure data into advanced, hyperintelligent computers.”

  “The Baondyeddi on Heimdall,” Gray said. “The Etched Cliffs . . .”

  “Indeed. Organic beings who have removed themselves from the ills, dangers, and tribulations of organic existence by becoming electronic life forms. But there were other possibilities as well. Genetic alterations to improve the species, essentially creating completely new species, for instance, or symbiosis between mutually alien life forms to create new forms. An emergent bacterial intelligence, for example . . .”

  “Wait! You’re saying it was fucking germs that were behind the Sh’daar grand scheme?” Gray shook his head. “I can’t believe that. That’s just too weird. . . .”

  “We do not yet have proof,” Konstantin admitted. “But thanks to my being able to interface with your internal hardware during your . . . struggle against the paramycoplasmid bacteria, I have begun tapping into a great deal of data stored within the bacterial substrate . . . the bacteria’s group mind, if you will.

  “And we believe it likely that the paramycoplasm genus is both highly intelligent and highly motivated. That it is the paramycoplasmids that fear a technological singularity . . . and have been seeking at all costs to prevent organic life from going down that path.”

  “Wait-wait-wait,” Gray said, struggling with the strange concept. “You really are saying that it’s the bacteria who are behind this? That want to communicate? That are driving the Sh’daar? . . .”

  “More precisely, it would be the symbiosis that is running things . . . the union of a bacterial aggregate with each of the different sapient species.”

  “But what the hell does all of that have to do with them talking to us?”

  “We’ve known for centuries, now, that bacteria can influence their human hosts,” Konstantin explained. “When the microbiota require a certain element for growth, they use chemical signals to create cravings for foods containing that element. Chocolate, for example. Or sugar.”

  “That’s not communication.”

  “I must disagree, Admiral. The organism we call Paramycoplasma subtilis is simply a little more sophisticated in its chemical signaling than the microbes with which you grew up. . . .”

  Stop. Kill.

  Gray had almost forgotten the impression of commands he’d felt during that savage and ultramicroscopic battle he’d witnessed within himself. What he remembered now was dreamlike, on the point of evaporating entirely.

  But that had definitely been communication.

  Intelligent microbes—no, worse.

  Intelligent microbes guiding galactic destiny.

  Chapter Fourteen

  12 December 2425

  USMA Lander Lucas

  Approaching Heimdall

  1210 hours, TFT

  “Fifteen minutes to atmosphere, Captain,” Lieutenant Peters announced.

  “Any response from Big Brother?”

  “Not a peep,” Hagelund said. “Yet.”

  Yet . . .

  They’d made the passage from Thrymheim to Bifrost at a painfully slow pace, drifting along at less than 3,000 kilometers per second—about one percent of the speed of light—which was a snail’s pace for interplanetary travel. The trek had taken the better part of three days, with almost a thousand Marines crammed into the assault lander’s drop capsules, their biological needs taken care of by their armor rather than through more traditional measures. Taggart could only imagine the discomfort their living cargo had been forced to endure.

  But the cautionary strategy appeared to have paid off. By limiting their velocity to a few thousand kps, they weren’t having any troubles passing through the strange, alien light structures surrounding Bifrost and Heimdall, and they didn’t seem to be attracting unwanted attention, either.

  The mission planners had not been certain what had triggered the Rosetter response to the Himmelschloss battlegroup or to the flight of fighters that had been wiped out. They’d been approaching slowly as well. Perhaps it had been their numbers that had upset the aliens, or the fact that Heimdall had been so close to the center of the alien activity. Perhaps it had been something else.

  All that matters is that they aren’t trying to destroy us now.

  In the past hours, the AI controlling the Lucas’s flight had slowed them even further—a slow drift in toward the ringed gas giant, which showed ahead as a vast, bloated black disk against the heavens, framed by the knife-slash white of the illuminated portions of the rings to either side. Heimdall was a smaller disk of darkness framed by the larger, deep in eclipse. Taggart could easily make out the ghostly blue and green glow of the moon’s aurorae ringing both poles. The Rosette alien structures were so tenuous as to be invisible when you were actually flying through them. In the distance, though, great curving arcs, bands, and beams of golden light hung, vast and enigmatic, against the stars.

  “Wait a sec,” Hagelund said. “What’s that? Coming up from Heimdall.”

  “Looks like we’ve got company,” Taggart said. “Reduce speed. . . .”

  Thousands—no, hundreds of thousands of glowing motes. They looked like fireflies. They ascended from the dark surface of Heimdall in a swarm, sweeping out from and around the Earth-sized moon with a motion reminiscent of a murmuration of starlings on Earth. Lucas’s bridge team was transfixed by the sight of a vast cloud, seething . . . surging . . . looping and twisting and folding in upon itself, now dividing, now recombining, now thinning, now compacting into almost solid masses of light as it rose from and enveloped the disk of Heimdall. . . .

  The cloud divided once more, a relatively small mass of lights streaming off from the main body and accelerating. Despite the fact that it was a small percentage, it assumed an immense, twisting wing-shape as it approached the assault lander.

  That’s a lot of lights.

  “What’s our velocity?” Taggart demanded.

  “Twenty-five kps,” Peters replied.

  “Reduce speed to ten kps,” she snapped. Damn. She had access to those data. She wasn’t thinking, transfixed by the sight ahead.

  Lucas decelerated further. “Captain?” a voice said over a private channel. It was Colonel Jamison, waiting out the approach
down in one of Lucas’s pod bays. “What are those things? We’re seeing them through the ship feed.”

  “Not sure yet, Colonel,” she replied. “Sit tight. I’m going to try to drift through.”

  To his credit, Jamison didn’t comment. The Marines were effectively trapped and helpless in their pods, and if those swarms of lights up ahead turned nasty, there was absolutely nothing they could do to fight back . . . or to run.

  Something thudded off of Lucas’s hull.

  “Soften us up a bit, Ross,” she told Hagelund.

  “Aye, aye, skipper.”

  The hull of the Lucas—most of her external surfaces, in fact—was nanomatrix, a type of titanium-ceramic alloy cast in particles that could rearrange themselves into different shapes for different purposes. Right now, Lucas’s external surfaces were held rigidly in place, with precisely calculated angles and surfaces designed to scatter incoming radio or laser signals into space, rendering the ship almost invisible to anyone looking for her. The surface also absorbed radio and light energy; by softening the hull further, Taggart was trying to get the ship to drink up even more incoming radiation, at the cost of losing some of its scattering capability. If she could find the sweet spot between scattering and absorption, Lucas would all but vanish from the aliens’ screens.

  Assuming, of course, that they were using technologies in their scans that were even remotely recognizable to humans.

  The swarm of glowing fireflies was all around them, swirling and merging and thinning and expanding. The main body of the swarm was behind them now, moving farther astern.

  “I think,” Hagelund said very quietly, as though fearful that the aliens would hear him, “you spoofed ’em.”

  “That,” Taggart replied, “or they decided we’re harmless.”

  “Either way,” Peters said, “I’ll take it.”

  Me, too, Taggart thought.

  An hour passed without further incident, and they drifted down through shimmering curtains of light toward the moon, Heimdall. The glowing motes continued to swarm and swoop outside, completely enveloping the moon and dispersing far out into space. Large numbers appeared to be streaming through the night-side atmosphere of giant Bifrost directly ahead, forming something like a vast wheel of light at least twenty thousand kilometers across. What, Taggart wondered, could the structure’s purpose possibly be? The Lucas brushed individual devices several more times, but with no apparent damage. She allowed herself to relax fractionally. We might be able to pull this off after all.

  Moving now at only a few kilometers per second, the Lucas swept past the moon just as sunrise exploded across one limb of Bifrost. Heimdall was coming out of eclipse, and the ruddy sunlight, weak and thin as it was, touched vast ice sheets with flashes of ruby flame and glowed across endless deserts of barren rock.

  The Lucas began changing shape, switching from a utilitarian teardrop to something with large down-canted wings that could grab and hold on to atmosphere.

  Heimdall was heavily glaciated, with land areas covered by cold, empty desert from pole to pole. There were two small, landlocked oceans edged with ice and choked with floes. Mountains girdled the equator, thrust high by the same tidal stresses that kept surface temperatures here a few degrees below zero and not, as would otherwise have been the case, at minus two-hundred something. Lucas’s scanners fed a constant stream of hard data through Taggart’s implants, revealing a world cold and dead and utterly devoid of life.

  Once, though, she knew, Heimdall had been a living world. Kapteyn’s Star had been a part of the N’gai Cluster. Xenosophontologists who’d studied the ruins here believed that Heimdall originally had been the homeworld for the Baondyeddi, one of the ur-Sh’daar species that had dominated that dwarf galaxy hundreds of millions of years ago.

  She knew the history, as it had been revealed both by archaeologists here on Heimdall, and by the crew of the America when it first penetrated the N’gai Cluster of 876 million years ago and tapped into Sh’daar records. The large, disk-shaped Baondyeddi had specialized in genetic manipulation. Rather than encasing themselves in armor when they wanted to explore a hostile alien world, they’d bred new versions of themselves that could endure, even thrive under those alien conditions. Over tens of thousands of years, they’d also genegineered smaller, more nimble versions of themselves, with brains configured to mesh with electronic prostheses, literally becoming part of their own robotic systems.

  As true cyborgs, then, part organic but mostly machine, they’d explored their tiny galaxy of a few billion stars and helped forge the ur-Sh’daar civilization. Eventually, though, even that tiny remaining link with flesh and blood became an impediment. Virtual reality offered, it seemed to many Baondyeddi, an existence far more rich, complex, and rewarding than so-called real life. Billions of them had uploaded their minds into powerful networks of AI computers.

  In time, their entire homeworld had become a single such network. Complex circuitry had been grown into the planet’s bedrock, creating a massively redundant computer net capable of modeling entire universes. Not all Baondyeddi, by any means, but many—perhaps most—had uploaded themselves into that network, together with some billions of individuals of other species seeking a kind of eternity. Powered by the heat generated by the tidal effects of massive Bifrost, the planetary computer was programmed to ride out the eons in ultra-slow motion, the digital beings within the network experiencing seconds for each year—or even century—passing outside. They’d seemed confident in their ability to survive in that state for trillions of years, until the ultimate heat death of the cosmos.

  And then the Rosette Aliens had shown up, destroyed the research stations studying the Baondyeddi, and descended on the ancient planet like hungry locusts from the sky. What might have happened to the digital population of Heimdall was unknown; the xenosophontology team on board the Lucas would be trying to discover that.

  Once the Marines had secured the landing zone.

  “Colonel Jamison?” Taggart called over a private channel. “We’re coming up on the drop zone.”

  “Right. Thanks for the lift.”

  “Anytime, Colonel. Good luck!”

  The actual drop was handled by the Lucas’s AI. Taggart felt the thump as two of the first drop pods fired, followed in rapid succession by dozens more. Four hundred Marines, packed four to a pod, were fired into the Heimdall night as the Lucas pursued a mathematically perfect curve across the sky at an altitude of three thousand meters. The rest remained on board for delivery straight to the surface.

  Bays swung open along Lucas’s flanks, disgorging twelve stubby black darts—Marine AS-90 Hornet fighters on CAP.

  “Cappers deployed!” Lieutenant Liam Davies called. The Marine assault force had brought along its own Combat Air Patrol in the absence of a star carrier.

  “Copy that, CAP-One,” Taggart heard Jamison reply. “Go wide and keep your eyes peeled. I don’t want anything sneaking up on us while we’re down here.”

  “Roger, Heimdall Command.”

  Taggart tried not to think about what highly advanced technology might mean for Primitives trying to set up a ground perimeter. Invisibility was a distinct possibility.

  So was collapsing the entire planet. She wished she could turn her brain off. . . .

  The curve described by the Lucas tightened as the assault lander moved to the center of the LZ.

  “There’s the old base, Skipper,” Peters reported. An icon danced against the computer imagery painted for Taggart’s inner eye. Heimdall Base had been a ground research facility operating in conjunction with the now-vanished Stanford torus called Heimdall Orbital. It appeared to have been destroyed; little remained but a black stain on the bare rock. Wisps of dry snow blew across barren rock and among twisted support beams.

  For not the first time, the question on everyone’s mind was, what the hell had happened here?

  A kilometer away, the Temple Ruins sprawled across a flat-topped plateau. The Pan-European explorers her
e had named it the Temple because it was evocative of terrestrial structures like the Parthenon or Baalbek . . . but in far greater disarray. Sections of columns littered the ground, and little remained of the intact structure save a cracked and broken base of stone blocks.

  Another mystery hosted by this cold and enigmatic world.

  As the Lucas continued to descend, passing above the Ruins, the images displayed within Taggart’s brain suddenly flickered and fuzzed, blasted by white noise. For just an instant, she saw . . . something else—the Temple whole and rising in soaring majesty above a dark blue-green and verdant landscape. Where there was barren rock now, she saw parks and vegetation. . . .

  And then reality reasserted itself, the vegetation replaced by windswept rock. Taggart blinked, trying to clear her head.

  What the hell?

  “Skipper!” Hagelund called. “I just saw—”

  “I know! I know! I saw it too!”

  “What was that?” Peters asked.

  “I don’t know . . . and it doesn’t matter. Right now we concentrate on getting down!”

  The ship’s AI, evidently, had seen nothing. Changing shape once more, growing rounder and flatter with a bulge in the middle, the Lucas slowed to a hover, then descended, touching down on the wind-swept surface of rock and snow. Wide-spread legs bit at the surface and the ramps came down, disgorging the rest of the Marine assault force.

  “Heimdall Command, this is CAP-One! We’re getting weird interference when we fly over the Temple area!”

  “What kind of interference?”

  Static blasted back for a moment, then cleared. “It’s okay now, Command. For a sec, there, I thought we were flying over a forest! Everything was dark blue-green, and there were buildings on the surface!”