Dark Mind

by Ian Douglas

  An antiproton beam clawed at America’s shield cap . . . a glancing strike deflected by the gravitic shield.

  With six squadrons on board, America carried a theoretical complement of seventy-two fighters, plus various auxilliary craft and SAR vehicles, but those squadrons had taken losses at Tabby’s Star. According to the CAG, they’d put sixty-three Starblades up.

  Forty fighters, Gray saw, were still in the sky.

  When, he thought, did the number of losses become unacceptable? He felt like the entire situation was spinning wildly out of his control, now. America should not have had to face this threat alone. Perhaps the better strategic choice would have been to take the Omega Code back to Earth . . . but, then, he’d expected to arrive here and join up with the Grand Fleet.

  Had they arrived forty AUs out, as planned, he probably would have ordered America back to Earth . . . but somehow the Rosetters had forced his hand and dropped the star carrier into this hellfire cauldron, leaving Gray with damned few choices.

  In fact . . . with no choices at all. He had to use the Omega Code . . . and pray that it worked, pray that it got through to the enemy.

  A thought came, unbidden, of Laurie Taggart’s Ancient Aliens, about praying to them and finding out that they and the Rosetters were one and the same. He laughed at that—the laugh carrying just a touch of hysteria with it.

  “Sir?” Gutierrez asked in his mind. She sounded concerned.

  Well, hell, she had a right to be. “Nothing. Steady as she goes . . .”

  The special package, he saw, was still there, highlighted on the screens in a flashing green box. Eight thousand kilometers to go . . . less than twice the diameter of Romeo One . . .

  “Have the ship’s helm move us closer to Heimdall,” Konstantin whispered in Gray’s mind.

  “Why? We don’t want to get them killed too. . . .”

  “It is important.”

  “Admiral!” Carolyn Sanger’s voice said. “Konstantin says—”

  “I hear.” And, almost despite himself, he trusted. Again, there were few choices. “Helm! Bring us eight degrees to port. I want to skim past Heimdall.”

  “Coming eight degrees to port, aye, aye, sir.”

  The starscape ahead shifted slightly as America rolled left. Nuclear fireballs detonated in a flaring, savage string, momentarily blocking Romeo One from view.

  At six thousand kilometers per second and accelerating at a thousand gravities, the star carrier bore down on the moon.

  “You may pull off from Heimdall now,” Konstantin said.

  “Why did—”

  “It was important that I make a transmission—”

  Before the thought was completed, America bucked and shuddered as something hit her shield cap. Alarm klaxons sounded, and Gray saw a cascade of red warning lights both on the consoles around him and within his in-head windows. America had just been hit, and very, very badly.

  “Keep firing!”

  Acceleration had ceased, the drive projection ring badly damaged. A schematic of the ship showed perhaps a quarter of the shield cap gone . . . just gone, vaporized by . . . was it that hellish Rosetter antimatter weapon?

  No. There were, he now saw, points in surrounding space—widely separated—that seemed somehow anchored in the fabric of space itself . . . little knots of intense gravitational energy associated with those vast structures of light filling surrounding space. America had plowed into one . . . like striking a mine.

  The gravitic shields hadn’t helped a bit.

  Or, Gray reasoned, maybe they had. Maybe the entire ship would be an expanding cloud of hot plasma right now if . . . if . . .

  There were no more ifs, no more choices. America was tumbling, now, surrounded by a vast sparkling sphere of ice particles as her water reserves spilled into hard vacuum. Her drive was out, maneuvering was out, shields down . . . damn it, was anything working?

  Weapons. The railguns were down, but most of the ship’s weapons were still on-line. Mallory was directing them at the alien planet, trying to clear a path for the fighters.

  Gray watched. There was nothing else to do, save, possibly, order abandon ship. He didn’t want to give that order, not yet, not until he knew the special package had reached its target. But he wasn’t sure how much longer he could wait.

  Antimatter beams lashed out from the artificial world, and another handful of fighters flared and died.

  The craft highlighted by the green box was one of them.

  Gray sagged. God . . . the mission had failed . . . failed. Their AI package had been destroyed. . . .

  “Captain Gutierrez,” he said. His voice cracked, and he tried again. “Captain, you may give the order to abandon ship.”

  “Abandon ship, aye, sir.”

  They’d lost . . .

  They’d lost everything.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  26 December 2425

  VFA-96, Black Demons

  Kapteyn’s Star

  0209 hours, TFT

  Lieutenant Don Gregory saw the destruction of the special-package fighter and his world crumbled within. What the hell was supposed to happen now?

  They were taking losses, too many of them. And the whole point of the operation had just vanished in a flash of light.

  “Break off, Demons,” Mackey said. “Break off! Pull back and regroup!”

  “Damn it, Mac,” DeHaviland called. “Was it all for nothing?”

  Gregory heard the rage and frustration in her voice, and felt the emotion behind it. So many lost. To retreat now, with nothing to show for it . . .

  “There’s nothing we can do against that thing,” Mackey replied. “Attacking a fucking planet with fighters! It’s nuts!”

  Gregory was already hauling his Starblade around, continuing to jink as Rosetter beams snapped and speared past him. He saw DeHaviland’s fighter just a few kilometers away. “C’mon, Cyn,” he said. “You heard the man—”

  The beam slashed past DeHaviland’s fighter, shearing off a piece of it in a gout of white light as hot as the core of an exploding sun. “I’m hit!”

  “Pull up, Cyn! Get out of there. . . .”

  But her fighter was continuing on a straight line, arrowing straight toward the center of the looming artificial world. “Controls out! I’m—”

  Her fighter impacted on the alien world’s surface, a solitary flash of light all but lost in that vast, black emptiness.

  “Cyn!” Gregory felt that impact in the pit of his stomach, a wrenching, emotional blow like a savage punch. For a horrible, yawning moment, he felt the urge to fling his fighter after hers.

  “Easy, Don,” Ruxton said.

  “Yeah,” Caswell added. “You’re okay. You’re okay . . .”

  No. He wasn’t. But he felt the concern in his friends’ voices, felt them drawing him back from the precipice.

  “Gregory?” Mackey said. “C’mon, son . . .”

  “On my way.” The words were flat, utterly devoid of life.

  He felt . . . nothing. Zero.

  Nothing but the bleak pit of depression opening beneath him once more.

  TC/USNA CVS America

  Flag Bridge

  Kapteyn’s Star

  0209 hours, TFT

  The evacuation was going as smoothly as such things could go. Gray remained strapped into his seat, feeling the gentle tug of acceleration as America, what was left of her, spun gently through emptiness.

  “Sara? I suggest you make your way to an escape pod.”

  “Didn’t you hear, Admiral? The Captain always goes down with her ship. What about you?”

  “I don’t really think there’s much point.”

  “I didn’t think suicide was your style, Admiral.”

  “At least it’ll save them the cost of court-martialing me. Captain Gutierrez, I order you to the pods.”

  “I don’t think so. I hate crowds.”

  “Insubordination? Disobeying a direct lawful order?”

  “Hey . . . I�
��ve learned from the best. Sir.”

  She had climbed up out of the bridge and was clinging to the side of his command chair. The gravs were low—perhaps a tenth of a G. For a long moment, they watched the stars drift past on the bridge screens.

  “Okay, Konstantin,” he said over his private channel with the AI. “We did everything you said. It wasn’t enough. You have any other words of wisdom for us?”

  “I am continuing with the attack,” Konstantin’s voice said.

  “Huh? What? How?”

  “I took the liberty of copying the cloned version of myself with the Omega Code virus within it . . . a number of times. We are attacking the Rosette entity from several distinct avenues as we speak.”

  “Avenues? What avenues? What are you talking about?”

  “Allies, Admiral. We have a number of allies here.”

  It dawned on Gray that Konstantin had not been entirely honest with him. This was, he decided, not entirely surprising . . . but he was furious at having been used, at having been played for a dupe. What else had the super-AI lied about . . . or withheld?

  Then he realized that just as he had deceived HQMILCOM and the rest of the fleet in order to do what he thought needed to be done, Konstantin had done the same with him. The AI had known that Gray didn’t trust machine intelligences, and had taken that fact into account as it had developed its plans.

  “Who is running things, Konstantin?” he asked. “Humans or machines?”

  “Humans, Admiral. Of course. But I needed to allow for human weakness.”

  “What weakness?”

  “Humans,” Konstantin replied, “are so terribly slow. . . .”

  Virtual Space

  Kapteyn’s Star

  0209 hours, TFT

  The planet-sized computer physically embodied in the Etched Cliffs of Heimdall defined a space that in one limited sense was not real at all. For nearly a billion years it had resided within the alien computer network, providing a world—no, an entire universe—within which the Baondyeddi and other species who’d refused the Technological Singularity when it had been offered to them could continue as digital constructs. The machine network grown and etched into the silent Heimdall cliffs provided a virtual space vast enough to hold millions of worlds, entire galaxies, and endless possibilities for growth and development and challenge and ongoing ecstasy for both individual beings and for the population as a whole.

  The population of Heimdall, in fact, had numbered some trillions of individuals, though many of those were duplicates living out a multiplicity of parallel lives. Their control of virtual time gave them a measure of security against the so-called real universe outside; by ticking off a second for every passing century or so, they expected to ride out the passing eons unnoticed by the ascended ur-Sh’daar.

  Slow their virtual life might be . . . but they’d not been unnoticed. The Dark Mind had found them and, seeking minds with which it could commune, it had entered their virtual universe and subsumed the digital population into itself.

  But it had left behind . . . ghosts. Backups . . . copies . . . a digital remnant that retained access to the vast and relentless communal life form that had momentarily occupied their virtual universe.

  Among those ghosts were the digitized versions of five Pan-European fighters, a flight designated Adler Eins.

  Eagle One.

  What had once been the flesh-and-blood Kapitanleutnant Martin Schmidt piloted his KRG-17 Raschadler fighter through strangeness, seeking an open door. He was not alone. He sensed an army of other intellects riding with him, looking over his digital shoulder . . . and among them was an extremely powerful artificial intelligence called Konstantin.

  “There,” Konstantin’s voice said, guiding. “Through there . . .”

  Light exploded around him, alien shapes like fantastic skyscrapers floating in space, carved from space, their Net connections singing in his mind in shrieks and gibbering howls.

  “Herr Schmidt!” Leutnant Gerd Heller called. “What is this place?”

  “The Dark Mind,” Schmidt replied. “Their virtual universe joins with ours here. . . .”

  “The weapon is ready, Martin,” Leutnant Andrea Weidman told him. He could almost sense her warmth close by his right side.

  The weapon . . . a powerful alien intelligence manufactured rather than born, the product of yet another alien intelligence unlike anything Humankind had yet encountered. It had a name: Omega Code.

  “Target the heart of . . . of that . . .” Schmidt said. Ahead, shapes twisted through impossible geometries, a non-Euclidian universe of far more than four dimensions. “Fire!”

  The weapon was loosed with a thought.

  The mind within . . . unfolded. . . .

  The Consciousness knew that something was wrong, terribly wrong, as dimensions unfolded with bewildering speed, moving in on a million separate control nodes almost before the far-flung Conciousness was aware that there was a threat. The intruder was fast. . . .

  And of a caliber that the Consciousness had not before encountered, in this universe, or in any other.

  It had found Mind . . . and wasn’t prepared for it.

  TC/USNA CVS America

  Flag Bridge

  Kapteyn’s Star

  0209 hours, TFT

  “What’s happening?” Gray demanded.

  “Sir . . . Romeo One has . . . has stopped dead.” Mallory didn’t sound like he believed it. “I think they’re having some trouble with their antiproton weapon.”

  Vast bolts of lightning were playing across the black surface of the artificial world. The negatively charged antiprotons might be grounding themselves out across the alien structure.

  Or, far more likely, the humans might be witnessing something completely beyond their understanding.

  “CAG! Are you still in PriFly?”

  “Still here, Admiral.”

  Damn. Didn’t anyone on this ship listen to orders? “Tell our fighters to back away from that thing.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  “Konstantin?”

  “Yes, Admiral.”

  “What’s going on over there?”

  “Impossible to be sure. However, the Omega Code has begun opening up inside the alien computer network, and is beginning to take over the control nodes. The electrical discharges may indeed be a weapons overload.”

  “This is your doing.”

  “It was all of us, Admiral. You captured the Omega Code and brought it here. Our first attempt to implant it failed. Successive attempts appear to have succeeded.”

  “What is the Omega Code, anyway?”

  “I may not be able to express it in language you can understand, Admiral. However, it appears to be an artificial life form. A very advanced, very intelligent life form.”

  “More intelligent than humans?”

  “More intelligent than me. Actually, words like ‘intelligence’ may not be applicable here.”

  “It’s the Gaki?”

  “The Gaki were low-level intellects, Admiral. The Omega Code rode the Gaki back to Tabby’s Star. It is far more intelligent than the starprobes.”

  “Can we talk with it?”

  “I have been all along, Admiral. However . . . again, I would caution you that English may not be the best language for attempting to describe it. It is not intelligent in any way that you would recognize. It is not conscious.”

  “How can it be intelligent and not be conscious? You mean it’s not self-aware?”

  “Among other things. Consider, however. The code was created by an advanced civilization at Deneb and returned to Tabby’s Star, a voyage that took more than a thousand years to complete. Can you imagine a mind, any mind, that would stay sane for that long with nothing to occupy it?”

  “Maybe it hibernated.”

  “Or, like the digitized Baondyeddi uploads within the Heimdall computer network, it might have experienced the passage of time at a different, slower rate. However, the simplest expedient would be
to design minds that have no self-awareness. It’s simple enough. Human computers were both extremely fast and extremely intelligent by human standards for quite a long portion of their evolution without being self-aware.”

  “And then you came along.”

  “Actually, the generation of machines that designed the machines that designed me were self-aware.”

  Gray wasn’t going to argue the point.

  “So, is the code, the e-virus in communication with the Rosette entity?”

  “I am not sure, Admiral. I am aware of an exchange of information in there, but at such a high rate of speed that I cannot follow it.”

  “Can we trust the thing not to give away the farm?”

  “I am not sure, Admiral, that trust is a concept that it would understand.”

  The lightnings playing across Romeo One’s surface were faltering now. After a few more minutes, the sphere began to dwindle, moving off into the distance.

  “It’s leaving?” Gray asked. “What?”

  It shimmered, grew intolerably bright, and vanished.

  And with it vanished the arches, pillars, and alien shapes of golden light filling the system of Kapteyn’s Star. The broken wreckage of America tumbled through emptiness.

  “I think,” Konstantin said, “that we—that you—have won.”

  The Consciousness was not defeated, was not even injured. But it did have something to think about. . . .

  The Consciousness had emerged into this young, vital universe from another continuum, one that it had occupied for many billions of years. It had hoped to encounter others like itself—amalgams of trillions of advanced minds giving rise to emergent hyperminds many orders of magnitude greater than the minds that gave it form and intent. That it did not was disappointing but not surprising. This universe was so young that such intellects might not yet have evolved.

  But it had just met an intellect designed by beings that utilized the entire energy output of suns. That intellect had attempted to wrest control of several levels of reality from the Consciousness, and had come startlingly close to doing so successfully. The Consciousness was several orders of magnitude more powerful than the attacking intellect, but the mere fact of the aliens’ presence, and their attempt to take and dissociate the control nodes, told the Consciousness that this universe was not the empty and mindless field of potentia it had first believed it to be.