by Ian Douglas
Outside the volume of the cluster proper, six normal red dwarfs hung in a rough circle a bit more than a quarter of an AU from the central cluster—about forty million kilometers. One was feeding an intensely brilliant thread of white light into the center of the ruby cluster.
For long minutes, Hojo had stared at the cluster, marveling at the technology—sheerest magic!—that must have been used to create its artificial perfection. Then the final navigational calculations were completed, and the Hoshiryu slipped again into the K-T plenum… but only for a vanishingly small instant.
When the ship emerged, it was half an AU from the outer shells of the cluster, and well within the circle of red dwarfs.
Perfect!…
The question now was whether the masters of the hypernode could fire at the fleet without hitting their own swarms of orbital structures.…
Hojo's eyes widened at the sheer scope and scale of what lay before the Japanese fleet. Half the sky was blotted out by a black nebula shot through with the gleams and partially shrouded inward glows of ruby stars. From seventy-five million kilometers out, those stars were brilliant pinpoints of red light, the structures surrounding them bands and streaks of black and silver glitter, while the structures deeper in merged into black thunderheads illuminated from within.
Well outside the cluster nebula, six red dwarf suns hung in jewel-like splendor. Hojo noted that the closest, fifty million kilometers away, had begun rolling over, its axis of rotation shifting to fall into line with the Japanese ships. Was that a prelude to attack? Or simple caution on the part of the matrioshka intelligence?
At this point, Hojo's orders became somewhat less than helpful. He was supposed to make contact with the controlling intelligence of this cluster if possible, and to deny contact to the rebel fleet. There was no sign of enemy ships at the moment, though Hojo was certain they would be here soon. His focus, then, was on establishing contact with this… this monster.…
But where did you even begin when your target was a collection of trillions of orbital structures gathered through a volume of space a million and a half kilometers across, circling three thousand brightly burning artificial suns?
A standard interrogatory message had been prepared, of course—an invitation to communicate translated into the language used by the Naga with humans. Since the Web had created the Naga in the first place, there should be no problems with misinterpretation.
"Something approaches, Lord General," Shiozaki said. "Something big.…"
Hojo turned his attention to a pinpoint on the viewall highlighted by a red triangle. "What is it?"
"Purpose unknown, Lord," Shiozaki replied. "But it appears to be primarily carbon with traces of other elements… almost certainly arranged as pure computronium. Roughly two hundred meters wide… mass 1.45 times ten to the eight tons… closing at seven kilometers per second.…"
"A Naga," Hojo said. "It's an enormous fragment of Naga!…"
The thing was incredibly dense, 145 million tons squeezed down into a shapeless mass less than half Hoshiryu's length. He felt a familiar crawling sensation in his gut. Despite his work on the Nekomata project, the thought of osen, of contamination by such alien horrors was simply too much to accept. The massive object approaching the Japanese fleet was an irregular and writhing black and greasy mass of amoebic formlessness that seemed to Hojo to be the very epitome of foulness, of disease, of black horror.…
"Fire!" he snapped. "Kill it… now!… Before it hits us!"
Hoshiryu's primary particle cannon loosed a bolt of high-energy lightning, and a moment later, the other ships of the fleet were joining in… Ryujo, Hiryu, and Unryu, destroyers and cruisers in a searing volley of destruction.
Over five million kilometers distant, the red dwarf sun had finished aligning itself with the Japanese squadron.
Magnetic fields surged, and white fire reached out.…
6
"Starmining technology would offer extremely long-lived technic civilizations a means of holding back the encroaching Galactic night and vastly expanding their expected lifespans. Where a type-G star like our sun remains on the main sequence for some ten billion years, a lower-mass red dwarf has a lifespan exceeding ten trillion years. The largest type-O supergiants burn through their full lifespan in a mere few hundred thousand years. Such a star might contain the mass of well over 100 typical red dwarfs, each with an expected lifespan equivalent to twelve million giants.
"Starmining civilizations might, then, be expected to parcel out the mass of rare, giant, short-lived suns to create large numbers of low-mass stars, misers hoarding their reserves of hydrogen fuel far, far into the impenetrable cosmic dark of a remote futurity."
Dr. Wataru Miyazawa
Deep Time
C.E. 2420
"Heads up, striderjacks," Lieutenant Vanderkamp's voice called through the cerebral links of the squadron's waiting jackers. "Emergence from K-T space in two minutes. Launch will be immediately after we drop into normal space."
Vaughn hung in his safety harness, cramped and in total darkness… but the feed coming through from the Connie showed him the writhing currents of the godsea as if he were hurtling naked through space, no starship, no warstrider, hell, not even a human body. He was an incorporeal viewpoint, the image filling his mind flowing in from Connie's computer network.
"Hey, Lieutenant," someone in the squadron called. Vaughn thought it was Hallman. "Are we sure the Empire didn't beat us in?"
"No, we're not," Vanderkamp replied. She sounded terse… a bit distracted. "There was no sign of Imperial ships from ten AU out… but it's tough seeing something as small as a starship—even one of their monster ryus—at that range. And if we happened to arrive within eighty minutes of them, we could be playing light tag."
Light tag was navy slang for getting a false impression of the peacefulness of an objective area… because the light carrying news of a battle hadn't yet reached the observer. The American flotilla had emerged at the edge of the cluster space, seen nothing, and jumped once more. They would be emerging practically on top of the hypernode itself.
Vaughn wondered if that were a good idea. The hypernode's matrioshka intelligence impressed him as an entity that you might not wish to startle. It had proven that it could react violently and with little provocation… no matter if it were conscious or not.
He also understood that moving up on the hypernode through normal space, giving the matrioshka intelligence a chance to observe them—and possibly aim a small star at them—was not necessarily a good option either. Gok… there were no good options.
At least jumping headlong directly into the alien's inner defensive zone had the benefits of surprise and decisiveness.
"All warstriders," a different voice called. "This is Admiral Carson. We're emerging in thirty seconds. Once you drop, weapons are not, repeat not free. We want to see what the situation is before we shoot the place up. Squadron leaders acknowledge."
Vaughn heard Vanderkamp's reply, loud over the more subdued background chatter of other squadrons checking in. "Bravo Squadron, ready for drop."
Vaughn chewed on Carson's order for a moment, though they'd said much the same in the final briefing the day before. Carson was the overall commander of the New American expeditionary force, the honcho calling the shots… but it was always a knuckle-whitener when the men on the line had to go into a hostile situation with orders not to fire… or to fire only if fired upon. Too often the rules of engagement were rules that got you killed.
The seconds trickled away.…
"Good luck, striders," Colonel Griffin's voice said. "Give the caps the space they need."
The warstrider ascraft would be leading the way in, providing a sort of flying wedge to clear the path ahead of the main fleet—the "caps," or capital ships. There were twelve of these—the three carrier-battleships, four cruisers, and five destroyers.
"Three…" Griffin's voice said, "and two… and one…"
Light exploded ar
ound him, the blue of the godsea swallowed whole by a flood of liquid ruby red. To one side, a brilliant red sub-star gleamed surrounded by planes and rings and swooping whorls of black dust and glitter. Elsewhere, filling half the sky, were thousands of other sub-stars.
Damn it, what were those things? Not brown dwarfs. They were radiating at much higher temperatures, as high as or higher than a red dwarf, a proper main sequence star. Vaughn's data feed told him the surface temperature of that nearest microstar was around 3,400 Kelvin—-about right for a star of spectral type M2V, though it only possessed the mass of Jupiter or a little more, and was far too small to initiate nuclear fusion on its core.
Then the sky to one side lit up in a blinding surge of energy, a narrow beam far hotter than any of the nearby cluster stars.
And at the same instant, Griffin's voice screamed "Now! Drop!"
Vaughn's Gyrfalcon dropped into flame-blasted emptiness.
He engaged his strider's primary drive, accelerating hard. Impressions, fleeting and violent, flooded his mind. He'd only just dropped into the volume of space outside the Constitution, and already he was close to cognitive overload.
Cerebral implant technology allowed the human brain to function at a far higher level of efficiency than those without technic prostheses. Unmodified brains, it was well known, relentlessly filtered incoming information; as much as ninety percent of all available sensory data never rose above the level of the unconscious mind. Implants provided additional processing power, faster speed, and large amounts of RAM storage, which helped the brain handle a larger input.
But it was still possible for the brain to overload as incoming impressions began piling up more and more quickly. Vaughn boosted his implant clock speed, in effect shifting his reaction time down to a fraction of normal. The panorama of light and movement around him slowed… or seemed to.
He knew he would pay for it later.…
The Constitution had emerged two million kilometers from one of the microstars, a ruby-red sphere of fusing hydrogen perhaps 100,000 kilometers across, a little larger than the diameter of Jupiter. The problem was that Jupiter-sized planets weren't massive enough to trigger nuclear fusion. Even a brown dwarf with a diameter ten times greater wasn't up to that task. Evidently, some extremely advanced technology was being used to boost the microstar's output of heat and light, though what that technology might be was a complete mystery.
Closer at hand, a vast, sweeping arc of artificial objects hung in a partial ring around the microstar. A second ring orbited closer in. Vaughn enlarged a portion of what he was seeing, pulling in data on mass, vector, and size.
Those rings comprised what was popularly known as Jenkins swarms… rings or belts of habitats in orbits—some at angles to one another. The outer ring, he saw, consisted of statites, structures that likely were pure computronium suspended on nearly invisible tethers from enormous, black sails. Those sails, evidently, each a hundred kilometers across, used the relentless pressure of the sub-star's radiation to hold the relatively minute statite aloft without needing to be in orbit. Each statite was interconnected with as many as a hundred other statites with networks of tight, invisible laser beams operating at near-infrared frequencies, and might well represent the system's enormous artificial intelligence… or a part of it. There were, Vaughn thought, millions of statites in that one partial ring alone, which arced more than halfway around the miniature star, plus billions… no trillions more surrounding the microstars of the hypernode.
The ring beyond, almost halfway deeper in toward the microstar, was composed of far more massive objects than lumps of computronium. The largest were hollow cylinders wider than they were deep. Each was the mass of a fair-sized planetoid pulled into a tube a thousand kilometers across and five hundred deep. With a sharp, inner shock, Vaughn realized that the interior of that squat cylinder was brightly illuminated, and that the surface had the appearance of a map… broad sweeps of land and sea beneath the white smear of clouds.
"What the hell is that?" Hallman exclaimed, looking at the same enlargement through the Griffins' shared data link.
"I think," Vaughn said slowly, "that it's a Bishop ring."
He'd downloaded an article about them years before, but the structures had always been strictly theory and speculation, not fact. Like the so-called ringworld first proposed by an American science fiction author in the late twentieth century, the Bishop ring was a titanic megastructure, an artificial habitat that rotated to provide out-is-down artificial gravity on the interior surface. The thing was so big that it could hold a population numbering in the hundreds of millions; the interior surface would total around three million square kilometers, which gave it the same rough area as the nation of Argentina back on Earth. As those clouds attested, the rotation also served to hold an atmosphere inside pressed up against the circular landscape, even though the tube was open to the vacuum of space. A retention wall circled both ends of the tube two hundred kilometers high, keeping the air from spilling out.
"My God," Hallman said, awed. "These guys think big, don't they?"
"And then some," Vaughn agreed. "Ah! Watch it!"
Another glaring burst of plasma light flashed in the distance. "It's okay!" Griffin called. "They're not shooting at us!"
"How the hell can you tell?" Vanderkamp asked.
"What the hell are they shooting at?" Wheeler asked.
"Who else?" Vaughn replied, "It's the gokking Japanese."
The entire hypernode occupied a volume roughly one and a half million kilometers across, and was composed of about three thousand Jupiter-sized microsuns. Smaller structures—statite sails, Bishop rings, and myriad smaller structures that might be manufactories or shipyards or smaller habitats—surrounded each microsun in swarms and arcs and rings and belts, massed so thickly that light could not penetrate the cloud. Unseen by the naked eye, but visible to infrared sensors, a fantastically complex web of IR laser beams reached across the entire cluster, connecting statite to statite by the tens, by the hundreds of thousands. From instant to instant, myriad beams would wink off, but other connections would flash on. Vaughn watched a computer-generated representation of the network in his display, and was reminded forcefully of an image he'd once seen of a neural net within a living human brain.
The Japanese Jade Moon fleet appeared to have entered the outermost layers of the habitat swarm nearly half a million kilometers around the curve of the hypernode swarm from the point where the New American flotilla had just emerged. It was difficult to see what was happening that far off, so thick were the intervening clouds of orbital and statite structures.
But the hypernode appeared to be trying to get the range with one of its "squirt-suns," to use Koko Wheeler's delightful phrase. Japanese strategy—and Vaughn had to admit that it was smart—seemed to involve getting their dragon ships as close to large hypernode structures as they could manage. Perhaps the hypernode's defenders wouldn't be able to get a clear shot without damaging their own habitat cloud.
But they certainly were trying in any case. One of the full-sized red dwarf stars, millions of kilometers beyond the Japanese fleet, had been rolled into position to fire grazing shots tangential to the hypernode sphere, apparently trying to pick off the Dai Nihon fleet. The rebel ships were close enough to the line of fire that it had seemed like they were under direct attack… and they yet might be. Under a surge of magnetic energy from its orbiting ring, the red dwarf loosed another searing bolt of plasma fire, and a statite sail 30,000 kilometers away from the rebel ships writhed and crumpled in the blast. Inexorably, the computronium structure hanging below the sail began to fall in toward the center of the hypernode, though so slowly it would be long minutes before any movement was detectable.
"The bastards are pretty desperate if they're willing to risk an own goal," Vanderkamp said. Own goal was military slang for hitting your own forces or structures, so-called "friendly fire."
"They might not care," Griffin replied.
"Sure," Hallman added. "Lots more orbital habs where that came from!"
The squadron was dropping in formation through the outer layer of statite sails. Black sails, titanic stretched out against the stars, hovered everywhere, dwindling away into the distance in all directions. The sheer scale of the engineering was daunting.
Behind the Black Griffins, the rebel flotilla was entering the shell of statites as well. "Easy does it," Admiral Carson's voice warned. "No one fire. I don't think they've even noticed us."
"They must have noticed us, sir," Griffin said. "They obviously spotted the Japanese fleet."
"Maybe the Japanese came in shooting," Carson replied. "Or they just happened to blunder in at a sensitive point."
"Has anyone noticed something really strange?" Wheeler asked.
"What's that, Sergeant?" Griffin replied.
"All those habitats up ahead. All together… millions and millions of times the total surface area of the Earth."
"What about it?" Vanderkamp asked.
"I thought this hypernode thing was supposed to be some kind of super-AI. A machine."
"So?…"
"So who's living in all of those orbital habs?"
"That, Sergeant, is a very good question," the admiral relied. "And I think it's one to which I'd like to know the answer."
"The folks who built this thing?" Griffin asked.
"Maybe. Or the ones who are running it. Maybe this hypernode isn't an AI machine after all the way we thought. Maybe the organics are in control.…"
In the distance, partially veiled by the thickly strewn Jenkins swarms, the Japanese fleet appeared to be withdrawing. Several massive warships—ryu-class battlecarriers, judging from the mass—had been destroyed, and as they fled clear of the outer shell of statite sails, the red dwarf sun loosed another bolt, catching a dragonship like a moth in the tight-focused blast of a blowtorch. The ship was vaporized, transformed in an instant to an expanding cloud of white-hot vapor. The survivors, however, continued to accelerate outbound and, one by one, they began winking out as they made the transition over to K-T space.
