Omega к-4

by Джек Макдевитт

  He was looking down at the receding city when the pilot informed him he had an incoming transmission from the al-Jahani. He opened the channel, turning up the volume so everybody could hear. Alexandra’s blond features appeared on-screen. “We’ve launched, Dave,” she said. “All twelve running true. Detonation in thirty-eight minutes.”

  The missiles were cluster weapons, each carrying sixteen nukes. If the plan worked, the missiles would penetrate two thousand kilometers into the cloud and jettison their weapons, which would explode simultaneously. Or they would explode when their electronics failed. The latter provision arose from the inability of researchers to sink probes more than a few kilometers into the clouds. Once inside, everything tended to shut down. Early on, a few ships had been lost.

  “Good luck, Alex,” he said. “Give it hell.”

  The lander, powered by its spike technology, ascended quickly, traveling west. The cloud began to rise also. The flight had been planned to allow the occupants a view of the omega when the missiles reached the target.

  Collingdale ached for a success. There was nothing in his life, no award, no intellectual breakthrough, no woman, he had ever wanted as passionately as he wanted to see Alexandra’s missiles blow the son of a bitch to hell.

  They climbed into orbit and passed into sunlight. Everyone sat quietly, not talking much. Riley and Ava pretended to be examining an electronic device they’d brought up, trying to figure out what it was. Jerry was looking through his notes. Even Collingdale, who prided himself on total honesty, gazed steadfastly at a recently recorded London conference on new Egyptian finds.

  The cloud filled the sky again.

  “Three minutes,” said Alex.

  THEY COULDN’T SEE the al-Jahani directly. It was too far, and it was lost somewhere in the enormous plumes that fountained off the cloud’s surface like so many tendrils reaching toward Moonlight. But its position was known, and Bill, the ship’s artificial intelligence, had put a marker on the screen. They could see the cloud, of course, and the positions of the missiles were also marked. Twelve blinking lights closing on the oversize gasbag. Collingdale amused himself by counting the weapons.

  “Thirty seconds to impact,” said the pilot.

  Collingdale let his head fall back. He wondered whether one could achieve impact with a cloud.

  Ava watched the time, and her lips were moving, counting down the seconds.

  “They’re in,” she said. Someone’s hand touched his shoulder. Gripped it. Good luck.

  Riley adjusted his harness.

  Collingdale, knowing his foster parents would have been proud, muttered a prayer.

  “They’ve gone off.” Alexandra’s voice. “Too soon.”

  There were a few glimmerings along the surface of the cloud. But he saw no sign of disruption.

  “It might take a while before we can really see anything,” said Riley, hopefully.

  The hand on his shoulder let go.

  “You’re right,” said one of the others. “I mean, the cloud is so big.”

  “The bombs had to do some damage. How could they not?”

  “Maybe just screw up the steering mechanism. Hell, that would be enough.”

  The glimmering got brighter. Collingdale thought he saw an explosion. Yes, there was no doubt of it. And there. Over there was a second eruption of some kind. They watched several patches grow more incandescent. Watched the cloud pass overhead. Watched it begin to sink toward the rim of the world.

  The explosive patches darkened.

  On a second orbit, they were still visible, smoldering scars on the otherwise pacific surface of the omega.

  “I don’t think it’s going to work,” said the pilot.

  ON THE THIRD orbit, they rendezvoused with the Quagmor, the vessel that had transported them to the system. The mood on the ship was dark, and everybody was making comments about having made a good effort. Just so much we can do.

  Alexandra reported that the omega was still on course for Moonlight. “We didn’t get much penetration. There’s still a chance we might have done some damage that just doesn’t show. I mean, if we blew up the internal skunk works, how would we know? So don’t give up, Doc.”

  He didn’t. But the view was unsettling. The jets reached out, arcing as if to encircle the planet. The omega was a malignant force, a thing out of religious myth, an agency beyond understanding.

  The al-Jahani maneuvered around the fringes of the cloud, trying to record as much of the event as it could. Collingdale went to his quarters, slept, got up, slept some more. The cloud closed and, as the city rotated into position, made contact directly above. Winds howled. Lightning ripped through the skies. Tornadoes formed.

  It was just after sunset.

  Collingdale could hardly bring himself to watch. Electrical discharges had been growing in the cloud, had become more intense as it drew nearer. The storm gathered force, but the towers stood, and the planet rotated, moving the city directly to ground zero and then past. And for a while he hoped it would get clear. But without warning a gigantic bolt tore though the cloud and hammered the city. The chess-piece structures seemed to melt and blacken and sink into the ice. Sprays of pebbles rattled against them, and something blasted into the base of one of the corner towers. The tower shuddered and began to lean precipitously. Other buildings collapsed or were blown away. Once, twice, they lost the picture as satellites were neutralized. Lightning ripped out of the night, scorched the diamond steeples and the crystal polygons. Hurricane-force winds hurled black dust across the snowscape. A few rocks fell from the sky, plowing into glass and crystal. It needed only a few minutes, and when it was over, a ground blizzard buried everything.

  Collingdale was hardly a violent or even a confrontational man. He hadn’t been in a loud argument as far back as he could remember. But in those moments he would have killed. Rage spilled out of his soul, sheer fury driven to excess by his helplessness.

  The cloud wrapped itself around the world, around Moonlight, and it found the other cities. It struck them in a display of sheet lightning, forked lightning, chain lightning, and fireballs. Collingdale couldn’t get away from it. He wandered through the ship, downing glasses of rum, extreme behavior for a man who seldom drank. He couldn’t stop moving, from the bridge to the mission center to the common room to his cabin to Riley’s quarters. (“Hey, Dave, look at what this damned thing is doing in the north.”) It fed his rage to watch, and for reasons he would never understand, it gave him a twisted pleasure to hate so fiercely.

  When finally the cloud grew dormant, pieces of it broke off and began to drift away, as if there were no gravity near the planet to hold on to them. The skies began to clear.

  The cities were charred and wrecked, wreathed in black smoke. Ava was in tears. Most of the others were in a state of shock. The devastation was more complete than anything they had imagined.

  Collingdale was drinking black coffee, trying to clear his head, when a couple of the technicians created a commotion. “Look,” one of them said, pointing at a screen.

  At a city. Intact.

  Untouched.

  Its towers still stood tall. Its hanging walkways still connected rooftops. A monument was down, and, on its southern flank, a minaret had collapsed. Otherwise, it had escaped.

  It was halfway around the globe from where the intersection with the cloud had happened. The safest possible place. But that alone wouldn’t have been enough. Other cities, equally distant, had been leveled.

  They went back and looked at the record.

  Collingdale saw it right away: snow. The surviving city had been experiencing a blizzard when the cloud hit.

  “It never saw this place,” said Ava.

  FIELD REPORT: Moonlight

  The only aspects of this civilization that survive are the city that suffered a timely blizzard, and the bases the inhabitants had established on the moon and on the third planet. And in the artifacts that we’ve managed to haul away.

  The loss i
s incalculable. And I hope that someone, somewhere, will realize that it is time to devise a defense against the omegas. Not to wait until our turn comes, when it might be too late. But to do it now, before the next Moonlight happens.

  — David Collingdale

  Preliminary Post-omega Report

  December 11, 2230

  PART ONE

  hedgehogs

  chapter 1

  Arlington.

  Tuesday, February 18, 2234.

  HAROLD TEWKSBURY WOKE from one of those curious disjointed dreams in which he was wandering down endless corridors while his heart fluttered and he had trouble breathing. Damned thing wouldn’t go away anymore.

  The doctors wanted to give him a synthetic heart. But he was over a hundred years old, and even if they could fix things so his body wouldn’t be tired, he was. His wife was long dead, his kids had grown up sixty years ago. Somehow he’d been too busy for his family, and he’d allowed himself to get separated from his grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Now none of them knew him.

  The commlink was chiming, and he heard Rhonda’s soft voice. “Harold,” she was saying. “The lab.” Rhonda was the house AI. “I don’t like waking you for these calls, and I think you should let me deal with them.”

  “Can’t, Rhonda. Just patch it through.”

  “At the very least, you should take your medication first. Are you all right?”

  “Yes,” he said, pushing up to a sitting position. “I’m fine. Just a little short of breath.” He dumped a pill into his hand and swallowed it. And felt better almost immediately.

  It was 3:17 A.M.

  “Put them on,” he said. And he knew, of course, why they were calling. The only reason they ever called at this hour except the time that Josephine had tripped over a rumpled carpet, broken an arm, and had to be taken off to the hospital.

  “Harold.” Charlie’s voice.

  “Yes, Charlie? It happened again?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Same as the others?”

  “Right. No record there was ever a star there anywhere.”

  “Same signature?”

  “We don’t quite have the details down yet, but it looks like it.”

  A nova. But not really. Not the right intensity. Not the right spectroscopic reading. And no evidence of a star having been in the neighborhood. He shook his head. Can’t have a nova without a star. “Where?”

  “Near the Golden Crescent.”

  “On a line with the others?”

  “Yes.”

  And that was what really chilled him. There had been three earlier events. On a line, as if something were marching through the sky.

  “Did we catch it at the beginning? Or was it running when the package opened up?”

  “At the beginning, Harold.”

  “Okay. Pipe it through.”

  He rearranged his pillows. A starfield winked on. The Golden Crescent, nursery to a thousand newborn stars, floated over his dresser. To his left, great smoky walls fell away to infinity. The Mogul, a small, dim class-G, was close enough to illuminate the clock. And the long arm of the Milky Way passed through the center of the room.

  “Five seconds,” said a recorded voice.

  He pushed himself higher and watched a dazzling light appear over the dresser. Brilliant and blinding, it overwhelmed everything else in the sky.

  It looked like a nova. Behaved like a nova. But it was something else.

  He ran it a few more times before closing the record. They had this one from the beginning. If it was like the others, the light would sustain itself for sixty-one days before shutting down.

  THROUGH HIS WINDOW the lights of the Washington Monument were a distant blur. The White Eagle Hotel, usually a bright beacon in the night, had been swallowed by an unseasonable fog. He sat quietly, allowing full rein to a rush of sheer pleasure. He was caught up in one of the great mysteries of the age, had no clue what was happening, suspected there would not be a reasonable explanation during his lifetime. And he could not have been happier. The universe, it seemed, was smart enough to keep them all guessing. Which was as it should be.

  They’d started trying to sell Weatherman fifteen years ago. The idea was to use their FTL capability to put automated observation packages in strategic locations. They’d presented the program as a means for observing omega clouds, finding out what they were, and possibly learning how to combat them. Fifteen years earlier that had been a very big deal. The clouds had still been relatively new. The news that one was headed toward Earth, even though it wouldn’t arrive for roughly nine hundred years, had scared the pants off the general public. But that fear had long since subsided.

  The technology had never been right; the program was expensive, and superluminals were needed to make the deliveries. Then there had been a huge piece of luck: the discovery of an alien vehicle at the Twins a few years before provided new technology: a way to build compact self-contained FTL engines and install them as part of the observation package. Push a button, and the Weatherman was on its way.

  It had been a long time getting there, but it was on the job at last.

  A month ago, the first long-range Weatherman package had arrived in the neighborhood of M68, a globular cluster thirty-one thousand light-years away. Since then, several dozen units had unfurled their sails and powered up scopes and sensors and hyperlight transmitters. More units were en route to hundreds of sites.

  The first pictures had come in, and they’d popped the champagne. Sylvia Virgil, the director of operations, had come down and gotten wobbly. But that night nobody cared. They’d stood around looking at a sky filled with dusty clouds like great walls, vast star nurseries that rose forever. It was eerie, gothic, ominous, illuminated by occasional smears of light, like the Monument and the White Eagle. The “walls” were, of course, thousands of light-years across. And they’d watched everything through the eye of the Weatherman. Soon, he’d told himself, they would be everywhere.

  MOST OF HAROLD’S colleagues had been blasé about the kind of results they expected. At the time they thought they understood everything, knew how galaxies formed, had a lock on the life cycles of suns, grasped the general nature of the beasts that haunted the dark reaches between the stars. But right out of the box they’d gotten a surprise.

  The first phase of the Weatherman Project consisted of the simultaneous launch of more than six hundred probes. When they all arrived at their stations, the Academy would have coverage of sites ranging from within two thousand light-years of the core all the way out to the rim, from Eta Carina to the Lagoon, from the Ring Nebula to the M15 cluster. They would take the temperature of dust clouds and nebulas, track down gravitational anomalies, and provide pictures of the controlled chaos around the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy. With luck, it would all happen during Harold’s lifetime.

  Actually, there’d been several surprises, from black jets to the galactic wind. But the great anomaly was the quasi nova. Behind his back, his people were already calling them tewks. Starlike explosions, eruptions of enormous energy in places where there were no stars. And almost in a line. Not quite, but almost. It made his hair stand on end.

  There was no use trying to go back to sleep. He disentangled himself from the sheets, wandered into the kitchen, got out two pieces of farm bread, and slugged some strawberry jelly on them. One of his many guilty pleasures.

  The explosions, though they were less than nova force, were nevertheless of sufficient intensity to be visible across tens of thousands of light-years. Probably all the way out to Andromeda. They were far away, and for that he felt grateful. Explosions of their magnitude, for which one couldn’t account, were disquieting.

  Light from the four events would reach Earth toward the end of the millennium. They would be visible in the southern hemisphere, where they’d blaze across the sky, in Libra and Scorpius, not quite lining up. But close.

  THIS WAS PRISCILLA Hutchins’s second tour in the Academy bureauc
racy. She’d served two years as transport chief, gotten bored, returned to piloting, gotten married, and accepted a tempting offer: assistant director of operations. She was at last content to leave the superluminals behind, to get away from the long voyages, to get out of the ships with their virtual beaches and their virtual mountainscapes and their virtual everything-else. The oceans and the breezes and the sand were real now. She had a man who loved her, and a daughter, and a house in the suburbs, and life was good.

  But Sylvia Virgil was leaving for a lucrative position in private industry. She was effectively gone, and Hutch had found herself assigned as Acting D.O. With an inside shot at getting a permanent appointment.

  But the view from the top was turning out to be a bit more complicated than she’d expected. The days in which she made decisions of no consequence to anyone, invested countless hours formulating policy for the record, attended conferences at establishments with convenient golf courses, reviewed reports from the field, and took extraordinarily long lunches abruptly ended.

  Hutch was now responsible for coordinating the movements of all Academy vessels, for deciding who piloted those vessels, and for determining passenger transportation. That sounded simple enough. In the old days, when Professor Hoskinson wanted to bump Dr. O’Leary from a flight to Pinnacle, Hutch had simply passed the issue along and let Sylvia make the call. Now she was in the middle of every food fight, and she had discovered that her clients, for the most part, owned substantial egos and were not above bringing to bear whatever pressure they could manage. Because they were inevitably the top people in their respective fields, the pressure they could bring was considerable.

  She had also become responsible, within monetary constraints, for determining which projects the Academy pushed and which it neglected, and for establishing their priority, and the level of resources to be devoted to each. All, of course, controlled by guidelines from the commissioner. She had a staff of scientific advisors, but the decisions tended more often than not to be based on political considerations. Who had clout with Congress? Who had been supportive of the Academy during the previous fiscal year? Whom did Asquith like?