Kitabı oku: «Bright Light»

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-one

Chapter Twenty-two

Chapter Twenty-three

Chapter Twenty-four

Chapter Twenty-five

Epilogue

Keep Reading …

By Ian Douglas

About the Publisher

Prologue

The Consciousness had known of Earth and of the starfaring civilization centered there for a long time. Indeed, given that it spanned vast gulfs of time as well as space, it was as if it had always known.

In the heart of the teeming sphere of 10 million ancient suns known to the humans as Omega Centauri, at the central rosette of six massive black holes orbiting their common center in a patently artificial arrangement, the Consciousness brooded on the intelligent beings it had found in this new, painfully young universe.

Intelligent was such a relative concept.

This was bolstered by the fact that the Consciousness had … tasted a number of them, sampling the minute ships and other structures within this volume of space.

Most of the minds it had sampled were of pathetically slow and limited capabilities. A few—a very few—were of higher orders of intelligence, though none came close to the Consciousness in terms of depth or scope of Mind.

Methodically, the Consciousness consumed those worth the effort.

The rest it deleted.

And with a slowly increasing vigor, it explored more deeply into this corner of the new universe. It had identified a sullen red ember of a star, called Kapteyn’s Star by the minds it had assimilated, with a world engineered by beings uploaded into digital form, extremely ancient beings called the Baondyeddi, the Adjugredudhra, and the Groth Hoj. These species, parts of a corporate polity referred to by various sources as the Sh’daar, were in hiding from some unknown threat … quite possibly from the Consciousness itself, though the digital refugees didn’t seem to know exactly what it was they feared.

Despite their attempts to make themselves undetectable—including the slowing of their awareness of time down to seconds on each century, the Consciousness had found them … and it had devoured them, absorbing trillions of minds into its own teeming hive, giving them order and a sense of purpose that had been lacking before.

And in the process it learned of the N’gai Cluster … and of the human presence much closer at hand.

And on the human homeworld, just twelve light years distant from Kapteyn’s Star, the watching beings of that planet anticipated the arrival of the Consciousness over Earth with an increasing and existential dread.

Chapter One

30 January 2426

Battery Park

New York City

1545 hours, EST

“Get the hell out of my head!”

“I submit that we will have to talk at some point,” the voice in his head told him. It sounded faintly amused.

Trevor Gray, formerly of the USNA Navy, scowled. “Why?” he replied, blunt and challenging. “Damn it, Konstantin, you’ve wrecked my life. You know that, don’t you?”

“It was necessary for you to leave naval service. Vital, in fact.”

“Bullshit. You no longer own me. And I don’t think we have a thing to say to one another.”

Gray prowled the transparent observation deck extending out over the choppy waters of New York Harbor. At his back, the newly grown towers of what once had been the Manhatt Ruins stabbed skyward, gleaming glass and silver in the winter sun. The place had … changed during the past year, changed more than he’d ever imagined possible. The spot where he was standing had been underwater a few months ago. Now it was clean and shiny, with a scattering of civilians who looked like tourists.

He could sense Konstantin, the powerful AI entity based at Tsiolkovsky, on the far side of the moon, watching him closely from the vantage point of his own in-head circuitry. That took a little getting used to. Konstantin’s principal hardware might be on the moon, but its—his—consciousness could be anywhere within the Global Net on Earth, in low earth orbit—LEO—or in cislunar space. And for sure, a tiny fraction of the super-AI was here in Manhatt, interacting with Gray through his in-head circuitry.

“I need you,” Konstantin told him, “to meet with Elena Vasilyeva …”

“Damn it, Konstantin, you know how I feel about the Pan-Europeans.”

“The war is over, Captain,” Konstantin told him, as though explaining why to a four-year-old. “In any case, Ms. Vasilyeva is Russian. They were on our side, remember?”

“Sorry,” Gray said, his mental voice sharp. “It’s kind of hard to just forget about Columbus, y’know?”

“Which the Russians had nothing to do with, you may recall,” Konstantin said. “In any case, no one is asking you to forget about Columbus.”

Gray turned and scowled up at the new towers of Manhattan, his shoulders hunched against the chill, late-January wind off the water. He did not, in fact, hate the Europeans … not exactly. The destruction of the USNA capital at Columbus had almost certainly been an act by rogue elements within the Genevan military. Pan-European attempts to seize territory along the USNA east coast had been strategic opportunism, pure and simple, and the true causus belli had been their conviction that Humankind had to accept Sh’daar demands and restrict their fast-developing technologies.

And Konstantin was right. With the signing of the Treaty of London, the war was over. Even the alien Sh’daar were friends, now … of a sort. The recent discovery that they’d been under the influence of intelligent colonies of bacteria had finally enabled Humankind to begin to understand just what they wanted … and what they truly were.

No, Gray might not trust the Pan-Euros, but neither did he hate them. His anger right now was reserved for the AI that had arranged to have him drummed out of the Navy. At Konstantin’s urging, he’d taken the star carrier America to the long-time stellar mystery of KIC 8462852—a distant, F3V sun better known as “Tabby’s Star.” What America had brought back, an alien e-virus called the Omega Code, had been of tremendous importance … but his fourteen-hundred-light-year detour had been in direct and blatant disregard of orders. Naval officers, even admirals, could not simply ignore the dictates of military command procedure, even when ordered to do so by super-AIs. The court-martial board had directed that Gray be reduced in rank to captain, and that he retire from the Navy.

Only recently had Gray learned that it had been Konstantin who’d recommended to the board that he be summarily cashiered.

With friends like that …

“I’m bringing in a robot shuttle,” Konstantin told him. “Will you meet with Ms. Vasilyeva?”

“Why? More to the point, why me?”

“The Pan-Euros want to meet you face-to-face. Ms. Vasilyeva has requested that her team get to speak with you first. You are … something of a legend, Captain. Even among those who once were the enemy. You have the reputation of a brilliant tactician, and some of them, I believe, are a bit in awe of you.”

Gray made a sour face at the obvious attempt at flattery. “Sure. Whatever …”

“Ms. Vasilyeva’s xeno team has some new assets that should make first contact with the Denebans more immediately productive.”

“If you say so.” A new thought occurred to him. “But why do we have to use the Pan-Euros at all? What’s wrong with Doc Truitt? When it comes to understanding alien civilizations, he’s the best. He’s told me that on several occasions.”

George Truitt had been the senior xenosophontological expert on board the America. He was testy, rude, and difficult to work with, but he did know his stuff.

“Dr. Truitt has returned to Crisium Base, where he will be working on interpreting the data from the Tabby’s Star Dyson swarm. His work there is absolutely essential. I assure you that Dr. Vasilyeva is as qualified as he is in the field … and considerably easier to work with.”

Gray cocked an eyebrow at that. How did the AI know whether or not it was easy for one set of humans to work with another?

“There’s something more.”

“What’s that?”

“The identity of the ship you will be using. It may be of interest to you.”

“Not America,” Gray said. And stifled the sharp pang at the thought of her. America, along with her sister ship, Lexington, had been badly savaged a month ago out at Kapteyn’s Star. Both carriers had made it back to Earth orbit, but they were in bad, bad shape.

“That is correct. America will be undergoing extensive repairs at the SupraQuito yards. Your vessel will be the Republic.”

His eyes widened at that. “The … Republic?”

People always talked about how damned small the Navy was. If you served long enough, you kept running into the same shipmates, the same vessels, the same commanding officers. This seemed to prove that ancient adage.

“Yes. She’s being taken out of mothballs and provisioned for the expedition. I believe you know her?”

“Hell, I was her CAG! I was her ACAG from oh-nine to eleven … then CAG from eleven to fourteen!”

“I know. Might that help you feel better about this assignment?”

“You know, I damn near cried when they retired her.”

“She was obsolete and overdue for retirement. As the Sh’daar War and the Confederation Civil War both wound down, she was taken off the line. However, the upgrades she will be receiving should again make her quite a formidable vessel.”

“Damn you, Konstantin.” But he relented. “Okay. But I still don’t know what you expect me to do or say.”

“I’ll be there to guide you, Captain.”

That wasn’t exactly an encouraging thought.

He was about to retort in kind when a bright star appeared in the dusk over the water of New York Harbor, rapidly approaching. Dropping lower, it resolved itself into a red-and-silver Sentinel 5000 autonomous flier. Its low-level AI pilot settled it gently on the observation deck and lifted the gull-wing door.

“So where are we going?” Gray asked as he ducked through into the passenger compartment. It was roomy and tastefully sleek inside—the luxury model. The robot pilot was invisibly tucked away somewhere forward. The dome roof gave him a full three-sixty view, and a thoughtclick would turn parts of the deck underfoot transparent as well.

“Geneva,” Konstantin told him.

Of course.

The door closed silently and the robotic transport rose into the sky on quietly humming grav-impellers. To the southwest he could see Lady Liberty, still on her pedestal after 540 years. Her right arm, which had broken off and fallen into the harbor at some point during the city’s decay, was back in place, the copper flame of her torch gleaming with the last touch of the setting sun. After centuries of neglect she once again represented the spirit of freedom and democracy in the North-American union.

But for how long that might ensue was anybody’s guess. North America had dodged two nasty bullets in the Sh’daar War and in the conflict with Pan-Europe.

As bad as they had been, though, Gray seriously wondered if it could survive the quiet rise of its own super-AI minds.

The flier swung about, still gaining altitude, and passed above the tallest towers of Lower Manhatt. As it did, the nagging question finally surfaced for Gray.

“I still don’t understand,” he told the super-AI partially resident within his head, “why you wanted me out of the Navy. It was my whole life …”

“I understand your feelings, Captain,” Konstantin said, using his honorary retirement rank—which felt like a needle digging into the wound. “But I—and you—encountered certain limitations in what we could do when you were part of the military hierarchy. In order to make contact with the Denebans, you will need a degree of freedom and free will impossible for a naval flag officer.”

“Bullshit. The president—”

“President Koenig has his own problems,” Konstantin explained, “and his own agendas. His decisions are closely circumscribed by those around him, and by the requirements of his office. I require a true free agent. Why are you, of all people, so wedded to your position within the military line of command?”

“Maybe because I belonged.”

Still, it was a good question, and one Gray had been wrestling with for a long time.

Gray had grown up in the Manhatt Ruins, a Prim making a marginal living working a small rooftop farm right over there … perched within the crumbling rooftop wreckage of the TriBeCa Tower, a couple of hundred meters above the flooded avenues of the city.

Damn … he couldn’t even locate the labyrinthine tower any longer. With nano-engineering, new buildings could be grown, and old ones completely made over into new structures in a matter of hours.

Made it easier to forget the past, he supposed.

More than three centuries ago, rising sea levels and the resultant social unrest had led to large swaths of what had been the coastal areas of the former United States of America being abandoned. The so-called Peripheries had been cut off from the technologies and from the social and governmental services of the new United States of North America. They’d become lawless frontiers too expensive to maintain, too difficult to control.

When Angela, his wife, had had a stroke, he’d been forced to get her to a medical center within the USNA proper. Angela had been healed … though either the treatment or the stroke itself had … changed her, dissolving her part of the emotional bond between them.

Gray had gotten over it … well, for the most part, at any rate. It had taken a long time and blossoming relationships with other people, but he’d finally done it. Sometimes he went for days now without even thinking of Angela.

And it had only taken him twenty-six years to get there …

In a world of such rapid changes, Gray was an outlier.

Overall, though, Gray had approved the unexpected course change in his life. In a quarter of a century, he’d worked his way up the ladder of rank, eventually commanding the star carrier America, and then serving as flag officer for the entire America battlegroup. He’d found a place for himself. He’d found respect—no mean feat for a former Prim in the Risty-dominated ranks of naval officers. Risties, derived from aristocrats, represented the worldview of a majority of USNA citizens and especially of naval officers. Primitives, lacking the high-tech cerebral implants and social e-connections of full citizens, were seen somehow as less than fully human.

It made Gray feel good that—even if it was just a possibility—his rise through the ranks, his accomplishments as a naval officer, even his victory over the aliens at Kapteyn’s Star all had been due to his fighting that old social stigma of Prim.

But now Konstantin had arranged to make him a civilian again. Of a sort, that is. Because he was still being swept up into bigger schemes.

It wasn’t like he could go back to the TriBeCa farm, though. No, the North-American government was taking the Peripheries back. Washington, D.C., had been fought over, drained, and rebuilt; swamplands from the Virginia Piedmont to Savannah were being reclaimed; here in Old New York City the Locust Point and Verrazano Narrows dams had been completed, and the water levels encroaching on Manhattan were slowly dropping.

Under steady assault by swarms of architectural nanoassemblers, the Ruins were ruins no more, as white towers grew from the sea’s retreating caress. For the past year, teams of neurobiotechnicians had been moving through the city, offering the inhabitants the chance to shed their status as Prims; soon, the very idea of Prims would be a thing of the past.

Just like me.

He studied the white towers from the sky … their lack of vegetation and obvious decay. Their clean sterility. Their bright newness in the lights of the city coming on to dispel the dark of early evening in winter.

He shook his head. There was no place for him any longer in the Navy and there certainly wasn’t a place for him down there among those newly grown skyscrapers. He felt out of place … and out of touch.

“Konstantin?” He still didn’t want to talk to the artificial intelligence, but he’d become too reliant on having his questions answered. Usually, that was handled by his own in-head RAM, but he was genuinely curious about what the AI would say.

“Yes?”

“What’s happening to them? The people like I was, down there in the Ruins?”

“Most have already been relocated.”

“Where?”

“New New York. Atlantica and Oceana. The New City around the Columbus Crater. Wherever they want to go, really. Quite a few have volunteered for off-world colonies. Mars. Chiron. New Earth.”

“‘Volunteered?’ No relocation camps?” He’d heard stories …

“There are relocation camps for the Refusers. However, I assure you that they lack for nothing.”

Refusers.

It was actually the translation of a Sh’daar term for those who’d refused to accept the Sh’daar Transcendence—their long-ago version of the Technological Singularity. It was also used, sometimes, to describe certain humans or human groups who rejected some aspects of modern technology. There were human religions, Gray knew, that rejected manipulation of the human genome, or medical life-extension technology.

In this case, Konstantin’s use of the word referred to those Prims who would not take cerebral implants, for whatever reason, preferring what they thought of as “living naturally.” Some would be afraid of change … or simply wanted to hang on to what they already had in the face of the unknown.

Gray didn’t agree with so extreme an ideology, but, having been there, he certainly understood where it came from. And it rankled him to hear about them so easily dismissed.

“Why do you ask?” Konstantin wanted to know.

“Sometimes I still identify more strongly with the other Prims than I do with full citizens.”

“Full citizen is an archaic term, Captain. They all are being happily and productively assimilated into the overall culture.”

Yeah, right. Happily assimilated was a contradiction in terms.

The phrasing wasn’t what truly bothered him, though. What Gray carefully guarded from the voice in his head was the fear that AIs, like Konstantin itself, were increasingly herding Humankind along narrowing paths that led to the gods alone knew where, paths understood and shaped by the AIs and utterly beyond the intellectual or emotional ken of organic humans. Beyond what made a human, well, human. Gray had worked with Konstantin many times and still didn’t fully trust a machine intelligence that, almost by definition, he was unable to fully understand.

He was only now realizing that he trusted Konstantin far less than he trusted the Pan-Europeans. And the realization bothered him.

“Flight time to Geneva,” the robot announced in Gray’s head, “fifteen minutes.”

The flier accelerated, leaving the gleaming towers of the new Manhattan vanishing below the horizon astern.

New White House

Washington, D.C.

1602 hours, EST

“Captain Gray is on his way,” Konstantin said quietly in President Alexander Koenig’s thoughts. “As you directed.”

Koenig was seated at his desk in the newly grown White House, located approximately on the site of the original. For several centuries, Washington, D.C., had been submerged, its buildings and monuments in ruins, its grounds flooded and engulfed by mangrove swamps. As with the Manhatt Ruins, dams and flood walls had been nanotechnically grown across the tidal estuary to the southeast so that the swamps could be drained. The reclamation was far enough along that the seat of the USNA government had only weeks before been moved from Toronto back to its historic seat in the District of Columbia.

Koenig sat back in his chair, looking over the reconstruction. The work was ongoing and expensive … but progress was being made.

Now, other kinds of progress needed to be made.

“Good. Did he put up much of a fuss?”

“Not really. He is suspicious of the Pan-Europeans, of course, and, as expected, he trusts neither my motives nor yours. He does not like being manipulated.”

“Hardly surprising. You pulled a damned dirty trick on him, you know.”

“Yes, I do. But if the threat to Earth is as severe as I believe it now is, we cannot afford to have him tied down by the traditional chain of command.”

“Maybe not. But at least we could have told the poor son-of-a-bitch …”

“Mr. President, this is something we must not leave to chance … or to human will and fallibility.”

Koenig scowled. “Sometimes, Konstantin,” he said slowly, “I get the feeling that you don’t trust humans.”

Geneva

Pan-European Union

2217 hours, GMT+1

It was raining and dark as the flier shrieked in over Burgundy, dropping swiftly from its cruising altitude of forty thousand meters, its outer surface reconfiguring from hypersonic mode to landing. “Going from sperm mode to turkey mode” was how fighter pilots described it, as the ship morphed from a sleek teardrop to a flattened, domed box with wings for landing. A former Navy pilot, Gray wondered if he would have to edit those memories sometime soon. They were a part of him, sure … but they were of damned little use now beyond pure nostalgia.

The lights of Geneva Spaceport glared up ahead, with the European capital’s urban sprawl delineating the black emptiness of Lake Geneva beyond. They touched down on a commercial pad, where an embarkation tube attached itself to the flier as the gravs were still spooling down.

Elena Vasilyeva, a tall woman in black with colorful abstract animations writhing over her face and hands, was there on the passenger concourse to meet him. “Captain Gray?” she said, extending a hand. “It was good of you to come on such short notice.”

It’s not like I had a whole lot of choice, he thought, but he kept it to himself and shook her hand. She was speaking Russian, but he heard the words in English as his in-head software translated them in real time.

“No problem,” he replied. “A pleasure. I’m sorry you had to stay at work so late in order to meet me.”

“It … what is the expression? It goes with the territory. This way, if you please.”

They traveled by mag-tube to the Ad Astra Confederation Government Complex, and a large meeting room a couple of hundred meters up, near the top of the tower. The space’s floor-to-ceiling windows looked out over the aptly named Plaza of Light and its titanic monument, Popolopolis’s statue Ascent of Man.

A number of other people were already present in the room, including several European military officers. Gray stopped at the threshold. “I was given to understand that this would be a civilian operation, Ms. Vasilyeva.”

“It is, Captain Gray,” a European Spaceforce admiral told him. “Operation Cygni, a joint European-American scientific and first-contact expedition to the star Deneb. However, as you must be aware, there are serious military and governmental implications to this mission.”

“Admiral Duchamp is correct,” an AI voice said in Gray’s thoughts. “In any event, we all wished to meet the man who would be commanding the expedition.”

“You could have done that in virtual reality,” he said.

In fact, the real reason for his transatlantic jaunt this afternoon had been bothering him quite a bit. With VR, people could meet in cyberspace, within AI-created realms with such resolution and fidelity to detail that it was quite impossible to tell illusion from reality.

“Perhaps,” the AI told him, “but we would not have known whether we were meeting the avatar or the actual person.”

“Nikolai is quite protective of us,” Duchamp told him. “He wanted us to get a good feel for the man who will be leading Operation Cygni.”

“ ‘Nikolai?’”

“For Nikolai Copernicus,” Vasilyeva explained. “An artificial intelligence housed here in Geneva analogous to your Konstantin.”

“A pleasure to meet you, Nikolai.”

“I am delighted to make your acquaintance. Until now I knew you only through back channels with Konstantin, and through intelligence reports and strategic analyses. To be frank, some of our people feared that you are a … I believe the Americanism is ‘cowboy.’ Shooting first, asking questions later.”

“And is that how you see me now?”

“Oh, most certainly not, Captain,” Duchamp told him. “We have all seen the reports of your encounters at Tabby’s Star. And many of us have been wondering why your senior staff would have retired you. It seems a poor use of a valuable asset.”

“Having met you, Captain,” Nikolai said, “and having spoken with you directly, I can unreservedly recommend that Operation Cygni proceed as it is currently organized, with our xenosophontological team under Captain Gray’s direct command.”

“So how about it, Konstantin?” Gray used a private channel to communicate with the AI without being overheard by the others. “I haven’t heard of this AI before.”

“Nikolai has only come on-line in the past few weeks,” Konstantin told him.

“A baby, huh? Can he be trusted?”

“As much as I can be trusted.”

Had that been sarcasm, Gray wondered? Or humor? Or a subtle rebuke? He found it difficult to understand what a super-AI was feeling—if feeling was the proper term—when he spoke with one.

“That’s not saying a great deal.”

Konstantin ignored the jibe. Gray wasn’t even certain that it was possible to insult the AI. “Nikolai,” Konstantin told him, “is several orders of magnitude faster, more powerful, and more compact than I. The Europeans wish to include a copy of him on the expedition to Deneb.”

“I’m not sure that’s such a good idea,” Gray said, transmitting on the group’s shared channel again. “The Omega virus, remember?”

“Nikolai was designed in part to be immune to Omega,” a sophontologist told him, “as well as to other potential e-threats.”

Gray wondered how any of them could be so certain of that, though. The Omega virus had been an alien software packet smuggled from Deneb back to Tabby’s Star … and it had apparently been responsible for the destruction of the Tabby’s Star civilization. Brought back to human space, it had been employed against the Rosette Aliens at Kapteyn’s Star, and evidently had been responsible for stopping the monumentally powerful invaders …

… at least for now. The Rosetters hadn’t been destroyed in the encounter by any means. As far as the xenosophontologists were concerned, they’d simply been forced to halt their advance toward Earth and actually notice the humans defiantly standing in their way.

“A copy,” Gray repeated. “Where? I mean, the Republic is going to have pretty limited running space for a full AI.”

“In this,” one of the civilian sophontologists said. She moved her hand in the air, summoning a hologram. “We call this the Helleslicht Modul Eins.”

Gray’s translator software told him the meaning of the German phrase: Bright Light Module One. The 3-D diagram floating in front of the woman was egg-shaped and, according to the listed dimensions, some three meters long and massing five metric tons.

“Dr. Marsh is a member of our xenosophontological team,” Vasilyeva told him. “But her specialty is advanced AI.”

“I see.”

“The HM-1’s internal matrix,” Marsh explained, “is essentially computronium—solid computing matter—with quantum circuitry of sufficient complexity and power to support Nikolai with plenty of room to spare.”

She sounded quite proud … and if she was even partly responsible for this device, she had every right to be. Artificial intelligences like Konstantin—in particular super-AIs, or “SAIs”—were resident within large computer complexes, usually underground and anything but mobile. Konstantin, for instance, had begun his existence in a subselene facility beneath Tsiolkovsky Crater, on the far side of the moon.

Using the far-flung Global Net, they could send independent parts of themselves anywhere within cislunar space. Pared-down copies of them, subsets of the larger and more powerful original software, could be resident within the electronic networks of starships or orbital stations. A sub-clone of Konstantin had made the passage to Tabby’s Star on board the star carrier America, and even smaller copies had been used to remotely contact the alien Dysonswarm intelligence there, and the uploaded minds called the Satori.

But that had been a fraction of what the original was capable of.

Gray wasn’t certain how massive the Tsiolkovsky complex was, but he knew it was big. If the Europeans had managed to build a computer that could run a similar SAI in a volume amounting to a few cubic meters, that was more than impressive.

It was a giant step forward for SAIs.

“So why does Nikolai want to go to Deneb?” Gray asked. He hesitated, then looked up at the ceiling. “I assume you do want to go, Nikolai?”

“Very much, Captain Gray,” Nikolai said.

“We cannot stress the importance of this expedition too much, Captain,” Duchamp added. “It is vital—vital—that we engage the Deneban civilization peacefully, to learn about them and their abilities, and perhaps to secure their aid in our confrontation with the Rosette Aliens.”

Gray shook his head. “I have to be honest with you, Admiral,” he said. “The Denebans may not be a good prospect for contact, let alone military aid. As best as we can determine, they utterly destroyed a technologically advanced culture at Tabby’s Star without even attempting to negotiate or open lines of communication.”

“We know that, Captain,” Duchamp said. “It was for that reason that we approached your President Koenig to request that we be included in Project Cygni. A copy of Nikolai, working with a copy of your Konstantin, offers, we believe, our best hope of establishing peaceful contact and technological help. It is unlikely that organic humans will be able to communicate in a meaningful way with such an advanced civilization.”

“But human oversight of the expedition is necessary,” Vasilyeva told him. “And when we learned that President Koenig was considering you as the expedition commander, we knew that there was hope.”

“Why?” Gray asked, genuinely baffled.

“Captain … we know too well that you can win battles, even wars. But what interests us is your ability to win peace.”

Chapter Two

31 January 2426

VFA-96, Black Demons

SupraQuito Yards

Earth Synchorbit

1018 hours, TFT

Through the vista opened by his fighter’s AI in his mind, Lieutenant Donald Gregory stared out into the tangle of orbital structures spread out before him. The SupraQuito Synchorbital was the largest of the human facilities in orbit over Earth, consisting of some hundreds of major stations and facilities strung together in a long, brilliantly lit arc.

The collection of structures was balanced on the Quito space elevator at an altitude of 37,786 kilometers, and a single orbit of the Earth took precisely twenty-four hours, which meant that the complex kept pace with the same spot on the turning Earth. From there, a slender tower reached down to its anchor point atop a mountain on Earth’s equator, and up into the black of space to the tethered asteroid that kept the whole assembly in dynamic tension. Four centuries earlier, synchorbit had been the parking zone for a swarm of unmanned communications satellites. Now it was one of three major communities in Earth orbit, with a permanent population of over sixty thousand and some thousands more each day traveling up or down the “E,” or arriving or departing on fleets of both interplanetary and interstellar ships.

The local sky, Gregory saw, was crowded with activity. The two badly damaged star carriers, Lexington and his own—or what used to be his own—America had been towed into position off the Navy yard, along with a couple of small asteroids. The two battered carriers were now almost obscured by swarming nanorepair ’bots busily eating away at the damaged hull surfaces, while simultaneously stripping the asteroids of raw material and bringing it across to the ships in steady streams.

We can rebuild our ships on the fly, Gregory thought. We can give them new life with this tech. But we can’t do anything for my squad mates.

Like Meg …

Lieutenant Meg Connor had been killed at Invictus, a frigid, ice-clad world out beyond the rim of the galaxy and 12 million years in the future. Gregory had lost his legs in that action. They’d grown those back for him … but nothing could bring back Megan.

Or Cynthia DeHaviland, killed in the hellfire of Kapteyn’s Star just a month ago.

“Tighten up, Demon Four!” the squadron’s CO snapped at him. “Belay the rubbernecking.” Commander Mackey sounded stressed.

What the hell do you have to be worried about? he thought, a bit petulantly, but he bit down on the words. “Copy,” was all he said. A moment’s inattention had let his Starblade fighter drift almost imperceptibly within the seven-ship formation, and with a thought he brought himself back into line. The spacelanes above and around the SupraQuito orbital facility were indeed crowded with ships large and small, construction tugs, intrastation transports, ship’s gigs, liberty boats, space-suited personnel on EVA, mobile repair shacks, and provisioning vessels. Theoretically, a lane had been cleared for the fighter squadron, but there was near-infinite opportunity here for a mistake.

And in space any mistake was likely to be expensive, fatal, or both.

At least Don Gregory was no longer suicidal. For a time after Invictus he’d been thinking about that a lot. The depression, at times, was overwhelming. His own in-head circuitry had urged him more than once to seek help, but he’d managed to put it off … and to avoid a mandatory checkup with the psych department. A down-grudge on his mental health would ground him … and might even get him kicked out of the Navy.

And now he thought he might see a better answer.

The seven fighters were moving at only eighty meters per second, a crawl against the scale of the titanic structures around them. They’d launched moments before from the America, followed a twisting route to stay clear of the nanoswarms and the small asteroid providing raw materials for the carrier’s repairs, and dropped into a long, slow approach to the main naval base dead ahead.

“There she is,” Lieutenant Gerald Ruxton called over the squadron channel. “Our new home!”

USNA CVL Republic was six hundred meters long, just over half the length of their former ship. Like America, though, she looked like an open umbrella, with a long, slender spine behind a dome-shaped shieldcap filled with water. In the shieldcap’s shadow, two modules rotated about the central keel, providing artificial gravity for the crew. A CVL, or light carrier, she had facilities to carry three combat squadrons of twelve fighters each, plus a number of auxiliary vessels, including a search-and-rescue squadron. VFA-90, a strike squadron called the Star Reapers, was also being transferred from America to the smaller carrier. In addition to VFA-96, the fresh-minted VFA-198, the Hellfuries, would be coming up from Earth later in the day.

After Kapteyn’s Star, the Black Demons could only muster seven fighters. They were supposed to be getting replacements up from Oceana, on Earth, but frankly, Gregory would believe that when he sat down with them in the ready room. Fighter losses during the past six months had been ungodly heavy, and they were having trouble recruiting and training replacements planetside fast enough to keep up with demand.

“VFA-96, this is Republic Primary Flight Control. You are cleared for final on Bay One, six-zero mps on approach.”

“Copy, Republic PriFly,” Commander Luther Mackey replied. “Bay One, sixty mps.”

Slowing sharply, the Starblade fighters fell into line ahead, moving in on the Republic from dead astern. Gregory was second in line, behind Bruce Caswell. He let his fighter’s AI cut his velocity and adjust his angle of approach; the landing bays on a star carrier were moving targets, rotating about the ship’s spine to create the illusion of gravity. Docking required more-than-human precision, and a slight upward bump of the thrusters just as the Starblade swept across the bay’s threshold. A feeling of gravity surged through Gregory’s body as the bay’s magnetic capture fields snagged his ship and brought him to a relative halt at the end of the deck.

“Demon Four,” a voice said in his head. “Trap complete. Welcome aboard, Lieutenant.”

Automated machinery grappled with his fighter, lifting it smoothly up through the overhead, making room for the next fighter in line behind him. The deck matrix molded about his Starblade for a moment, maintaining the vacuum in the landing bay as his fighter transitioned into pressure and the orchestrated bustle of deck personnel tending the incoming Starblades. Gregory’s cockpit melted open and released him, and he stepped out into the open.

“Welcome to the Republic, Lieutenant,” a woman with a commander’s insignia on her utilities said. Gregory felt her ping him as she accessed his in-head RAM and downloaded his personnel records and orders. “The ship will show you to your quarters. Debriefing at eleven hundred, Ready One.”

“Thank you, Commander.” Her name, he read through his in-head, was Sandra Dillon, and she was Republic’s ACAG, the assistant commander Aerospace Group. He opened a channel to the Republic’s AI and requested directions into the labyrinthine interior of the ship.

A light star carrier was considerably smaller than a monster like the America, but she still was an enormous vessel, with kilometers of internal passageways and compartments and a crew of more than two thousand. Junior officers quartered four to a stateroom; he found his berthing compartment and claimed a rack. Then he followed the ship’s directions to take him up to one of the ready rooms.

Gregory had been in the Navy for four years, now, and was an old hand at this. They would be getting the standard welcome-aboard talk, get to meet the ship’s CAG, and if they were lucky, find out something about the expedition to which they’d been assigned. That said, the setup for this mission was unusual: a Navy ship, with Navy personnel and three fighter squadrons … but with a civilian skipper and a load of double-dome civilian xenosophs. So that meant they were pulling first-contact duty.

Gregory didn’t much care one way or the other. He’d been there, done that, and been issued a brand-new pair of legs. At the moment he had only one question.

When the hell was he going to be able to get liberty? There was some very important business he needed to conduct ashore.

USNA CVE Guadalcanal

Orbiting Heimdall

Kapteyn’s Star

1213 hours, GMT

Captain Laurie Taggart floated into the bridge compartment of the escort star carrier Guadalcanal and pulled herself down into her command chair. “Captain on the bridge!” Commander Franklin Simmons, her XO, announced as her seat enclosed her lower body, gently restraining her in the ambient microgravity. In front of her, Lieutenant Rodriguez, the ship’s combat information officer, intently studied the repeater screens that partially surrounded him, and Taggart’s eyes widened as she glanced at them.

“What the hell is that?” she demanded. She’d received a “captain to the bridge” call moments earlier, but they hadn’t told her what the call was about.

“Don’t know for sure, Captain,” Rodriguez told her. “But it’s got to be the Rosies. Nothing else could work on that grand a scale!”

“Does the rest of the fleet see this?”

“They will when the signal reaches them, Captain. Transmission time … ten more minutes.”

Taggart stared into the screens a moment longer, then linked in with Nelly, the ship’s AI, opening the same channel in her mind.

She gazed into wonder …

Not for the first time Taggart questioned if these beings truly were the Stargods of her religion. She’d drifted away from the old beliefs lately, but it was impossible to feel that inner stirring of awe and not at least wonder.

They were in orbit over an Earth-sized moon of the gas giant Bifrost. Heimdall was a barren, desolate world now, though it had given rise to intelligent life billions of years in the past. For the past 800 million years or so, it had been the site of the so-called Etched Cliffs, a super-computer network carved into solid rock and spanning the world. Several alien species had vanished into that network, living digital lives within a virtual universe of their own making.

Those uploaded minds, uncounted trillions of them, were gone now, devoured by the Rosette entity—“the Rosies,” as Rodriguez had called them. For weeks the world had been utterly dead and empty. But now …

It looked like aurorae, slow-moving bars and circles of pale blue-green light, but the patterns were far too regular and organized to be natural emissions within the local magnetic field. They were emerging, it looked like, from the primary Etched Cliffs site, but expanding second by second with bewildering speed and complexity to engulf the world of Heimdall.

The Rosette entity had created large numbers of geometric constructs in open space, but the structures had vanished after the Battle of Heimdall. Navy xenosophontologists had assumed that the aliens had withdrawn.

Evidently, Taggart thought as she studied the phenomenon, they had not.

“Helm,” she said.

“Helm, aye, Captain.”

“Take us out of orbit. Come to one-one-five minus one eight, five-zero kps.”

“Come to course one-one-five minus one eight at fifty kps, aye, aye.”

She didn’t know what was going on down there, but she wanted her ship well clear of it, whatever it was.

Her ship. Laurie Taggart’s military career had taken some sudden and unexpected shifts in vector over the past few months. She’d started off as senior weapons officer on board the star carrier America … but then she’d received a new assignment as Exec on board America’s sister ship, the Lexington. From there, she’d volunteered for TAD—temporary attached duty—as skipper of the Lucas, a Marine transport and stealth lander, and then had returned to take command of the Lady Lex when Captain Bigelow had been killed.

She’d been the one who’d brought the crippled Lexington home.

Of course, there was no way the Navy Department was going to let her keep that billet. She was far too junior, too low on the Navy’s rank hierarchy to skipper the Lexington. Upon reaching SupraQuito, though, she’d received a field promotion to the rank of captain and been given command of the light carrier Guadalcanal.

She suspected that Trev—her lover, Captain Trevor Gray—had made the recommendation for her promotion, but he’d refused to confirm or deny her accusation. Instead, he’d snuggled her in close and merely whispered, “Hush. You’ve earned it.”

Now she just hoped she could keep what she’d earned. The light show was engulfing the entire globe of Heimdall now and reaching far out into space as well.

“Captain?” Lieutenant Peters, on sensor watch, called. “We’re getting solid returns now. Fireflies.”

“Shit …”

Fireflies referred to small, autonomous objects, ranging from dust specks to a few meters across in size, that seemed to be associated with the Rosette Alien structures. They flew in unimaginably vast swarms, could fit themselves together into solid components, or they could destroy a starship simply by ramming into it at high velocity. Fireflies were believed to be part of an enormous swarm intelligence numbering in the hundreds of trillions and providing the underlying computronium matrix for the Rosette intelligence.

What, she wondered, was the best call, here? Stay put and observe? Rejoin the rest of the Kapteyn’s Star flotilla out at Thrymheim, the system’s outermost planet some twelve light-minutes distant? Probe the bewildering tangle of light structures now unfolding across local space? Launch Guadalcanal’s fighters?

Her orders, the standing orders for the five-ship flotilla here, were simply to patrol the Kapteyn’s Star system and alert Earth if the Rosies showed up again. Judging by what was unfolding out of Heimdall, they’d never left in the first place, and Earth was going to want to know about that.

“Get us back to the others,” she told the helm officer.

“Aye, Captain.”

“Exec? Go to general quarters.”

This was not looking good.

USNA FME Olympia

Rosette

Omega Centauri

1214 hours, GMT

Some 15,800 light years removed from Earth, an AI called Limpy by the humans working with it stared into strangeness as well. Although he did not think in the same way that humans did, and did not make the same value judgments, it knew that something was going on … and that it did not look good.

Omega Centauri was the largest globular star cluster in the Milky Way galaxy—10 million stars with a total mass some 4 million times that of Sol, packed into a sphere 150 light years across. At its gravitational center, deep within that teeming swarm of stars filling an impossibly crowded sky, six black holes, each the size of a world, orbited, in a patently artificial manner—a Klemperer rosette.

Centuries before, Terran astronomers had demonstrated that Omega Centauri was not, in fact, a typical globular cluster, but rather that it was the stripped-down core of a small galaxy that had been sucked in and devoured by the much larger Milky Way more than half a billion years before. Large galaxies, it was known, were cannibals, shredding smaller galaxies and slurping up the remains. Several stars—among them the red dwarf Kapteyn’s Star, only 12.7 light years from Sol, had been proven by their spectral fingerprints to be escaped members of that ancient galaxy.

Much more recently, human warships engaging the so-called Sh’daar Empire had traveled back through time and discovered that galaxy, called the N’gai Cluster by its myriad inhabitants, during an epoch when it was still just above the Milky Way. At the heart of N’gai, they’d found what was almost certainly the precursor of the Rosette—six hyper-giant blue stars serving as a kind of beacon or monument for the Sh’daar.

Here within Omega Centauri, however, those hyperstars had long ago exploded, turning into black holes whirling around a tortured volume of space not much larger than Earth. And there was more. The enigmatic being known as the Consciousness had been busily building … something. Titanic structures apparently constructed of pure light hung suspended around the hexagon of rotating singularities and extended in all directions to impossible infinities.

The monitor Olympia, a high-tech listening post disguised as an innocuous chunk of rock the size of Mt. Everest—crewed by 150 humans and a late-model AI with some very special programming—had slipped into orbit around the Rosette only weeks before. With downloads based on data snatched from the Consciousness at Kapteyn’s Star, Limpy could eavesdrop on the Consciousness by linking in to back channels and sidebands to tap into conversations between a few of the far-flung individual devices making up the whole.

So far, the effort had not been particularly productive. One xenosophontologist had declared that the eavesdropping effort was akin to finding out what a human was thinking by analyzing the waste emissions of a couple of the bacteria in his gut. Limpy felt that the chances of getting something useful were better than that, but he understood the problem. The Consciousness was very, very large and complex, and even the very best human-directed SAIs had little chance of understanding the entity in more than an extremely basic way.

To Limpy, it was a chance worth taking.

Right now, the AI on Olympia was drifting across the face of the Rosette, its orbit taking it cross the opening between the six whirling singularities. In the space at the center, stars were visible … but not the thronging, massed stars of Omega Centauri. Olympia’s bridge crew was looking, quite literally, through a hole punched in spacetime. They were looking into somewhere—and somewhen—else.

Clearly, the Rosette was a stargate of some kind. The high-velocity rotation of those black holes around their common center twisted the normal, sane dimensions of spacetime out of all reason, opening numerous gateways into the unknown. The starscapes glimpsed within that whirling gateway might be other regions of the galaxy, other times, or even other universes entirely.

The being called the Consciousness had come through from one of those elsewheres. The Consciousness, the Rosette entity, the Alien Intelligence … all of those were names for something Humankind had never truly encountered and might never be able to understand.

Limpy was here to try to learn more.

“Hey, Limp?”

“Yes, Captain Mosely?”

“What’s all that stuff over there? Opposite the Rosette opening?”

He knew exactly what Mosely was referring to. He’d been watching the phenomenon grow and develop for several minutes now … a huge cloud of what looked like smoke, white and gray-silver in the massed starlight.

“Unknown, Captain. It appears to be clouds of micromachines similar to those you call fireflies, numbering in the trillions.”

“What are they doing?”

“Coming in this general direction.”

“Shit …”

The Olympia AI continued watching for several moments. “Captain, I would suggest you sound general quarters.”

“I was just arriving at the same conclusion.”

A second later, Olympia’s internal passageways rang with the shrill clanging of the alarm. Not that it much mattered—the swarm was on them before most of the crew was able to take their positions. Yet the lead elements of the cloud swept past the ship at a range of several hundred kilometers, and it soon became clear that the cloud’s target was not the Olympia.

“So where are they going in such a damned hurry?” Mosely wondered aloud, thinking the danger had passed.

And then a shudder ran through the drifting mountain, followed by several savage shocks.

“Limpy!” Mosely called. “We’ve been hit!” The starfield outside began drifting. “We’re rotating!”

“We haven’t been hit, Captain. We have been caught in an extremely powerful gravitational stream.”

“What the hell is a ‘gravitational stream’?”

“A narrow, tubular volume of space has been distorted in such a way as to create rapid movement toward the Rosette. We have been caught by the fringes of the effect and are being swept along.”

“Toward the Rosette …”

“That is correct, Captain. Unless we can break free, we will pass through the central lumen of the hexagon in another forty-three seconds.”

The Olympia possessed gravitational drive engines, but the ship was slow and underpowered for a vessel of its size and mass. Mosely was shouting orders, trying to engage the drive and bring the ship clear, but the AI had already determined that there simply was not enough power for the ship to break free, not in the time remaining.

Olympia’s capture did not appear to be a hostile act; indeed, it seemed to be completely accidental. The column of gravitationally warped space enveloped the vast swarm streaming through space toward the Rosette. It seemed likely that the devices themselves were generating the warp as a means of propulsion, and that their destination was somewhere on the other side of the Rosette gateway through spacetime.

Regardless of the reason, Olympia was being dragged along with it.

With emotionless efficiency, Limpy compressed a complete record of recent events into a laser comm message and fired it into space. There were other vessels drifting in the heart of Omega Centauri that would get the record back to Earth.

Ahead, the blurred ring of distortion created by the rapidly circling singularities expanded, filling the sky. Brilliant hues of light—light trapped within the gravitational anomaly—created a radiant halo effect that resembled a titanic, unblinking eye. At the very center of the distortion, within the eye’s pupil, a starfield had appeared. Limpy did a rapid scan and assessment and discovered that the starfield matched nothing in his own memory.

And then Olympia fell through the eye and vanished from local spacetime.

SupraQuito Space Elevator

In Transit

1635 hours, TFT

Gray was glad that he always traveled light. After his interview in Geneva, he’d been taken to a hotel for an uncomfortable night’s sleep, and then he attended a six-hour briefing covering things of which he was already well aware: the wrecked high-technic civilization at Tabby’s Star, the discovery of the Omega Code, and the fact … no, the presumption that a highly advanced civilization existed at the brilliant blue-white star Deneb some 173 light years from Tabby’s Star.

Because he’d been the one to uncover most of this information, Gray sat bored and cross-armed through most of it. He was able to correct a presenter at one point, however. There was a possible motive for the Denebans to attack the Satori, the civilization at Tabby’s Star. The Satori had encircled their sun with gravitational thrusters and been accelerating their entire civilization, star, Dyson swarm, and all, in the direction of Deneb. Why was still unknown … but the Denebans evidently hadn’t taken kindly to pushy neighbors.

It would be well, he told the large audience gathered in the Ad Astra center’s amphitheater, to keep that in mind when they approached Deneb for the first time.

Later that afternoon, he, Vasilyeva, and a dozen of her xenosoph people had boarded another, considerably larger, grav flier for the very nearly 10,000-kilometer flight to Quito, in the Unión de América del Sur.

From there, a brief tube ride had taken them to the base of the first of Earth’s three space elevators, anchored to a mountaintop perched directly astride Earth’s equator. The group had then boarded a special express skycar for the trip up to SupraQuito.

Express meant an acceleration of one G—which, added to the one G of Earth’s surface gravity, meant that the passengers were under two gravities for the first part of their trip. The magnetic skycar was impeccably appointed, however, with luxurious reclining seats designed to keep the passengers as comfortable as possible despite the sensation of another person sitting on their chests. Decks, bulkheads, and overhead projected views of their surroundings—in particular the gloriously beautiful vista of the cloud-wrapped Earth falling away below them.

Not that any of them had any particular interest in watching the Earth. Gray was focused on his breathing as they shot faster and faster into the sky above Quito, magnetically accelerated along the taut Earth-to-heaven cable.

The sensation of crushing weight lessened bit by bit as the skycar rose higher. Thirty-two minutes after leaving the elevator port, they were traveling at 19.5 kilometers per second and they were at the halfway point, almost 19,000 kilometers above the mountaintop. Acceleration ceased, and the passenger compartment rotated through 180 degrees, until the vast blue-and-white expanse of the Earth below swung around and took up a new position above them. They were now decelerating at one gravity, though it felt like considerably less because the Earth now was working against that acceleration rather than adding to it.

“I thought we would be in zero-G once we were in space!” one of the scientists grumbled. His name was Dr. Liu and Gray had been told he was on loan from the Shanghai Institute of Advanced Technology.

“Only if you’re in orbit,” Gray told him. “If you’re in free fall, you’re basically falling around the Earth … but you’re never outside of the reach of its gravity. This part of the space elevator isn’t in orbit, and if you were to open a hatch and step outside right now you’d fall all the way back down to Ecuador.”

“It’s different up at geosynch,” Vasilyeva added gently. “We’ll be in free fall there.”

Liu grunted, and Gray fell silent, feeling a small disquiet. He would have thought that any scientifically literate person would know that, and not make such a rookie goof.

Expertise in one scientific area, evidently, didn’t qualify the person as an expert in others. Space, however, was a place where ignorance could get you killed.

He wondered how savvy the rest of this crowd was when it came to basic orbital mechanics.

One hour and five minutes after leaving Earth, the skycar decelerated into SupraQuito Synchorbital Station, and a five-minute tube run brought them to the yards.

Gray sat in the tube capsule looking up through the overhead transparency at a labyrinth of struts and railguides, and orbital structures, gantries, and dockyard facilities slowly moving past against the backdrop of space. Ahead, docked within her gantry, the USNA CVL Republic looked just as Gray remembered her.

He was coming back on board her, he knew, with decidedly mixed feelings. He was eager to get back on board a ship—any ship—once again, and the sooner the better. There was little enough on Earth to hold him there now, he knew. Each time he returned to explore his roots within Manhatt, he found more and more change, less and less a sense of home or belonging.