by Ian Douglas
TC/USNA CVS Republic
0829 hours, TFT
Lieutenant Gregory signaled his readiness for launch, then slapped his empty coffee cup against the side of his cockpit, where the nanotech coating of the cockpit’s bulkhead broke down the individual molecules and absorbed them.
“PriFly, Black Demons are ready for launch,” Commander Mackey called. “Just give us the word.”
“Copy, Demons,” the voice of Sandra Dillon replied. “Hang tight while they make up their minds in CIC.”
Dillon, the Assistant CAG, was up in PriFly, and the sound of her voice stirred memories in Gregory’s mind, as well as a slight flush of warmth. He wondered how well she’d slept last night. . . .
Pushing the memories of last night aside, Gregory linked in with an external feed. The alien vessel, or whatever it was, continued to hang in front of the Republic, eleven hundred kilometers distant. It was . . . enormous, threatening, simply by virtue of its sheer mass. Numerous smaller craft, each mirror sheened, swarmed through that volume of space, some as large as the Republic, some the size of individual pressure suits.
What, Gregory wondered, were the occupants like? As far as he knew, no human had seen a Deneban yet, and no one knew what they looked like, or what their biochemistry might be like. Analyses of the light visible through those myriad windows, or whatever they were, suggested temperatures on board in excess of nine hundred Celsius . . . as hot as some molten lavas.
Not, he thought, life as we know it.
Ever since the very first contact with an alien species, the beetle-like Agletsch encountered over a century before, human xenosophontologists had spoken of the inevitability of alien “life as we know it.” By that, they’d meant—speaking in broad terms, at least—carbon-based life using liquid water as a solvent. So far, carbon chemistry had been the norm. There’d been some surprises along the way, of course; there were exoplanet ecologies that had evolved on worlds like Titan, where water was solid rock and the liquid of choice was ethane, and a few utilizing sulfur. But even Titan and similar frigid worlds found in other solar systems had evolved life based on familiar hydrocarbon chemistry. Whatever it was that was living inside that huge ship ahead, Gregory thought, it had precious little in common with “life as we know it.”
And if the xenosoph people didn’t understand their biochemistry, it was a sure bet they understood the alien psychology even less.
“Hey, Skipper!” Ruxton called over the squadron channel. “Why doesn’t PriFly kick us out?”
“Yeah,” Bruce Caswell added. “It’s not like we’re doing any good in here!”
“Can it, people,” Mackey replied. “They might be thinking that there’s nothing we could do out there anyway.”
“That’s right,” Gregory said. “We’re like a tenth of a light year from the star. What the hell are we supposed to do way out here?”
“We could take that big mirror ball down,” Ruxton said.
“Technically,” Mackey said, “we’re not at war with the bastards . . . at least not yet. Let’s not start one if we can help it, okay?”
And then, suddenly, in an instant, the huge alien vessel was gone.
“Hey, what happened to it?” Caswell demanded.
“Tracking says it’s heading back toward Deneb at close to c,” Mackey said. “Ah! Cancel that! The damned thing just blinked out!”
“It must’ve gone superluminal,” Gregory suggested.
“If that’s the case,” Mackey said, “they’ve got some damned good tech. Instant acceleration to the speed of light, and total nullification of inertia.”
“So what happens now?”
“What do you think, Gregory? This is the military!”
“Sounds like we hurry up and wait.”
Which had been the command imperative in all branches of the military, probably since before the time of Sargon the Great.
Gregory snuggled back within the embrace of his fighter’s cockpit and wondered if he could catch up on some sleep. . . .
Bridge
TC/USNA CVS Republic
Approaching Deneb
0850 hours, TFT
“Are we still tracking them?” Gray asked.
“Sorry, Captain,” Walters, the sensor officer, said. “They broke our lock.”
“Then they must have jumped to FTL. Helm! Follow them. Take us all the way in if you have to.” Republic’s radiation shielding should hold, at least up to a point. What that point was would need to be determined.
“Aye, aye, Captain.”
“That didn’t exactly look like an invitation, Captain,” Commander Rohlwing said.
“It wasn’t exactly a ‘humans go home,’ either. We need to get in closer.”
Republic began accelerating, piling on the gravities until they were beginning to crowd the speed of light. The operation, Gray noticed, took a hell of a lot longer than it had for the aliens. But that was to be expected.
Ahead, the bright star Deneb flared even brighter, its light blue-shifted until much of its radiation seemed to be blasting through from the X-ray portion of the spectrum. Once moving at near-c, Gray gave the command to shift to Alcubierre Drive, but only for a few fleeting seconds. The light-tortured sky surrounding them went black . . . and then they emerged in a searing ocean of radiance.
“Anything?” Gray demanded.
“Sir,” Walters said, “we’re reading a planet. Bearing one-one-five, range thirty million kilometers.”
“What kind? Inhabited?”
“Unknown as yet, sir,” she said. “But it looks like pretty close to Earth in mass and gravity. Atmosphere . . . we’re reading liquid water.”
“How far is it from the star?”
“I make it three hundred twenty AUs, Captain.”
Gray nodded. Deneb’s output of heat and light was roughly one hundred thousand times that of small and miserly Sol, or perhaps a little more. That put the so-called Goldilocks zone over three hundred times the distance of Earth from the sun.
He doubted, though, that anyplace within the star system would be even remotely habitable for organic life forms like humans. Deneb’s output bathed surrounding space in ultraviolet and X-ray radiation, enough to cook any world even this far out.
“Sir,” Walters added. “There’s something . . . weird. . . .”
“What?”
“That planet . . . it wasn’t there a moment ago!”
“That doesn’t seem likely,” Rohlwing said. “Check your instrumentation, Walters.”
“I just did, sir. A planet that big should have shown up as a gravitational mass even when we were clear out at our emergence point. Between then and now . . . I swear it just came out of nowhere!”
“Helm!” Gray said. “Take us there! Let’s see what it’s like close up.”
“Aye, Captain. Accelerating . . .”
Again, the light ahead blue-shifted with Republic’s velocity. There was no need to go FTL this time, though, and the Republic made the short jaunt in minutes.
“Great God in heaven!” Rohlwing said, his voice ragged with emotion. “What the hell is that?”
“Advanced technology, Commander,” Gray replied, trying to keep his voice steady. “Very advanced technology.”
The sky around the mysterious planet was filled with machines.
That, at least, was how Gray interpreted what he was seeing in the first instant. As he stared into the alien vista, he could make out more and more detail, but the nature of what he was seeing was so difficult to grasp, his brain rejected much of the information out of hand, threatening to collapse the scale of those objects down to manageable toy size, or interpret it as some sort of surreal artwork. It was all he could do to force his eyes to follow those shapes and try to understand the size and scope and depth of what he was seeing. . . .
His first impression was of circles . . . of thousands upon thousands of enormous circles. . . .
“Konstantin?” Gray called in his mind. “What the hell are
we looking at?”
“Planetary engineering on a truly titanic scale,” the SAI replied. “This civilization appears to be focused on harvesting light from blue and blue-white supergiants.”
Each of the circles, Gray saw, was thousands of kilometers in diameter and filled rim to rim with six-sided transparent shapes like misshapen honeycombs. They must be designed, he thought, to intercept some small percentage of the radiation streaming out from the star. They were adrift in space, obviously ordered as part of an enormous pattern that appeared to stretch off to infinity in all directions—a shell of trillions of objects, Gray thought, that might surround Deneb much like a Dyson swarm.
But where any sane Dyson sphere imagined by humans would have a radius of, at most, 1 or 2 astronomical units, this one was constructed 320 AU out from the star, enclosing a total volume of over 216 cubic kilometers.
The sheer mass of so many solar receivers was staggering. Most Dyson sphere concepts imagined disassembling the planets of a solar system to create the individual Dyson objects . . . but building a swarm on this scale would entail the destruction of untold tens of thousands of planetary systems.
Or . . . another possibility occurred to him. Perhaps they could convert energy into matter. That, after all, was one of the two possible outcomes of E=mc2, and in Deneb the locals certainly possessed an astonishing amount of ambient energy.
Still, Gray wasn’t sure he believed that . . . that he could believe that.
“They may also create matter out of empty space, using the vacuum energy,” Konstantin suggested, apparently reading his thoughts. “Either way, I am detecting evidence of mega-engineering on an unimaginable scale.”
What, Gray wondered, was “unimaginable” for a super-AI? Some of what he was seeing . . .
“We need to talk to them,” he said. He wasn’t sure how they were going to open the conversation, however. Hi, there . . . nice mega-engineering?
“We have been transmitting the language protocols developed when we encountered their Gaki software.” Konstantin had established communication, of a sort, with the Gaki during America’s visit to the system.
“Any response?” The mirror-bright sphere, he noticed, had vanished, as though the Denebans knew the humans could not harm them.
“Not so far.” Konstantin seemed to hesitate. “The Denebans appear to be ignoring us.”
“Better than stepping on us,” Gray said.
Even so, being ignored was not, Gray thought, an auspicious beginning to the relationship.
“We need to attract their attention,” Konstantin said, “without provoking a hostile response.”
“I also want a closer look at those megastructures out there. CAG! We still have fighters ready to drop?”
“Yes, sir!”
“Then do so. Let’s see just what it is we’re dealing with.”
Chapter Twelve
20 February 2426
VFA-96, Black Demons
Launch Bay One
TC/USNA CVS Republic
0905 hours, TFT
Lieutenant Gregory came awake with a start. His in-head time-keeping told him he’d only been asleep for a few moments.
Someone had been talking. “Sorry . . . what was that?”
“I said drop in five minutes,” Mackey said over the squadron net. “Listen up, Gregory!”
“Right you are.” He scanned his in-head read-outs. “I’m good to go here.”
“Well, pay attention. It’s a real zoo out there.”
Zoo was right. The Republic had moved deeper into the Deneb system and was now adrift just a few thousand kilometers from what looked like another Earth, complete with blue seas and mottled white clouds. Auroras flared and rippled at the poles; throughout surrounding space, ring-shaped devices apparently designed to trap incoming stellar radiation filled the local sky, but enough hard stuff was getting through to funnel down the world’s magnetic field and ignite the polar skies with cold fire.
Besides the myriad energy-collection rings closer at hand, in the distance there were much larger structures—ring-shaped constructs spanning millions of kilometers. Gregory had never seen anything like them and couldn’t imagine what they were. Some appeared to be woven from slender red-hued rods; others were more like massive assemblies of machine parts. All were enigmatic, mysterious, and awe-inspiring in their sheer mass and breadth.
“Okay, Demons,” Mackey said, addressing the whole unit. “The bridge wants a close look-see on that planet. Stay tight, stay alert, and keep an eye out for that monster ship that was out there a while ago. If that thing shows up, we’re to fall back to the Republic and provide close escort.”
The last minute trickled away. “Black Demons,” the assistant CAG called, “you are clear for drop . . . in three . . . two . . . one . . . go!”
The first four Starblades of VFA-96 dropped into the Void, flung into space by the out-is-down rotation of the Republic’s rotating hab module. Gregory was in the first sequence. He gentled his fighter clear of the drop volume as the ponderous module swung around again, releasing the next three ships in line. Gregory’s earlier skepticism had proven accurate, and the Black Demons were still short-handed, at seven ships.
Mackey gave the order to proceed.
“PriFly, Black Demons. VFA-96, handing off to CIC.”
“Demons, CIC. We have you. You are clear to proceed.”
“Black Demons copy. Okay, tuck in close, chicks. Let’s check it out.”
Accelerating, the seven fighters held a close V-formation as they swept out from the carrier and adjusted their vectors for the gleaming blue-and-white world ahead.
“So what’s the word on this planet, Skipper?” Caswell asked. “They’re saying it appeared out of empty space!”
“That’s what they say.”
“What the hell kind of nonsense is that?” Gregory demanded.
“It’s freakin’ true! If you’d stayed awake you would have heard PriFly talking about it.”
“Planets don’t just pop into existence from out of nowhere!”
“Most likely guess?” Mackey said. “They just have really good screens or shields or something. The planet was there, but we couldn’t pick up its mass signature from a tenth of a light year out.”
The thought made Gregory feel a bit better. Really good shields he could wrap his mind around. But creating a planet out of hard vacuum in an eye blink? That was something else entirely.
“Okay, boys and girls,” Mackey told them. “We’ll split up to increase coverage. First pass, we’ll swing around the planet separately at two hundred kilometers. All scanners out, all sensors recording. Everybody set? Break in three . . . and two . . . and one . . . and break!”
The fighters dispersed, each following a different orbital path around the looming planet. At their current angle of approach, the world was showing as a fat crescent, but Gregory noted that the night side of the world was dimly lit by Deneb-light reflected off the bizarre and sky-filling artificial structures in the surrounding space.
He wondered if they were checking out the right objective—the planet, instead of those strange and complex alien megastructures.
“So what’s the name of the planet?” Ruxton wanted to know. “We can’t just keep calling it ‘the planet.’ ”
“How about Deneb-b?” Caswell replied. “I think that’s what the planetology department is calling the thing.”
“Nah,” Garcia said. “That doesn’t tell you a damned thing about it.”
“No imagination,” Ruxton put in. “No soul.”
“I’ve got one,” Gregory said. “Enigma.”
“Hey, I like it,” Mackey said. “I’ll suggest it to the planet wonks on the Republic.”
Caswell laughed. “Yeah, and take credit for it, right, Skipper?”
Gregory was getting closer to the planet, whatever its name might eventually be. It rapidly swelled to fill his forward field of view, the horizon flattening out as more and more detail of cloud
and ocean, bay and mountain became visible. Swiftly, in an explosion of light, Deneb rose above the horizon, bathing the landscape below in a harsh, actinic glare. At two hundred kilometers, the seven fighters swept around the planet’s curve, completing a circuit in ninety minutes.
“Next pass,” Mackey said, “you all duck into the atmosphere and get some low-altitude samples. I’ll stay parked up here and coordinate.”
“Copy that, Flight Leader,” Gregory called back. “Descending . . .”
He dropped slowly and heard the growing roar of atmosphere outside his hull.
“So what do we do if we run into the locals?” Cheng asked.
“Don’t,” Mackey replied, blunt. “Cut and run, rejoin me in orbit.”
“Shouldn’t be a problem,” Gregory said. “I don’t think anyone’s at home.”
Cutting his speed sharply, he fell deeper into the atmosphere. His Starblade began shuddering hard, the roar outside swelling to a shrill and thunderous howl. He let his fighter’s AI sample atmospheric gases all the way down, leveling off at just five hundred meters. He was sweeping low and slow above a vast, gently undulating plain: green grass spotted by rare clumps of what looked like low, spreading trees. It could have been the African veldt back home.
There was no sign of cities, of population, of inhabitants of any kind. No herds of large animals, no flocks of birds. There were forests, vast masses of things that might be trees . . . or perhaps a deliberate mimicry of trees and vegetation. Winding rivers flashing brilliantly in the bright light. Mountains—the tallest capped by ice. He brought his ship up to clear a low and worn-looking mountain range averaging a couple of thousand meters.
From horizon to horizon, the place seemed empty and deserted. Beyond the mountains, a broad, flooded estuary swept past beneath his keel, giving way a moment later to open ocean.
“Demon Flight, Demon Four,” he called. “I’m putting out some drones.”
“Copy that, Demon Four.”
He thoughtclicked an icon, firing a cluster of remote probes into the sky. Some would dip down and sample the ocean below. Others would spread out and sample the land and other parts of the atmosphere, checking temperatures and pressures.