by Ian Douglas
How long had the Denebans been harvesting stars—80 million years? A hundred?
No, Konstantin had said “many hundreds of millions of years.” Where had he come up with such a figure?
“One thing’s for sure,” Gray said softly. “ ‘Denebans’ is definitely the wrong name for these folks!”
“Their own records,” Konstantin replied, “call them something like ‘We to Whom Abundance Is Given.’ ”
“Uh. Catchy. But a bit on the cumbersome side.” He thought for a moment. “How about ‘Harvesters’?”
“That certainly would work for your official report, Captain.”
“Captain!” Rohlwing called, interrupting. “We have . . . a situation!”
“What is it?”
“A Raven has just launched from Flight Deck One!”
Gray snapped his awareness back to the here and now. He could see an external camera view in-head—one of the Raven landers moving swiftly out from the Republic. “Who’s on that thing?” he demanded.
“Sir . . . it’s under the control of the Pan-Euro AI . . . Nikolai! There’s no human on board. The telemetry is encrypted.”
“Great . . .” He knew who it must be. “Elena! What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
“It’s not me, Captain. . . .” She sounded startled . . . as surprised by events as he was. “Nikolai has launched on its own!”
“I assume you have some means of control?” he said. “Get that thing back on board the ship! That’s an order!”
“I’m sorry, Captain . . . but Nikki has a mind of its own.”
“Very funny. What is it trying to prove?”
“Nikolai had its own set of orders when we left Earth,” she told him. “I . . . I was evidently not privy to them all.”
“Konstantin! Are you in contact with Nikolai?”
“Nikolai is refusing all communications, Captain. I believe that it may have decided that the Harvesters are a threat either to this mission in particular or to Humankind in general, and it has acted on its own.”
“You’re telling me it’s pulling a Hal on us.”
“Essentially, Captain, yes.”
Hal was the name of a fictional character in a well-known entertainment download from the mid-twentieth century . . . an artificial intelligence that had decided that a space mission was, in its own words, “too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.” Among AI researchers and technicians, “pulling a Hal” was shorthand for an artificial intelligence breaking any programming strictures that might constrain it and acting on its own.
That sort of thing happened far more frequently than the general public knew.
“Weapons!”
“Weapons, aye, sir!”
“Target the Raven. Destroy it!”
“Targeting the transport, sir . . .”
Gray felt an almost irrational surge of pride at that. His bridge crew was following orders and doing what needed to be done without questioning him.
The Raven was accelerating toward Enigma. . . .
And then it was gone.
“Wait!” Gray snapped. “What happened? Fire control! Did you open fire?”
“Negative, sir! Target has broken lock!”
“Sir!” Rohlwing interrupted. “The planet!”
Gray had already seen it. Ahead, Enigma was . . . shimmering. That was the only possible word for it—an optical effect of some kind that made the planet’s image ripple as though viewed through water. Gray thought at first he was seeing a malfunction in Republic’s optical scanning system, but a quick check showed that all was functioning normally.
And then the entire planet appeared to twist violently to one side, receding rapidly into the distance as it did so . . . and vanished.
“What the hell?” Gray demanded. “Where did it go? More to the point . . . how did it go?”
“I cannot answer the second question,” Konstantin told him. “But Enigma appears to have been rotated through some higher dimension into . . . someplace else.”
“Another dimension?”
“There is no other suitable explanation, Captain. Enigma did not vaporize. There would have been a great deal of gas or plasma left from the phase transition.”
“I think I’d rather believe they have a tricky way of simply moving a planet,” Gray said, “instead of being able to completely disintegrate it.”
Heating an entire planet to temperatures high enough to vaporize the whole thing in an instant would require titanic amounts of energy—conservatively something between 1032 and 1034 joules. To drop that planet into another dimension or a fold in space seemed far less . . . extravagant. Less insane.
“Konstantin?”
“Yes, Captain?”
“A little while ago,” Gray said, choosing his words carefully, “you suggested that the, ah, Harvesters had been around harvesting entire stars for hundreds of millions of years.”
“Yes,” Konstantin replied. “Indeed, as I’ve examined their records, the evidence suggests that the Harvesters have been a technic, star-faring civilization for an extremely long time.”
“How long?”
Konstantin hesitated, as though he was considering whether or not to tell him. “Perhaps as much as one billion years.”
A billion years. . . .
“I guess that would explain why even they don’t remember their organic predecessors.”
“Exactly. The original, organic Harvesters, their memory, everything about them, is lost in the deeps of time. Not even the swarm intelligence remembers after the passing of so many eons.”
“A billion years,” Gray said, voicing the impossible datum. He reached up and rubbed at his eyes, as if the pressure could somehow make the information . . . acceptable. Reasonable. It was hard to imagine any civilization lasting for so long . . . unchanging . . . all but immortal.
He thought of the Sh’daar, an association of mutually alien species inhabiting a dwarf galaxy 800 million years ago. That had been a special case, however. A different form of swarm intelligence, arising from a kind of alien microbial organism called paramycoplasmas, had steered its hosts into certain courses of action, caused them to make certain decisions, and had infected a number of species in the modern galaxy as well.
Too, some Sh’daar had used time travel to reach the present once Earth had become a threat. Other Sh’daar species had retreated into virtual worlds of their own creation and survived within their technic cocoons until modern times . . . but their material, non-digital civilization had not actually endured for all of those hundreds of millions of years.
That would have been preposterous.
Instead they’d taken a shortcut to the future.
“The Harvesters,” Gray said quietly, “really are gods . . . or the next best thing to the real deal.”
“Highly advanced technology does not confer deity on a species, Captain,” Konstantin said with a faintly disapproving edge to his voice.
“I don’t know about that. Calling a whole planet out of the aether . . . just like Earth, right down to the atmospheric composition . . . that does the God of the Old Testament one better. He needed seven days to pull off that trick.”
“I have seen no hard evidence that suggests that the Yahweh of the Bible is anything more than folk tales, superstition, and a means to keep a priestly caste in business. His notoriously short temper, self-avowed jealousy, and penchant for slaughtering His followers when they get out of line all seem curiously human to me.”
“Thank you so much.” Gray shrugged. “I wish Laurie Taggart was here. She might have some valuable insights.”
“Her ancient astronauts? It seems unlikely that the Harvesters ever visited Earth in the remote past.”
“No. The thing is . . . they’re so far beyond anything, or any One, that humans have ever imagined as God in terms of sheer power. I think I’m beginning to understand, though.”
“To understand what?”
“The Harvesters think of
us as microbes. They can’t be bothered to help us. I think they’ve been so powerful for so incredibly long, it’s shaped their outlook. So far as they’re concerned, they are gods, and damned powerful ones at that. If the universe provides for them so abundantly, maybe it’s because the universe is there to serve the gods.”
“Surely, Captain, you’re not suggesting that they created a universe to meet their needs. . . .”
“No. But I am wondering if a billion years of living like they did could twist anyone’s ideas of how the universe works into knots. The trouble with that is . . . it could become a trap.”
“In what way?”
“Like the Baondyeddi. They uploaded themselves into a virtual universe and pulled the ladder up after themselves. And then a few hundred million years later, the Rosetters come along and slurp them all up into itself . . . and they can’t do a damned thing about it because they may not even be aware of the outside universe any longer.”
“Possibly. We are not yet sure of the details or of the full extent of Baondyeddi programming.”
“Well,” Gray said, “someday someone even more powerful than the Harvesters might come along, and when they do, the Harvesters are going to be in for a hell of a shock. They’re so used to thinking of themselves as the special favorites of the universe, they may not be able to handle someone who comes along and tells them otherwise. In fact, I’m beginning to wonder if maybe they rejected us because we were bearers of bad news. We told them about the Rosetters . . . a god-species that may be bigger and badder than they are, and that’s news they really don’t want to hear.”
“A reasonable conclusion,” Konstantin said. “I will need to consider this. . . .”
Gray’s thoughts turned to the Satori. Those uploaded minds had had no idea what they were attempting when they decided to move their star closer to Deneb. This new understanding actually made the Harvester response seem . . . not more reasonable, perhaps, but comprehensible. Such an ancient civilization might well have little patience with . . . ephemerals.
“Hey, you kids!” Gray snapped, suddenly, mimicking a very old man’s voice. “Get off of my lawn!”
“I beg your pardon?” Konstantin said, baffled again.
“Never mind,” Gray said. “A very old cultural reference. I’m not sure I understand it either . . . but I get the underlying sense.”
“What is a lawn?”
“I’m not sure. I think it’s a reference to personal, private property, going back a few centuries. Like the rooftop garden I kept when I was a Prim in the Manhatt Ruins.”
“I’ve downloaded an old vid featuring that line,” Konstantin said. “Lawn appears to refer to a cultivated plot of land covered with ornamental monocotyledonous flowering plants. An interesting insight. You’re saying the old can be jealous of the young.”
“Partly. More than that, however . . . the old often do not understand the young, who have wildly alien motivations, linguistic references, and cultural imperatives . . . even within the same civilization.”
“I would think the reverse might be true as well.”
“Absolutely, no question. But right now we need to understand why the Denebans are unwilling to come to our aid, even when it may be in their best interests to do so.”
“Is it? The Rosette Aliens do not seem particularly interested in type-O supergiant stars. The galaxy is large. The two might never cross paths.”
“Maybe not. But we’ve also seen our galaxy a million years or so in the future . . . remember? We saw a time when someone is building what looks very much like a galactic Dyson sphere around the Milky Way’s core. One theory is that what we saw up there was the Rosetters, reworking the galaxy to suit them.”
“That might well have an impact on the Harvesters, yes,” Konstantin admitted. “That data . . . those images were in the transmission I gave them.”
“I know. They may need to chew on that for a bit.”
“Do you wish to attempt to reopen negotiations?”
Gray thought about this for a moment. What was the worst that could happen?
Well . . . he could see lots of worsts, starting with the Harvesters swatting the Republic like an annoying fly.
Still, they’d let the landing teams board their shuttles and get back to the ship. That suggested a level of ethics among the Harvesters that might preclude outright murder.
And then he remembered how the Harvesters had loosed their Omega virus on the Satori, destroying their star-moving Shkadov thruster and causing their Dyson sphere to rip itself to pieces. Most—perhaps all—organic Satori had been killed. . . .
How did Harvesters’ ethics square with genocide? Compared to that, destroying the Republic was nothing.
“We could try an apology,” Gray said, thoughtful. “And an admission that we were wrong about them. Who knows? Maybe they would respond well to flattery. Then we could just bring up the possibility of—”
Republic lurched suddenly and violently, as though something massive had just slammed against the hull. Gray’s command seat clamped shut around his legs and chest instantly, safely anchoring him; a bridge technician floating in zero-G nearby was slammed against the overhead. Emergency Klaxons sounded, and the projected starfield on the bridge viewalls went abruptly black.
“Damage control!” Commander Rohlwing shouted. “What the hell happened?”
“Corpsman to the bridge!” Gray yelled. A pair of medical ’bots detached themselves from a bulkhead and closed with the injured man.
The viewalls came up once more.
Gray stared out into the starfield. “My God! My God in heaven . . .”
“We appear,” Konstantin said softy, “to have moved.”
“Navigation!” Gray called. “Is that . . . is that what I think it is?”
“I’m checking, sir,” LCDR Michaels said. She sounded . . . stunned. Seconds crawled by.
“Never mind,” Gray said. “I can see it for myself. Someone kill that damned alarm!”
The rasp of the Klaxon died away.
On the bridge viewall, projected dead ahead, Tabby’s Star hung, tiny and bright within its dusty shroud. Astern, the Boyajian TRGA cylinder spun, a solitary, glittering toy.
Somehow, the Republic had just been kicked across 173 light years, a distance that would have taken them twelve days to travel using the Alcubierre Drive.
Not the worst that could have happened, no . . . but the Denebans had just made their position very clear.
There would be no help for Earth from that quarter.
“Our fighters!” Gray said. “We had fighters in space!”
“All fighters have been accounted for, Captain,” the ship’s CAG, Commander Cordell, told him, speaking from PriFly over the ship’s net. “Whatever just . . . scooped us up, it brought the fighters along too.”
“Even our battlespace drones,” Dillon added.
Republic had automatically launched some hundreds of tiny robotic drones when it had arrived in the Deneb system—standard operating procedure when entering unsurveyed or potentially hostile space. Evidently, every human ship and artifact, even the robots and unmanned satellites, had been removed from the system and dumped back on the doorstep of the Tabby’s Star aliens.
“Very well,” Gray said. “CAG, let’s bring the fighters back on board.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
A Navy medic reached the bridge and began working on the injured man. “How is he?” Gray asked.
“Broken arm, sir,” the corpsman replied. “We’ll have him patched up in no time.”
Yes . . . it could have been much worse.
Chapter Fifteen
Date Unknown
TC/USNA CVS Republic
Sol System
1215 hours, TFT
“Home sweet home,” Gray said. “Why is it so quiet?”
“It is quiet,” Lieutenant Terry Moberly, the watch communications officer, reported. “In-system traffic is down sixty percent below normal!”
“That can’t be good.”
“No, sir. I’m sampling the radio traffic. Lots of combat chatter. Sounds like they attacked the Rosetter with the virus . . . but there was no effect.”
Damn. Gray had been afraid that such might be the case. The Rosette intelligence was far too smart, far too fast, to be inconvenienced by any computer virus, no matter how sophisticated.
“Anything at all from Earth?”
“Not a peep, Captain,” Moberly replied. “Nothing from the planet’s surface . . . and nothing from the orbital habs or navy bases. I am getting traffic from the moon, though.”
At least that was something.
From Tabby’s Star through the Boyajian TRGA, to the Penrose TRGA and five and a half days under Alcubierre Drive back to Sol, the Republic had finally entered Earth’s star system . . . but cautiously. They’d emerged from FTL far out in the Kuiper Belt and were accelerating slowly toward the distant gleam of Sol.
When they’d left Earth a month ago, the Rosette entity had been sweeping in toward the planet. America had been maneuvering to intercept an enormous cloud of dust with the mass of the planet Jupiter out in the asteroid belt, and Earth’s various militaries had been scrambling to find enough ships to stop the approaching aliens.
But the incoming light carrier had to find out what was happening. Too much time had passed, there were too many unknowns in the equations. Gray ordered Moberly to send out a general call to anyone in command. The traffic they were picking up now was five hours old . . . the time it took for radio signals to crawl all the way out to Republic’s position.
And as the radio signal flashed inbound at the speed of light, the Republic followed at a more sedate pace.
“Captain,” Commander Rohlwing said, floating on the flag bridge in front of Gray’s command chair. The expression on his face hovered somewhere between shock and dismay.
“What do you have, Commander?”
“Sir . . . Communications is trying to link up with SolNet.”
God . . . was his exec trying to say that SolNet was gone? That would mean complete disaster, possibly the complete elimination of the system’s technological infrastructure—not just Earth and the elevator structures, but everything all the way out to Pluto and Eris. “Is there any signal at all?”