by Douglas, Ian
And maybe that would be enough.
Epilogue
18 January 2425
TC/USNA CVS America
The Black Rosette,
Omega Centauri
16,000 light years from Earth
1420 hours, TFT
Admiral Trevor “Sandy” Gray stared into a vista of incomprehensible and complex wonder. Whatever it was that had emerged from the Black Rosette, whatever it was that had destroyed Endeavor, was incomparably beautiful.
Two months had passed since CBG-14’s return from 70 Ophiuchi. There’d been two tumultuous, eventful weeks after their emergence at the 40-AU limit of the Sol System, followed by forty-four days of quiet and introspective seclusion within the tightly wrapped spacetime bubble of Alcubierre Drive, and that had brought them . . . here.
“It’s incredible!” Laurie Taggart said.
They were standing side by side in one of America’s officer lounges, a quiet compartment with comfortable furniture, low lighting, and a gently curving, deck-to-overhead viewall almost 15 meters wide.
“It’s all of that,” Gray agreed. Words seemed such poor, such poverty-stricken things in the face of such beauty.
The two of them were comfortably nude after a swim in the rec-center pool. Others in the lounge, a handful of ship’s officers, were dressed or not, from uniform to utilities to off-duty civvies to social nudity, depending on preference. Military regs had little to say about fashion statements during off-duty hours.
The ship—the entire battlegroup—was still on high alert, but after twenty-four hours of watching that . . . that thing out there, Gray had decided to leave the bridge in Commander Gutierrez’s capable hands and take some much-needed downtime with his weapons officer.
You could not stay keyed to the highest possible emotional and mental pitch all the time. So far, there’d been no indication that the . . . call them the Builders . . . thing, or things, outside had deliberately destroyed the Endeavor, or, indeed, that there was any threat at all.
America and her battlegroup had arrived, were hanging motionless now in space, observing . . . and trying to decide what their next step should be.
The Builders had, so far, taken exactly zero notice of their presence.
“This might be what it takes to end the war back home,” Taggart observed. “If that doesn’t get Humankind to pull together, to come together as one united species, I don’t know what will.”
“Maybe. But they’re still human, after all. Don’t expect miracles.”
When CBG-40 had arrived at Earth, it was to find the Confederation sundered, a civil war in progress. The USNA capital had been destroyed in what could only be described as an atrocity, a war crime on an unfathomable scale. Geneva so far had refused to admit that they’d given the order. The nano-D strike on the city had been the act of a renegade squadron commander, now dead in the fiery immolation of the Montcalm a few moments after the destruction of Columbus. USNA forces had beaten off invasion attempts at several points along the Periphery, and captured Bruno Base on the moon.
And elsewhere on Earth, the horror of Columbus had forced the Confederation loyalists back on the defensive. Russia and North India both had seceded from the Confederation and announced alliances with the USNA. But as if to balance the equation, Mexico and Honduras had seceded from the USNA. There was bitter fighting now along the Texas and California borders.
How it all would resolve no one could tell. Much depended on how the various colony worlds would choose.
Once that issue was resolved, perhaps a Marine assault force could be dispatched to Osiris. The fates of colonists lost twenty years ago, however, definitely took a backseat to events on Earth, here and now.
Somewhere in the chaos, President Koenig had found the time to summon Gray to the temporary capital beneath the city of Toronto, promote him to rear admiral, and confirm his command of CBG-40. That command was stripped down a bit, now. America’s battlegroup now consisted of only America, one cruiser, the Edmonton, three destroyers, and the provisioning ship Shenandoah. And almost as soon as his command had been confirmed by the USNA Senate and the Hexagon, new orders had come through.
The battlegroup was being deployed to Omega Centauri, to observe and report on the “Thing” that had emerged from the Black Rosette four months before, and destroyed the RSV Endeavor.
Gray hadn’t decided yet whether the deployment was intended as punishment, or simply as a means of getting him out of the way. While the Senate had been effusive in its praises of his actions at both Ophiuchis, 36 and 70, the Hexagon was somewhat less than enthusiastic. Gray had disobeyed a direct order to return to Earth after the fighting at Arianrhod.
“I understand,” Koenig had told him after the promotion ceremony. The president had shrugged. “When you’re out on the ass-end of nowhere, you have to do what you think is right at the time. But unless it’s done by the book, the brass won’t like it. You know that.”
Gray did indeed.
And now he really was on the ass-end of nowhere, sixteen thousand light years from home, confronted by . . . that.
The visuals transmitted by the Endeavor during its last few seconds of existence hadn’t shown much except for an intense light emerging from the Rosette. Presumably, whatever had come through from the other side had set up shop here in the heart of the Omega Centauri star cluster and begun disassembling stars.
Hundreds of thousands of stars had been taken apart, leaving vast, dark streaks through the glowing heart of the globular cluster. Black holes—other than those making up the fast-rotating Rosette—had been brought together. Stars had been merged with stars, creating a central beacon fifty times Sol’s mass and illuminating the cluster’s central core with searing blue light, an intense hazy glow fifty light days across.
And out from that central sun.
It was hard to avoid the thought that what they were seeing was an enormous, deliberate structure of some kind, an unimaginably vast construct of curving beams and platforms and spheres and connectors of pale blue mist. Close measurement of those shapes had revealed something disturbing. They were bent, twisted in eye-hurting ways that did not make sense by the rules and regs of ordinary geometry.
Somehow, that bizarre and alien construction involved not only normal space, but higher dimensions as well. It was anchored by stars and within the depths of the central sun, and extended outward into otherness, extending—impossibly—throughout the entire cluster, across perhaps two hundred light years. And yet . . . the light from anything farther out than a couple of light months would not have reached this spot where the battlegroup observed. By rights, they should be able to see only a fraction of a light year.
But not only space, but time as well had been warped in this place. Beams a hundred light years long reached into vastness and vanished into some space that was not space, some time that was not time.
The overall effect was indescribably lovely, in gentle hues of blue and violet, with deep and subtle ruby reds in places where structures vanished from the ken of normal spacetime.
It was beautiful and it was awe-inspiring.
It was also unintelligible to human reason and understanding.
What, exactly, was it?
“The alien gods,” Taggart said, her voice small and far away.
“I’m not sure I can buy that,” Gray replied. “I mean . . . beings so powerful they can do that. What the hell would they need with humans, anyway? They land on Earth, teach people to plant crops or build pyramids . . . why? Those beams are light years long, and they’ve reworked time so we can see it all. Beings like that . . . I’m not sure they would even notice the Earth.”
“I don’t know,” Taggart said. “I don’t know. I don’t even know what I’m looking at.” Tears glistened on her face. Was it happiness at seeing evidence of the gods she worshipped, Gray wondered? Or terror
at this unimaginable expression of the ultimate Void, the Black Unknown?
For Gray, Laurie Taggart’s ancient alien gods had often seemed . . . petty, somehow. Jehovah was a space alien, dropping nukes on Sodom and Gomorrah, or tinkering with human genetics. Ridiculous.
And yet . . .
Gray was thinking now of another mystery that had filtered down across the galaxy, footnotes from a thousand alien civilizations within the Sh’daar Collective.
“I wonder,” he whispered.
“Wonder what?” Taggart asked.
“I wonder if these are the Starborn?”
The term would work until something better came along . . . until they learned more.
But for now, the glowing bridges, buttresses, and arcs of the Builders’ stellarforming remained impenetrably enigmatic.
And humans could only watch . . .
And wonder.
About the Author
IAN DOUGLAS is one of several pseudonyms for author William H. Keith, Jr. As Ian Douglas he writes an SF/military series called the Heritage Trilogy, and its sequels, the Legacy Trilogy and the Inheritance Trilogy, in which the U.S. Marine Corps is sent to battle alien species.
www.whkeith.com
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By Ian Douglas
Star Corpsman
Bloodstar
Star Carrier
Earth Strike
Center of Gravity
Singularity
Deep Space
The Galactic Marines Saga
The Heritage Trilogy
Semper Mars
Luna Marine
Europa Strike
The Legacy Trilogy
Star Corps
Battlespace
Star Marines
The Inheritance Trilogy
Star Strike
Galactic Corps
Semper Human
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Cover art by Gregory Bridges
DEEP SPACE. Copyright © 2013 by William H. Keith, Jr. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition MAY 2013 ISBN: 9780062183828
Print Edition ISBN: 9780062183804
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