Darkness Falling

by Ian Douglas

  Dedication

  For Brea, my love and my light.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  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

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  By Ian Douglas

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  Two galaxies collided, their star-clotted central cores passing through one another in silent, spectacular radiance, their starburst glory filling a sky gone strange.

  Four billion years earlier, the larger of those titanic spiral galaxies had been called M-31. Alternatively, and less precisely, but perhaps more euphoniously, it also had borne the name of a constellation, the apparent star-pattern within which it happened to appear from the vantage point of one solitary world.

  Andromeda.

  The sapient life-forms of that world who’d given Andromeda its name had called the second spiral the Milky Way, or, with a conceit born of innocence, simply “the Galaxy.”

  The component stars of those two galaxies—400 billion within the Milky Way, perhaps a trillion for Andromeda—appeared densely packed, a whirling, violent star-storm frozen in time by the sheer scale of the collision. In fact, very few of those teeming, myriad suns had or would collide as the mismatched spirals penetrated one another, so vast were the distances involved, so minute were the individual dust-mote stars.

  What was colliding, however, were vast clouds of dust and gas, the invisible mystery of dark matter, and the tug of powerful gravitational fields. Shocks and forces set into motion nebulae-collapsing pressure waves that spawned hot, young, intensely blue-white suns in their teeming tens of millions. Until the galactic collision had begun some hundreds of millions of years before, these two galaxies had appeared staid, middle-aged, verging on senescent . . . quiet, conservative, the exuberance of their youth long since spent. Now, however, the collision was rejuvenating both galaxies, giving them a brilliant radiance that neither had known since the universe was new.

  One of the spiral galaxies teemed with life, with vibrant civilizations, some unimaginably ancient, some unimaginably advanced.

  Andromeda, however, was quite another matter indeed. . . .

  Chapter One

  It was hard not to despair.

  The sense of being divorced from one’s proper place and time, the sense of loss, of separation, of sheer, aching homesickness filled the waking thoughts of every human on board the Tellus Ad Astra. It haunted their dreams as well. In all the varied and disparate history of Humankind, never had any person—any group of people—been so isolated, so lost, or so alone.

  Lord Commander Grayson St. Clair floated weightless within the globe of Ad Astra’s bridge, adrift in a blaze of light. The collision of Earth’s galaxy with the monster spiral of Andromeda had flung titanic clouds of interstellar dust and gas together, compressing them, giving birth to myriad new stars imbedded in bright-glowing sheets and streamers and shells of radiance.

  It was, he thought, a spectacular backdrop to the thoughts and hopes and fears of the castaways . . . the million or so humans and metahumans, AI minds and robots marooned in this remote futurity. The feelings of isolation, of homesickness, of loss felt all the more acute as he looked at a world that might be Earth, that most probably was Earth . . . but an Earth 4 billion years removed from the world he’d known.

  “It doesn’t look much like home, does it, my lord?” St. Clair’s executive officer said. Vanessa Symms floated beside him, staring out into the brilliant starscape. He could hear the longing in her words, echoing his own.

  “Not in the least,” St. Clair replied. “But 4 billion years can do that to a planet. To an entire star system.”

  “Uh-uh.” Symms shook her head. “I just don’t buy it, my lord. That can’t be Earth. The sun is all wrong.”

  The local star gleamed in the distance off Ad Astra’s starboard side, some five and a half AUs off, a yellow sun of roughly the mass of a stellar type G8 or G9. That meant that it should have been a bit cooler than Sol and a bit smaller . . . but in fact it was nearly twice the sun’s diameter and considerably hotter. Those mass and temperature readings argued that this was not, could not be Earth’s solar system, and yet . . .

  “Newton does have an explanation for that, you know,” St. Clair pointed out. He could feel the ship’s powerful artificial intelligence at the back of his mind, watching over his virtual shoulder. It offered no comment.

  “So I’ve heard. Maybe I just won’t want to believe it.”

  “I get that.” St. Clair shrugged. “But it’s about the only explanation that makes sense.”

  “Really?” Symms laughed, the sound harsh and challenging. She waved a hand at the alien starscape, the gesture angry . . . or perhaps simply showing her frustration. “How the hell can you make sense of that?”

  The sprawl of brilliant nebulae and hot, blue-white stars in the distance served as the stage for a tight knot of worlds just ahead. Largest was a gas giant as far from the local star as was Jupiter from Sol in St. Clair’s memory of home. There were differences, however. The world was smaller than Jupiter by about 15 percent, with roughly the same diameter as Saturn. It was also a bright blue in color, like Neptune, with less distinct banding, and it lacked the famous Great Red Spot.

  Moreover, dozens of worlds orbited the giant, most appearing no larger than bright stars strung out along the planet’s equatorial plane, but 5 million kilometers ahead lay a white-and-ocher world with an equatorial diameter of 12,756 kilometers.

  That precise diameter all but proved that the planet Tellus Ad Astra was closing with was, in fact, Earth. The coincidence was too astonishing for it to be otherwise. But still . . .

  “I mean, where are the oceans?” Symms wanted to know.

  “It’s got oceans—”

  “It has landlocked seas, my lord. Tiny ones. There’s a difference. That planet is not even remotely like Earth . . . apart from its diameter.”

  True enough. Much of the planet’s equatorial zones appeared to be desert, with a tiny fraction of the total surface covered by water. Of the widely dispersed continents and world-girdling oceans of St. Clair’s Earth there were no traces. Nor were there ice caps, and save for a few scattered swirls of cloud, those sweeping streaks and expanses of white appeared to be salt flats coating the dead ocean basin that dominated the northern hemisphere. To St. Clair’s eye it appeared that all of the planet’s original land masses had gathered together as one supercontinent isolated in the southern hemisphere, and much of that was as barren as the empty ocean.

  Of Earth’s moon there was no sign.

  If that was Earth ahead, someone had moved it, probably a geological age or two ago, and parked it around Jupiter. It orbited the gas giant now at a distance of 850,000 kilometers, circling the bloated world once roughly every five days.

  Why? Well, that was something they’d need to find out.

  “Bring us to a halt relative to that planet,” St. Cl
air ordered.

  “Aye, aye, my lord,” Sublieutenant Carla Adams replied from the helm station. “Dead stop.”

  St. Clair wasn’t sure of the reception they could expect here—if any at all. They needed to proceed with extreme caution.

  He glanced at a secondary screen nearby, one showing a large schematic of both the Tellus and the Ad Astra. All green, with no red flags—all normal. Good.

  “Lord Commander?” Senior Lieutenant Vance Cameron said over the in-head cybernetics. He was Ad Astra’s tactical officer, the man charged with handling the ship in combat. “You know . . . I have the feeling nobody’s home.”

  “Maybe not. Pass the word to General Wilson that the Marines can proceed.”

  “Very well, my lord.”

  Even without the rotating habitats that made up the Tellus, a vessel as large as the Ad Astra had room to spare for an entire fleet stored within her vast flight decks and internal ship bays. In addition, her entourage included three military LPS transports, Inchon, Saipan, and Vera Cruz, complete with two divisions of United Earth Marines. One of them, the Vera Cruz, had been deployed ahead of the Tellus Ad Astra. At Cameron’s command, relayed through the Marine HQ on board Ad Astra, she accelerated gently, edging toward the planet.

  “There go the gunships,” Cameron said. A half dozen blocky, rugged-looking vessels emerged from the shadows of the tug’s ventral surface, moving out and falling into formation with the Marine transport.

  “. . . and the fighters.” What looked like clouds of sparkling dust had begun wafting off the Vera Cruz and moving with her in loose formation. A few of the larger specks were ASF-99 Wasp fighters, but most were Marines in Mk. III MCA armor with MX-40 backpacks, their wings deployed, their Martin-Teller gravitic thrusters operational. In effect, several thousand Marines had just become individual fighter crafts. After a moment, the sparkling effect became muted, and the clouds began to fade into darkness. Marine armor could selectively and intelligently bend background light and color, rendering its wearer all but invisible.

  “You don’t think that display out there is too . . . threatening?” Symms asked. “We don’t know they’re hostile . . . if there’s even anyone in there.”

  “I want a solid wall up between Tellus Ad Astra and whatever the hell is in there,” St. Clair replied. “We have to assume it’s Xam . . . and when we ran into them before they were not friendly.”

  She snorted. “Not friendly? They tried to freaking wipe us out of the sky. . . .”

  “Not exactly conducive to free and open communications.”

  St. Clair was painfully aware of the responsibility he carried as the military commander of the expedition. Tellus Ad Astra had been projected 4 billion years into her own future, which meant that the million or so humans on board were all that was left of Humankind. If that was indeed Earth up ahead, it had been changed beyond all recognition, and Homo sapiens was long since extinct.

  “No,” Symms replied. “But, you know, I think the real problem for me is that I’m having a lot of trouble wrapping my head around the idea that the Xam are somehow our remote descendants. That’s just plain . . . I don’t know . . . creepy.”

  “Maybe. But what,” St. Clair replied, “does creepy have to do with the truth? The DNA studies were conclusive.”

  He didn’t add the fact that the alien-looking but humanoid Xam offered the population of Tellus Ad Astra the tiniest possible sliver of hope that they could somehow find their way back to their own time.

  In fact, it was that hope that had brought them here. . . .

  Dr. Francois Dumont, the expedition’s civilian expert on xenotechnology, swam up to the pair. “Lord Commander?”

  “Yes, Doctor?” St. Clair replied.

  “We’ve completed the preliminary scan of the planet ahead.”

  “And?”

  “We cannot detect any cities on the surface.”

  “What . . . none?”

  “No, my lord. There may be . . . settlements, solitary bases, that sort of thing, but no cities and no major power sources. However, we are detecting an artificial ring, a big one, circling the entire planet.”

  “How big?”

  “The arc is about 30,000 kilometers across, my lord. Measuring from one side of the planet to the other, the entire structure is two and a half million kilometers across.”

  “My God! Let me see.”

  The download came in through St. Clair’s in-head hardware, appearing in a window that blinked open within his mind’s eye.

  Ad Astra was approaching the planet dead-on at the equator, so from this distance the ring system was not visible to the unaided eye, but under high magnification and enhancement it appeared as a ruler-straight gray-and-silver line scratched across the planetary disc. Alphanumerics off to one side gave mass, rotational velocity, and energy readings. That thing was enormous. . . .

  Another megastructure, then.

  “Any sign of life, Doctor? Or is this another dry hole?”

  “Can’t tell yet, my lord,” Dumont replied. “The structure is well shielded. We’re broadcasting using both Xam and Kroajid protocols, but we won’t know until they decide to respond to us.”

  If someone had asked St. Clair a month before what he imagined the Galaxy might be like in the remote future, he probably would have talked about far-flung, brilliant civilizations, frankly magical technologies, perhaps something like the alien Coadunation that existed within the Galaxy of his home time. He would not have envisioned what Tellus Ad Astra had encountered so far . . . a Galaxy of empty worlds, ruins, abandoned megastructures, and a handful of scattered advanced cultures that seemed to have withdrawn from reality.

  Since her arrival here/now, Ad Astra had investigated three titanic megaengineering habitats in this era. One, a series of nested swarms of stationary satellites called a matrioshka brain, had been inhabited solely by digitized life-forms uploaded into trillions of computer habitats completely surrounding a star. The other two had been an Alderson disk—a vast, flat structure like an old-fashioned phonograph record with the local star bobbing up and down in the central hole—and a topopolis—a tangled mass of enclosed habitat tubes surrounding its star like a belt of fuzz. Each of these last two possessed the surface area of millions of Earths, but both had been deserted and apparently crumbling into ruin.

  Judging by their encounters so far, galactic civilization, at least corporeal civilizations made up of flesh-and-blood beings, was on the decline. Yes, they’d met a star-faring species called the Kroajid, two-meter arthropods that communicated by vibrating the stiff hairs on their bodies, but it looked as though the vast majority of intelligent life had retreated into virtual, electronic realities of far more complexity and sheer pleasure than could ever be experienced in the material universe.

  And then, of course . . . there was the Dark.

  I don’t want to think about that now, St. Clair thought with an internal shudder. He just wasn’t sure he’d have that choice.

  “Very well, Doctor,” St. Clair said. “Let me know the instant you hear anything.”

  “Of course, my lord.”

  Vera Cruz and her escorts were almost invisibly small, now, all but lost in the distance. If the Xam were there on or around that planet ahead, and if they were a part of the Andromedan Dark . . .

  “It would be nice to know,” Cameron said over the command channel, “that we’re actually fighting on the right side. I mean, if we have to take sides in an alien war . . .”

  “I know,” St. Clair replied. “It’d be a hell of a thing if we find out that the Xam are the good guys.”

  But if the Xam were indeed Humankind’s descendants, what the hell were they doing working for the Andromedan Dark? Had what passed for human civilization in this time moved wholesale to M-31? Were they a splinter, a fragment of the original human civilizations that had migrated to Andromeda a billion or so years ago, and now they were returning?

  St. Clair shook his head. So much to learn . . .
and they had to get it right. The consequences of screwing up were incalculable for all of Humankind.

  He hoped there might be some answers waiting on or around the planet up ahead. Was it really Earth, aged 4 billion years since last he’d seen it?

  Could the Xam really be humanity’s descendants?

  Was going home even a possibility?

  “Have you seen Dr. Crosby’s report?” Symms asked him.

  “The one that says the Xam can’t be human, because 4 billion years is too long?”

  “That’s the one. He thinks the DNA evidence is faulty. Or manufactured . . . a hoax. Maybe even a hoax for our benefit.”

  “By who? And for what possible reason?”

  “How about by the Xam to make us think we’re related? So we would join them against the Spiders,” she said, referring to the Kroajid.

  “You do have a nasty, suspicious mind, don’t you?”

  She shrugged. “If you say so, my lord. But we should take it slow. Sir.”

  “Believe me, a snail will be able to outrace us. We have no idea as to what we’re getting into here. But . . .”

  “But, my lord?”

  “But if the Xam are related to us, but only separated from our genome by a million years or so, as Crosby says . . . that’s all the more reason we should try to establish peaceful contact.”

  “You can’t believe that.”

  “I believe there’s . . . a possibility. A very slim chance. And that means we need to explore it. Because.”

  “Because,” she echoed. Neither of them wanted to say their hopes out loud—that the Xam might have the technology that might let them go home once more.

  Damn it, things just weren’t adding up. According to every computer simulation run so far, the Xam weren’t showing anything close to four gigayears’ worth of genetic divergence from Homo sapiens. But for now, St. Clair assumed, had to assume, that the Xam were in fact the remote evolutionary descendants of humans.

  After all, they’d learned about this star system from a database taken from a Xam fighter. It described a galactic coordinate system, built around a line extending between the supermassive black holes at the cores of both Andromeda and the Milky Way, that had been in use for some tens of millions of years already. Navigators could plug in sets of numbers and pinpoint precise locations in either galaxy, and one such set of coordinates had led the Tellus Ad Astra here. If the xenolinguists were right, this should be the system revered by the Xam as their ancient, ancestral homeworld.