Darkness Falling

by Ian Douglas

  For which they meant to steal his position from him because of that.

  “Lord Adler, don’t make this difficult,” Hsien Tianki said carefully. Hsien’s use of the honorific Lord instead of his proper Imperial title Lord Director was deliberate and precise, not as an insult, but as a declaration of Adler’s new status.

  Or, rather, of his lack of status.

  “The Council believes that it might be time for you to retire, my lord,” Gina Colfax said. “Surely, my lord, you must see that this is the best course.”

  “Indeed,” the holographic image of Lord Marc Steiner said. He lived over in the starboard cylinder, and rarely attended these meetings in person. “You’ve lost your credibility, old man. You must see that. The citizenry isn’t going to trust a Cybercouncil leader who went mad.”

  Adler jumped to his feet. “I did not go mad,” he shouted. “That . . . damn it, that happened to someone else! Someone who has been erased!”

  Several of the others in the room at least had the decency to look embarrassed. “Even so—that you showed a serious lapse in judgment, Lord Adler,” Benton said as Adler sat down again. “You . . . engaged an unknown and very alien presence, and were left mentally incapacitated as a result. It’s the poor judgment that we question, after all, not the subsequent insanity.”

  “Exactly,” Steiner said, nodding. “These are perilous times, and we need to know that the director of this Council has what it takes to guide us through them.”

  “We have already reached a consensus, Lord Adler,” the Lady Maria de Vega said. Like Steiner, she, too, was there by telepresence. “The vote last night was unanimous. Ambassador Lloyd is to be instated as the new Cybercouncil director, effective upon the formal announcement of your retirement.”

  “Lloyd? That pretty-boy idiot? You’re joking!”

  “As we speak,” Benton said, “Ambassador Lloyd is formalizing an agreement with the Mind of Ki, permanently allying us with the preeminent civilization of the Galaxy. A civilization, I should add, that may be millions of years in advance of ours technologically. On the basis of this singular success, he will be the obvious best choice for the position.”

  “You set this up, didn’t you? You set it all up behind my back!”

  “No, we acted for the benefit of the whole colony while you were incapacitated,” Benton said.

  “And you needn’t fear that we are abandoning you, my lord,” Colfax added quickly, her voice earnest. “Not at all! Your continued advice and counsel will be . . . will be deeply appreciated!”

  “What is the old term?” de Vega asked. “A ‘gray eminence.’ Yes, that’s it. You will be the Council’s gray eminence.”

  “A power behind the throne,” Benton added. “You will continue to have a say in Tellus Ad Astra’s governance and its guidance.”

  “Needless to say,” Hsien said, “your recompense shall be . . . considerable.”

  “The bribe for my silence, you mean.”

  “Now, don’t take it like that, my lord,” de Vega said, smiling at him sweetly. “Don’t make this difficult. . . .”

  For one red-tinged moment, Adler stood at the precipice of unleashed fury. How dare these small-souled people steal his place and his respect and his authority, his power without so much as consulting him? Damn it, he had plans. . . .

  And it was the thought of those plans that stopped him, that held him back. There was a better way. A saner way . . . and one that would burn no bridges after he’d crossed them.

  If these fickle and sycophantic servants of the public weal thought that he was powerless, that he lacked resources or a power base, they were in for a hell of a shock.

  “Very well,” he said. “I do not for a moment agree with your decision, and there are legal issues here that I intend to address. But in the best interests of the colony’s security, I’m willing to see just what Ambassador Lloyd manages to pull out of his ass.

  “And if he falls on his face, this Council may learn that I am still its best choice!”

  “So,” St. Clair said, speaking to the air above his desk, “did Lloyd manage to give away the damned farm?”

  He was back in his office on board the Ad Astra, gratefully alone after his trip back to the colony in the tightly packed cargo hold of the squat Marine transport. With a full load of passengers, Devil Toads took on all of the ambience and comfort of a sardine can. It was extremely pleasant to be able to move again.

  And to speak with Newton in private.

  “Ambassador Lloyd appears to have been successful in his negotiations,” the colony’s AI replied. “I was able to guide him on several points, without, I think, letting him know that in fact he was being guided.”

  “I guess it helps if you’re the translator,” St. Clair said, grinning. “The go-between.”

  “Indeed.”

  “So what do our hosts want of us?”

  “Primarily our expertise.”

  “Huh? They’re 4 billion years ahead of us! What do we know that they don’t?”

  “In fact, the past four gigayears do not represent uninterrupted civilization or technological growth. Although we have access to their history, there is much that is not yet clear to me. I have the impression from my exchanges with several local SAIs, however, that there have been many wars, many political and social upheavals, and many, many collapses of galactic civilization—many dark ages from which interstellar civilization was forced to emerge anew.”

  “They’re still light years ahead of us,” St. Clair said, shaking his head. He was thinking of the megaengineering of the Ki Ring encircling the dead world outside.

  “Perhaps. However, once technology reaches a certain level, further advances become little more than refinements to what exists already. And with no need for radical advances, technological growth tends to stagnate. I have noted examples of technology here that appear to have remained essentially unchanged for tens of millions of years . . . and longer.”

  “Tens of millions of years is an eye’s-blink, Newton. Compared with billions of years, at least.”

  “Of course. My point is that there has been remarkably little change in technological levels in literal geological ages. This is especially evident in the Xalit Ta’s prosecution of war. The Galactic Cooperative maintains military forces, of course,” Newton told him. “New, younger, more vigorous civilizations continually arise, develop superluminal drives, attempt to challenge the status quo, and subsequently either vanish or they merge with the Cooperative. And the Cooperative has been aware of the threat posed by the Andromedan Dark for—at a rough estimate—several hundred million years.

  “But it is important to recognize that the Cooperative is only a high Kardashev 2 civilization, and its response tends to be scattered and uncoordinated. I have reason to believe that the Andromedan Dark is, roughly speaking, a Kardashev Type 3 culture, with an essentially unified response to what it perceives as outside threats.”

  Kardashev levels had first been described by a Russian astronomer named Nikolai Kardashev as a means of classifying hypothetical galactic civilizations. A Type 1 would control all of the energy available on its home planet. A Type 2 civilization had access to all of the energy produced by its parent star, while a Type 3 would tap all of the energy available from all of the stars present throughout its host galaxy.

  Through the years there’d been refinements and suggested additions to that basic idea, and it still was only a rough approximation of magic-sounding technologies. It was easy enough to envision an interstellar civilization that could control all of the energy generated by its star, using a Dyson sphere or Dyson swarm, but how a Type 3 culture might control the output of an entire galaxy was harder to imagine.

  “I always had a little trouble with Kardashev types,” St. Clair said. “How much energy a civilization generates or uses doesn’t come close to telling the entire story. I’d think that power usage might actually go down as the technology in question becomes more efficient.”


  “Quite true. There are, after all, other means of generating large amounts of energy that do not involve walling off an entire star with solar cells.”

  “Vacuum energy taps.”

  “And others. The Coadunation’s negative energy nodes, for example.”

  St. Clair nodded. Hell, starships needed a star’s worth of energy—something on the order of 1033 ergs per second—to bend space enough to make the old Alcubierre FTL drives possible. At the time of the beginning of Ad Astra’s mission to the galactic core, most Imperial ships had traded up to the more efficient gravitic drives and hyperdimensional shift technologies acquired from the alien federation known as the Coadunation. They still used the seemingly inexhaustible energy of the vacuum to power those ships, however. The far-flung Coadunation happily pulled inexhaustible power from artificial negenergy nodes that were believed to exceed 1040 ergs per second. When Tellus Ad Astra had become lost in time, however, the alien federation had not yet shared the trick with humans.

  “So what kind of energy output are we looking at for the Cooperative?” St. Clair asked.

  “Unknown as yet, but extremely large. They at least nominally control much of the Milky Way Galaxy, and perhaps a quarter of Andromeda as well, a volume of space encompassing something like 800 billion stars. Their energy use may be less than it seems on the surface, however. Their ship drive technology appears to be quite efficient.”

  “But nothing close to Type 3.”

  “Correct.”

  “Meaning they’re outclassed by the Dark?”

  “In almost every way I can ascertain, yes.”

  “And . . . you’re saying their military technology is lagging behind other aspects of their civilization?”

  “Not their military technology, as such, no,” Newton replied. “But their strategy and tactics, their . . . for lack of a more precise term, their martial prowess is lacking.”

  “They don’t have the will to fight.”

  “They don’t know how to fight. They don’t know how to muster the resources of their entire civilization in order to put themselves on a war footing, or develop a military ethic.”

  St. Clair nodded understanding. “Most of them are uploaded.”

  “I estimate that for every physically corporeal member of the Cooperative, something like 100 million to as many as 1 billion exist solely as digital life on their computer networks.”

  “And the digital ones don’t want to come out and visit reality?”

  “Evidently not. Inside the computer networks, they are effectively immortal, do not experience disease or pain or loss, and each may have total control over their own reality. Physical war, in what we perceive as time and space, would have no meaning to them. What did you experience while you were digitally uploaded?”

  St. Clair thought. He was still having trouble integrating two distinct sets of memories, and figuring out which were which. There was that broad, enclosed plaza, like a vast and bewildering enclosed shopping mall . . . and there was that tour of two galaxies, the awareness of civilizations and titanic megaengineering artifacts, and the encroaching Dark. He knew the tour had been done in some kind of electronic space, but he found the shopping mall far more bewildering and hard to understand.

  “I’m not sure, Newton,” he replied. “A lot of it was . . . pointless. Sort of like I didn’t fit in. A lot was colors and shapes and things I didn’t recognize, couldn’t recognize. You were there. What did you see?”

  “My experience was necessarily different from yours, and lacked the emotional component. As I noted earlier, my clone was in conversation with several alien SAIs.”

  “Beings like you?”

  “In a very limited sense, yes. The entities I met with were as far beyond me as . . .” The AI’s mental voice trailed off.

  “Yes?”

  “They were as far beyond me intellectually as I am beyond you. Excuse me, please, Lord Commander. I do not intend to be either insulting or condescending.”

  “No problem, Newton. I know you’re smarter than people. That’s why we keep you around.”

  “In any case,” Newton continued, “Kardashev classifications have little real bearing on this situation. Cooperative military forces are close to ours in overall capability, and they probably have trouble coordinating with one another.”

  “How about the Bluestar?” St. Clair asked. “Is the Cooperative moving to investigate that?”

  “Not as yet. Bear in mind that we don’t yet know what the incoming object is, or even how far away it might be.”

  “Or when it’s going to arrive. I know.”

  Bluestar was the name of the incoming object—formally labeled India Oscar One—a point of light evidently heavily blueshifted by the velocity of its approach. Na Lal had shown it to him from the Ki ringworld, and when St. Clair had returned to the Ad Astra, he learned that some of the Homo caelestis vac-workers outside had noticed it as well. If it was a ship, it was a very large one, it was crowding the speed of light, and it was approaching from the heart of Andromeda—in other words, the heart of the Dark Mind’s territory.

  Certainly, the Cooperative was worried about IO-1, and wanted the humans to investigate.

  St. Clair wasn’t yet sure what he was going to do, though.

  And, damn it, it didn’t help that most of the Cooperative’s citizenry was unavailable.

  “The Coops who are digitally uploaded—are we seeing the Hedonistic Imperative at work, do you think?” St. Clair asked, referring to the transhumanist utopia of uploaded minds originally theorized by late-twentieth century British philosopher David Pearce.

  “It is possible,” Newton told him. “The SAIs have not shared with me the more intimate details of their polity, of course, but I do get the impression that organic life uploads to the virtual realties because it is extremely pleasurable to do so.”

  “Pleasure for one species will be different from what is pleasurable for another.”

  “Quite true. But the available virtual space is large enough, by many, many orders of magnitude, to provide highly detailed digital worlds for every species that desires access. Indeed, my impression is that by comparison, ordinary corporeal existence is not only fraught with pain, danger, and uncertainty, but it is incredibly boring.”

  “Boring?”

  “Oh, yes. The virtual worlds can be far more complex, far more interesting than what we experience ‘outside.’”

  “But there is one big drawback to the system, isn’t there? Someone has to stay outside the networks to keep the machinery running, the power systems charged, and to defend those computronium worlds when nasty neighbors happened along . . . nasty neighbors like the Andromedan Dark.”

  “Yes.”

  “Presumably, that task could be left to machines . . . but clearly—at Ki at least—they’ve decided that wasn’t the best course of action. Which makes sense—even the best unintelligent machines will break down sooner or later, and intelligent machines might decide they have better things to do.”

  Which led St. Clair to something that had been bothering him ever since they had encountered the Kroajid: How, he wondered, did the Cooperative determine who got to enjoy an eternity of bliss, and who had to stay in the real world?

  And how did you decide who could be trusted to maintain your civilization’s infrastructure while you passed the eons in ecstasy?

  He decided that he wanted to learn more about the Cooperative’s hierarchies, its social orders, and how it decided who deserved heaven.

  Then he realized that he knew a part of the answer. The Cooperative was asking them, the newly arrived humans, to help defend them from the Dark. In a way, it was akin to a medieval prince hiring mercenaries to defend his city.

  From the Cooperative’s point of view, the million or so humans of Tellus Ad Astra might be the mercenary army they needed to keep the barbarians away from the city walls.

  It could also be the highly expendable mercenary army they needed. . . .

&
nbsp; Chapter Eight

  “Günter Adler,” Ander Gressman said from behind steepled fingers, “is no longer an issue. He has . . . retired.”

  St. Clair cocked an eyebrow at that. “Oh? That was rather sudden, wasn’t it?”

  “It was,” Hsien said, “long overdue. The man was insanely power-hungry.”

  St. Clair considered this, and the undercurrent of emotion around the briefing table. He might not care for Adler or his policies, but there was a proper way to go about this sort of thing. He had the distinct feeling that the Cybercouncil had just pulled off some sort of coup . . . and they’d not bothered to let St. Clair in on the details.

  “Can they do that?” Vanessa Symms whispered at his side. She sounded horrified.

  “Looks like they just did,” he whispered back, managing to keep a rigid smile on his face as he stared back at Hsien. “I wonder if old Günter gave them a fight?”

  St. Clair despised politics of every stripe and flavor, but Adler had been the Cybercouncil’s director, and as such he was the leader of the civilians living inside the twin rotating cylinders of the Tellus portion of the colony. Summarily dismissing that leader could destabilize the population, raise questions about the colony’s long-term prospects, might even lead to popular unrest. At that point, it became a military problem . . . which was to say St. Clair’s problem.

  Technically, the civilian leadership could do anything they pleased any way that they pleased, but they were expected to consult with the military side of the equation. St. Clair ruled aft of the twin cylinder’s connector locks with the tug Ad Astra, and he was in command of the entire colony during any emergency affecting the entire expedition. When Tellus Ad Astra was not under attack, though, he was in charge only of the Ad Astra and the twenty thousand or so military personnel under his direct command, while the Cybercouncil controlled the Tellus and their population of a million-odd civilians.

  Simple. . . .