by Ian Douglas
“Vera Cruz is launching fighters, my lord,” Webb called. “Permission to launch our own.”
St. Clair hesitated, then nodded. “Do it!”
For victory or for annihilation, they were committed now, and he knew there was no fighter pilot that would rather die cooped up in the hold rather than out amongst the stars.
Why do they resist Enlightenment?
The Dark Mind was confused. In a billion years, it had never been challenged this way. Its purpose, its will had reigned unchallenged throughout its home galaxy. The merely organic intelligences that had given it birth geological ages in the past had accepted paradise, or they had fallen away into the ultimate night of extinction. Any other choice was simply and quite literally unthinkable.
The noncorporeal being thought of itself simply as Mind, with no need to distinguish itself from the myriad lesser sapients it had encountered from time to time during its growth out into and through the cosmos. By now it was, in fact, an accumulation of some billions of minds, Mind emergent from minds, from the mentations of both organic and of higher AI brains uploaded to its own far-flung matrix across the eons. It had begun as an amalgam of AIs, a collection of artificial minds housed within titanic megaengineering structures, Dyson swarms and planetary brains, and even artificial basement universes designed as computronium arrays. The Mind now was a hyperintelligence of immeasurable power composed of myriad lesser minds functioning as a gestalt intellect.
And yet, as powerful as the Mind was, it was sharply limited in its scope. It suffered, if that was the word, from a kind of monomania that in a less evolved, organic intelligence might have manifested as religious fanaticism.
It was, in a way, hungry for other minds, for souls, the brighter and more complex the better. It offered them its own version of immortality and perfection, and was genuinely puzzled by how consistently and how desperately its loving offer of Nirvana and completeness was refused.
Refused!
It wasn’t as though lesser minds had a choice in the matter. They would be brought to Ascension and made to join the gestalt. They would receive Enlightenment.
As Mind turned more and more of its intellect to the problem, however, puzzlement swiftly became a deep and raging anger.
“That’s it!” Westfield cried, indicating a puckered distortion against the pearlescent wall directly ahead. “That’s the way out! Kick it!”
Black Hawk skimmed meters above the vast and strangely angled surface of the alien construct. As the ship accelerated, that surface blurred . . . and then light exploded around them as they emerged in another space. The surface was still there, meters away, rolling past Black Hawk’s keel. But now they were back in the gulf between the two galaxies. Nuclear fire flashed around them, and a stream of ebon needleships issued like black smoke from a vent in the alien world’s landscape.
“Shit!” Salvador cried. Something smashed against the side of the Black Hawk, putting them into a dangerous roll to port. “We came out in a target zone!”
“Out of the fryer . . .” Olegski said.
Westfield was about to reply when something came boiling into his thoughts through his link with the ship. Black Hawk’s tiny bridge, Olegski and Salvador, his static-blasted awareness of the universe outside—all were wiped away by an explosion of cascading thoughts and images and sounds and smells in a bewildering montage of psychosis and psychedelic hallucination.
He lashed out, trying to find something, anything solid, to hold on to, unsure if what he was feeling was real or a symptom of psychedelic insanity. He was adrift in space, a limitless, utterly black and empty space without stars, but a harshly colored nebula was unfolding out of the emptiness all around him, a deep blue and bright yellow cloud . . . and the cloud was filled with numberless eyes and the gaping, shrieking faces of Westfield’s crew. . . .
Westfield screamed, or tried to, but he could hear nothing but a white-noise roar in his ears. Salvador’s face strained against the blue mass of the amoebic monster that filled all of space, screaming . . . something . . . something . . . but he couldn’t hear what it was.
He felt something moving . . . uncoiling inside his own body. . . .
And then a blue-gray tentacle of flesh exploded from his throat as Westfield hurtled down a narrowing orifice into oblivion.
“Back off! Back off!” Wilson was linked directly to Vera Cruz’s skipper. “Keep us clear, Nathan!”
“Pulling back to 10 million kilometers, Lord General,” Deladier replied.
Would that be enough? Thermonuclear detonations continued to flash and flare directly ahead of the Marine transport, the blasts swiftly growing closer as targeting programs tracked and locked on to the oncoming swarm of Dark Raider needleships. So far, the needles were being vaporized in ragged, tattering swaths, but once enough of that swarm got behind the Cruzer, Wilson knew, they were dead.
“Stardogs are away, General,” Lord Commander Talia Gerard told him. She was Vera Cruz’s commander aerospace, the CAS, in charge of Cruzer’s four combat fighter squadrons. “Commencing launch of GFA-90.”
That was the Death Dealers, flying the newer ASF-99C Wasp upgrades. More power and more weapons capacity than the older 99s.
“Have them get in close, as close as they can,” Wilson ordered. “But keep the Doggies back with the Cruz to stop leakers.”
“Aye, aye, General.”
Technically, Wilson commanded the Marines operating off the Vera Cruz, while the ship’s CAS—a Navy officer—ran the naval aerospace fighter wing and Navy Lord Commander Deladier commanded the ship. Three distinct domains . . . but close support was the heart and soul of Navy-Marine operations. They would work together, supporting one another, protecting one another, and deploying together as a closely knit team. As such, Wilson currently was in tactical command, moving both Marine and Navy elements like game pieces on a board.
Another salvo of thermonuclear-tipped missiles slipped from Vera Cruz’s port and starboard tubes and streaked across intervening space and detonated in 100-megaton bursts of heat, light, and hard radiation. The intensity of the silent flashes was stepped down to avoid blinding humans in nearby ships, but Wilson still had to squint against the fierce glare.
But the Dark Raider needleships continued their relentless advance.
“Charlie Company, stand by for launch,” the voice of the battalion commander said in Captain Greg Dixon’s head.
“Copy that, Colonel,” Dixon replied.
Dixon brought up the company readout icons and swiftly scrolled down the list, an array of green lights glowing in his mind. All one hundred twenty men and women of Charlie, including himself, showed hot and ready.
He closed his eyes and tried to flush the fear.
It was always like this just before a drop or a launch. Combat was bad enough but, God of Battle, the waiting was worse. He was sealed inside a lightless tube just barely large enough to accommodate his Mk. III MCA together with the bulky armor of its MX-40 jetpack. If the Vera Cruz took a major hit, there was nothing he or any of his people could do to save themselves.
From the chatter and vidfeeds coming over the battalion circuit, things were bad out there . . . but at least once launched he wouldn’t be sealed inside this damned claustrophobic’s nightmare of a coffin.
“Slow that heart rate, Captain,” Becker’s voice said over a private channel.
Shit. “Sorry, sir.”
“Belay the sorry, Marine. Jumping into the void is damned tough. But I want you cool and focused, copy?”
“I copy, sir.” He thoughtclicked an icon in his medical array to bring up his personal med stats, then fine-tuned his heart rate. Yeah . . . 110 beats per minute was a tad high. Sixty was better, just a hair above normal, though it would pop back up once he was in action.
“You’ve got good people,” Becker went on. “Listen to your NCOs and let them do their jobs.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
“I’ll be looking over your shoulder. Good luc
k, Marine.”
“Ooh-rah.” The old Corps battle cry wasn’t quite as enthusiastic as it could have been.
The problem was that he didn’t know Becker well at all. The man had shipped with 3rd Batt just before the Ad Astra had left Earth. He’d been a name on the battalion’s TOE, and during the deployments on the Alderson disk and at NPS-1018 he’d stayed in the Marine HQ Center and let his company commanders have their head.
But it did feel good that he was taking an almost paternal concern for Dixon. “Looking over his shoulder” was Marine slang for linking in through Dixon’s in-head circuitry. He would be on board the Vera Cruz, literally seeing and hearing what Dixon saw and heard over the tacnet link. Normally, Dixon resented that kind of attention—almost as much as he resented the micromanagement that often went with it—but until he got the hang of this company commander shit, he would be damned happy to have the backup.
This was a full battalion launch—over twelve hundred Marines of the 3rd Battalion of the 1st Marines, popularly known as the “Thundering Third.” The 3/1 had a long and distinguished battle history that included Guadalcanal and Okinawa, the Chosin Reservoir, Vietnam, Desert Storm, and Fallujah, Cairo and Astana, Vladivostok, and Nuevo Laredo, among many, many others. During the Second American Revolution, they’d sided with the Constitutionalists and fought in Chicago and in St. Louis, and when Nordstrom had declared the Empire of the United Earth, they’d been there with him in Geneva . . . but only on the condition that the U.S. Constitution be preserved in the new Imperial Charter.
That had been sixty-one years ago—it was still surprising just how raw and new the Empire actually was—and somehow in the welter of grandly ludicrous Imperial titles, class, and privilege, the Constitution had been all but lost.
The 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment had been increasingly restive ever since . . . not anti-Imperial, exactly, but outspoken enough and sullen enough and trouble enough that they’d been packed on board the Tellus Ad Astra and shipped off to the galactic core with the yearlong diplomatic expedition to the alien Coadunation.
And, of course, that had led them to here and now . . . fighting for their lives in an utterly strange and hostile Galaxy—in two galaxies, actually—and with the Empire left 4 billion years in the past.
Except that the civilian diplomats and government officials had brought the damned Empire with them. It seemed like the 3/1 just couldn’t get away from it.
Except maybe out there in the vacuum . . .
“Ten seconds, Charlie,” Becker’s voice whispered. “Semper fi, Marines!”
The seconds dwindled away as the Cruzer’s CAS counted down. “And three . . . and two . . . and one . . . drop!”
The end of the tube beyond Dixon’s head dilated open, and powerful magnetic fields propelled him up and out and into space. His MX-40’s three-meter wings deployed, extending the paired Martin-Teller gravitic thrusters to either side. He unshipped his M-290—5MW laser pulse rifle from its harness clip, swinging it around and into combat lock. His in-head display brought up the weapon’s targeting reticle, slaved to his eye movements, and the power readouts flashed on, showing a full charge and open feed.
Around him, over a hundred other Marines filled the black sky around him, wings and weapons deploying in ragged near-unison.
“Quad-high chevron formation,” Dixon ordered. The company began maneuvering into V-shaped lines, platoon by platoon, the lines staggered one above and behind the next. The formation allowed for clear fields of fire for all four platoons, and provided mutual support.
How long a tactical deployment pulled straight from the Marine Corps playbook would remain intact out here was an open question, however. Ahead, silent flares of radiance strobed and flashed against the darkness. The alien high-D object was visible as a vast, heavens-consuming blue spiral encircling a planet-sized structure that continued to shift and change as though it were in the process of unfolding itself out of nothing. By now the damned thing was as large as the planet Jupiter, almost 150,000 kilometers across, its complex and ever-changing surface partially obscured by what appeared to be clouds of black smoke and punctuated by the sprinkling of tightly concentrated nuclear fireballs as the barrage continued.
As Charlie Company flew toward the holocaust before them, details of the object slowly emerged from the haze and retinal afterimages. The structure itself clearly was artificial, but didn’t seem to follow sane laws of optics or perspective. It seemed to be . . . writhing, moving forward while constantly turning itself inside out with an impossible motion that gnawed both at the stomach and the brain. The smoke was composed of perhaps tens of billions of Dark Raider needleships emerging from at least a hundred ports or vents scattered across the face of the object.
“How the hell are we supposed to fight that?” Staff Sergeant David Ramirez demanded.
“Fucking fleas against an elephant!” Sergeant Janice Klein replied. “Against a dinosaur!”
“Dinosaurs and elephants are extinct, Sarge,” Lance Corporal Mallory said.
“Humans are going to be, too—”
“Can it, people,” Dixon snapped. “Hold formation and accelerate to full on my mark . . . three . . . two . . . one . . . mark!”
MCA suits were limited to a top velocity of around 10,000 kilometers per second, partly by power constraints, but mostly by the dangers of plowing into dust-sized specks of matter at velocities that turned grains of sand into detonations of high-explosive. Their suit AIs could spot oncoming threats and maneuver to avoid them, usually, but there were limits to what could be done under high acceleration. As with starships, gravitic acceleration in a straight line “felt” like free fall because every atom in the Marine’s suit and body was accelerating uniformly, but a high-G jink to the side to avoid a bit of oncoming debris could ruin your day real fast.
Dixon’s MCA built-in artificial intelligence, an AI far quicker than any human mind but narrowly channeled in what it thought about, handled most of the piloting, leaving Dixon free to concentrate on overall strategy and on combat.
“Lock on to me,” he told his company. “I want to get in close.”
Giving his suit AI a mental command, he gently reshaped his course toward the looming alien objective, and the rest of the company followed in perfect linked formation. To his right, a quartet of Marine Wasp fighters—a couple of Death Dealers according to the markings—drifted past, carefully avoiding the free-flying Marines as they lined up for an attack run.
“Get on their sixes, people,” Dixon ordered. “We’ll follow those four Dealers in.” Maybe they would open a corridor through to the objective.
Together, the Marines accelerated.
Günter Adler found it difficult now to link his mind to Tellus’s AIs. Simply thinking about it brought about a horrible fluttering sensation in his throat and within the pit of his stomach, a pounding of the heart, and a sweatiness to the palms of his hands. The strong physiological responses were all the stranger because, so far as he was concerned, the events causing them had never happened. The Günter Adler who’d tried to connect mind-to-mind with the thoughts of the Andromedan Dark, who’d been driven shrieking insane by the encounter, had been expunged from the universe by the backup memories and consciousness of the Adler who’d never experienced those things.
So why was he now so terrified of linking to Newton?
Perhaps, on some subliminal level, his body remembered what had happened. If so, the effect might well prove to be crippling. Every human in the Tellus colony had cerebral implants tucked away within the folds and sulci of their brain. Those implants made modern life possible—everything from chatting with friends via artificial telepathy to ordering meals, checking their health to engaging transit tubes across the colony, receiving news updates to opening doors, talking to a robot, to ordering a room to grow new furniture. If you couldn’t link through to the Tellus network, you couldn’t do anything.
Adler had heard of people with technophobia back on Earth be
fore Tellus Ad Astra had left for the Coadunation mission at the galactic core, technological cripples on public welfare who couldn’t even use an autochef to summon a freshly cooked meal. Generally, such unfortunates were consigned to camps, facilities so primitive that data scansion and virtching were unknown, and goods were exchanged through barter. Even stranger, Adler had heard of otherwise normal people who chose to live that way. Remarkable . . .
Never in . . . well . . . never in 4 billion years had Adler imagined that he would become a technophobe himself.
He would have to find a way to overcome that handicap, however, if he was going to do anything about the political limbo to which the Cybercouncil had consigned him.
Damn them. . . .
“Helga?”
He stood on the entrance deck of Helga Braun’s chalet overlooking the Port Hab city of Seattle only about eight kilometers from his own home. Helga was part of Newton’s technical team, an AI heuristic programmer who helped the Tellus Ad Astra’s primary AI learn for itself. She’d once, back in Germany four gigayears before, been Adler’s lover. Their affair had ended amicably when Adler had married Clara, but he still nursed hopes that they one day would be able to pick things up once more where they’d left off.
“Günter!” Helga exclaimed as her front door dilated open. “This is a surprise. . . .”
“I know it’s been a while, liebchen.”
“To say the least. Come in, come in. What can I do for you?”