by Ian Douglas
He moved his head slightly . . . and he saw skin . . . then he was looking past the skin and down into her internal organs. Her heart was a vivid scarlet lump pulsing away just beyond the white bands of her ribs. Her naked skull grinned hideously at him . . . and somehow at the same time he could see past the bone and into her brain.
Someone, one of the Marines opposite him, gasped. “My God! What the . . .”
“Fuck!” another cried. “I’m looking at your guts!”
“Easy, people!” the Company CO, Captain Andrew Byrne, snapped. “We expected something like this, right? We’re in another dimension. . . .”
Well . . . not exactly expected, Kilgore thought. There’d been some pre-mission discussion of what they might expect facing critters with access to higher dimensions, but he certainly hadn’t been prepared for this. Nor was the explanation of what they were now experiencing as cut-and-dried as that, as if “another dimension” meant an entirely new and different universe with different rules. But that simplistic phrase would do for now until they could come up with new language and better descriptions.
The Marines still appeared to be sitting within the normal framework of length, height, and depth that characterized the 3-D universe they were used to . . . but as they moved their heads, as their optical perspectives changed, it was as though they were getting just a taste of another realm interpenetrating and filling normal space. Kilgore raised his right hand, staring at his plasteel-laminate gauntlet . . . and marveled at the interplay of bones and tendons and flowing threads of blood within his bare hand as he flexed his fingers. Exactly what he saw, and how deeply his enhanced vision penetrated what he was looking at, seemed to depend partly on the angle of view, and partly on his own mental focus. He could will himself to see the black surface of his armored glove in front of him, rather than the living anatomy lesson within. Apparently the brain had a fair amount of control over what incoming data it processed.
Kilgore remembered having downloaded a factoid back when he’d been getting used to his new military cerebral implants . . . something to the effect that the human brain actually processed 400 billion bits of data per second, but was only aware of something like two kilobytes. Humans were awash in a sea of incoming data, the vast majority of which they were never aware. Cyber implants could improve that wildly unbalanced ratio through organization and efficient storage, but humans were still oblivious to much of what was going on around them.
Maybe the brain simply unconsciously discarded what it didn’t need . . . or didn’t understand.
Maybe he could decide what he was seeing, simply through an act of concentration. . . .
It would take some getting used to, though, and a lot of practice to be able to function normally in this strangely twisted space.
Others in the compartment were doing the same as he, staring at their hands, or at one another, getting used to the strangeness. Kilgore looked at PFC Colby, seated in his cage next to Rees, and for a horrible moment wondered if those normally closely enclosed and restrained intestines could fall out of the man’s body through a sixth-dimensional shortcut.
Intriguingly, the company’s electronic feeds didn’t seem to be affected. The data streaming in from the ship’s sensors showed normal surfaces. He tried to concentrate on that, and not on the disturbing internal views of his fellow Marines or of the compartment’s bulkheads that now showed an unnerving tendency to disappear if he stared at them for too long. Could they fall past those bulkheads and into open space?
“Listen up, people,” Byrne said. “Our Newton clone has a fix . . .”
Kilgore saw the flashing in-head icon marking a new software patch and accepted it, and his strangely enhanced vision flattened back to normal.
“Hey, Skipper!” Lieutenant Hayes of Second Platoon called. “What just happened?”
“Newton just dropped a filter into your visual processing center at the back of your skull. It’ll help you ignore the extra dimensions.”
“Roger that.”
Kilgore wasn’t entirely sure he could ignore those dimensions. Simply knowing that it was possible to look right inside a person—that it might even be possible to reach right out and grasp their beating heart—had left him feeling nakedly exposed and vulnerable. He kept remembering the stories he’d heard of some crew members on the Ad Astra who’d been yanked out of their regular 3-D world by the Dark, flipped over, and dropped back into three dimensions inside out.
The mounting stress was all but intolerable. Modern combat, Kilgore reflected, was characterized by endless tedium punctuated by brief episodes of sheer terror . . . an observation likely as ancient as human combat itself. What made it worse by far was thinking that you knew what was about to happen, and then having everything change in a heartbeat.
But it was infinitely worse knowing that the enemy could defy everything you thought you knew about the physical world, reach right inside you—reach into your guts, maybe grab that beating heart—and yank it out . . .
All First Platoon Bravo could do was watch the image feeds . . . and engage in the long-established Marine tradition of bitching.
“That’s better,” Lance Corporal Carolyn Lalakos said over the company channel. “Looking at what all you lean, green gyrenes ate for breakfast was making me sick to my stomach.”
“Fuck, Lakie,” Sergeant Tony Kalinin replied. “And here I was just sitting back and enjoying getting to see your titties.”
She held up an armored middle finger. “SAR, man,” she said sweetly. “Sit and rotate.”
“Titties, huh? Can’t see a thing, now,” PFC Terry Gonzales said. “Pity . . .”
Minutes dragged on, one following another. “C’mon, c’mon,” PFC Colby said. “We got our eyes fixed! Let’s see some action, here!”
Kilgore put the exclamation down to waiting-sharpened bravado. “Simmer down, Colby. It’ll happen when it happens.”
“Looks like some of the zoomies came through with us,” Rees pointed out. Visible on their in-heads, a dozen green icons were flying along close by Vera Cruz’s blunt prow, like dolphins riding an ocean-going ship’s bow wave. Their ID tags pegged them as GFA-86, the Stardogs, flying close combat aerospace support in front of the Cruzer.
“The Doggies,” Kilgore agreed. “There are some more fighters up ahead . . . right above the surface of that . . . that thing.”
“GFA-90,” Rees said. “The Death Dealers.”
“Think they can?” Colby asked.
“Think they can what?” Lance Corporal Francis Rivoldini asked.
“Deal out death to a whole fuckin’ blue-glowing planet!”
“Well, fuck!” PFC Dennis Blanchard said with a casual aplomb too studied to be real. “They’re Marines, right?”
“Ooh-rah!” Lalakos replied.
“Hey, looks like the damned thing’s not a Jovian-type planet after all,” PFC Benson DuBoise said. “Are those fucking cities down there?”
“It’s got a solid surface,” Kilgore replied, “so we know it’s not a gas giant. But those markings are too damned big to be cities.”
“Whatever they are,” Rees added, “they’re not natural features. Too many right angles.”
“Bullshit,” Lance Corporal Alexis Mishchenko said. “Some of those structures are frickin’ bigger than Earth!”
Kilgore was studying the readouts coming through his data feed. “What worries me,” he said, “is the gravity. Anybody else notice that?”
“I’m reading . . . shit,” Rees said. “That can’t be right. . . .”
“Surface gravity estimated at point nine-five G,” DuBoise added. “From something that big?”
“Must be a glitch in the metrics,” Byrne said.
“Not necessarily, sir,” Kilgore said. He was glad for the distraction. The waiting and not-knowing was miserable. “Back in our own solar system, the gas giant Saturn was . . . what? A diameter of something like 120,000 kilometers? But it wasn’t all that dense, right? It had a surface
gravity of just a hair over one G, even though it was almost ten times bigger than Earth.”
“Not that Saturn had a solid surface,” Byrne said. “But point taken. Maybe Bluestar isn’t really solid.”
“It looks solid enough,” Colby said.
“I heard,” Rees added, “that Saturn was so light that if you could find an ocean big enough, the planet would float.”
“That’s one fuckin’ big ocean,” DuBoise said.
“This thing is bigger than Saturn,” Byrne pointed out. “Hell, it’s bigger than Jupiter. But it’s artificial, definitely. Maybe it has a kind of latticework interior, so a lot of it is hollow?”
“God,” Kilgore said, stunned as realization sank in.
“What?”
“I was just thinking . . . we see that . . . that city down there. But imagine another city underneath . . . and another below that, and another, and another . . .”
He’d been wondering if it would have been possible, before downloading that internal software patch, if it would have been possible to look at the Bluestar and see into it, to see its internal structure. The thought had driven home the realization that the thing was a solid object, three-dimensional and more, and that its interior would be brain-twistingly complex. Millions of cities layered one upon another was just one of the possibilities.
“That one freaking ship could be carrying a population that outnumbers the population of the entire Galaxy,” Rees said, awe creeping into her voice as well.
“Actually,” Byrne said, thoughtful, “I think what we’re seeing here is a J-brain.”
“What the hell’s that?” PFC Ana Lopez asked.
“J-brain, Jupiter-brain,” Byrne said. “An artificial structure the size of a gas giant, optimized as a massive computer.”
“I’m reading a mass of . . . oh, call it one times ten to the twenty-seven kilograms,” Rees said. “Jupiter masses almost twice that.”
“So if we dropped this thing into that ocean next to Saturn,” Kilgore suggested, “it would float, too.”
“Heads up, people,” Byrne said. “The bridge is picking up a distress beacon down there.”
Kilgore brought up the data on his in-head—a flashing red beacon on the surface below. “Is that the gunship?”
“The gunship,” Byrne agreed. “Black Hawk. We’re going down to check it out.”
“I wonder,” Kilgore said, “what an AI super-mind inhabiting a computronium matrix as big as the planet Jupiter will have to say about that?”
“What happened to them?” St. Clair demanded. “Where did they go?”
“Presumably,” Newton replied, “they were pulled in after IO-1.”
“Yes, but in where?” Symms wanted to know. “The Vera Cruz has just vanished, along with twenty-four of our fighters!”
St. Clair magnified the image displayed by the feed from battlespace drones closer to the fight. Lonely icons appeared scattered across a large volume of space, marking Marines and damaged fighters left behind after the fight, but of the heavy Marine transport there was no sign. SAR vehicles moved through the area on their post-battle missions of mercy, rescuing survivors.
He took another moment to closely scan Ad Astra’s security status. That attack belowdecks had unnerved him . . . proof that the Andromedan Dark could reach down inside the ship from elsewhere without warning. Was there a range limitation to that reach? He didn’t know . . . and he wasn’t particularly eager to find out.
Gudahk and his escorts were long gone. Good. There would be a reckoning of some sort there later, but not now, not until the current tactical situation had resolved itself.
“ExComm,” he said, “hold our position. Provide support for the SARs.”
“Yes, Lord Commander.”
St. Clair rotated his command chair until he was facing Gorton Noyer. The Cybercouncil liaison was still sitting at the rear of the command bridge, but St. Clair honestly couldn’t tell whether the man was quietly fuming . . . or terrified. He decided to give the man the benefit of the doubt. “Lord Noyer? I think it’s time you and I had a little heart-to-heart.”
Noyer responded with a quick, jerky nod. “Yes, my lord.”
Ah . . . fear, then, rather than rage. The man appeared thoroughly shaken. By what? The alien invasion belowdecks? The vanishing of a Marine heavy transport?
Or, just possibly, the brief encounter with Gudahk of the Tchagar.
“So . . . what did you think of our new friend Gudahk?” St. Clair asked, keeping his voice light and conversational.
“I . . . don’t know,” Noyer said, hesitant. “Dealing with em might be . . . difficult.”
“That,” St. Clair replied, “is one hell of an understatement. Conference Room One, ten minutes.”
Lisa let herself into St. Clair’s cliffside house, her walkabout over. She was surprised to discover that she was actually glad to be home.
The pleasure of her homecoming, however, was considerably muddied by an emotion she’d rarely permitted herself to feel—and she wasn’t certain she wanted to experience it now. The emotion was worry, and for Lisa it was an alien and unpleasant condition. To gnaw at and churn over some event about which little or nothing could be done, to have thoughts chasing one another around and around inside her brain to no perceptible advantage was not generally thought of as characteristic of robots.
Lisa’s creators, however, at the General Nanodynamics Corporation of San Francisco in the state of North California, had been seeking to make her line of sex gynoids as human as possible, and that meant giving them the capacity for certain traits and emotional responses usually seen as negatives. Jealousy was permanently blocked, of course, to avoid potential confrontations with human sexual partners, but she could feel at least mild anger, frustration, annoyance, fear, irritation . . .
. . . and, of course, she could worry.
Her advantage over humans lay in her being able to switch those feelings off at will. Humans tended to be driven incessantly by their emotional states, a condition that Lisa found almost incomprehensible. But some emotions, even the most negative, if properly calibrated and controlled could be effective as personal drivers. In short, they helped her get things done, rather than being a passive observer of the world around her.
Earlier, she’d considered switching off the worry . . . but she didn’t want to do that, not yet. The mild, nagging pull at her thoughts would help to keep her focused on the problem. She wanted to discuss it with Grayson, and she didn’t want to simply forget about it like some conscienceless machine, cold and unfeeling. So she would live with it.
But, damn it, how do humans deal with this nagging inner torment, day in and day out?
As she walked into the living room, she tried pinging St. Clair, and was startled when her transmission failed to find its destination. She checked a StarNet source and saw that the Ad Astra had pulled away from the Tellus some time ago and accelerated out-system, racing toward the enigmatic Bluestar.
More worried, now, she shifted to a StarNet news feed, pulling down the latest. There was nothing new, unfortunately, nothing since an hour ago when word had reached the Tellus that the Marine transport Vera Cruz had been swallowed by the Bluestar object. There was no word on what Tellus was doing, but she was certain that St. Clair would be in the thick of things, confronting the alien object, possibly directing the battle. . . .
Her worry index clicked up a couple of notches. Two humans she cared for deeply were out there now: Grayson St. Clair and Gunnery Sergeant Roger Kilgore.
She desperately wanted to switch off the worry . . . and didn’t quite dare.
One news feed thread caught her attention, and she switched it over to the big display wall in the living room. A talking head three meters tall—Günter Adler, the ousted director of the UE Cybercouncil—glowered down at her. “—is a bad, bad deal for Tellus Ad Astra,” Adler was saying. “Now, yes, it’s true that I supported these negotiations at the start. I thought that a close military alliance wi
th the Galactic Cooperative would provide security and peace for our citizens.
“But the recent attacks by the so-called Andromedan Dark have demonstrated that the Cooperative is unable or unwilling to protect itself, that in fact they intended for us to be in the forefront of the battle against their enemy, even though they possess technologies infinitely beyond our own. We must renounce this evil treaty and find our own safety within this distant and alien epoch within which we now find ourselves. . . .”
Adler’s face was replaced by that of Barbra Delarosa, a leading StarNet News anchor. On a screen behind her, an angry, chanting mob waved homemade signs and placards. “Lord Adler made his comments at a rally in downtown Seattle today,” Delarosa said, “not far from his residence below the Port Hab endcap. He is calling for an immediate renunciation of the Cooperative Alliance Treaty. Some of Lord Adler’s supporters are calling for his reinstatement on the Cybercouncil, and the immediate nullification of the CAT agreement.
“We have with us at our SNN offices Lord Clayton Lloyd, Lord Ambassador Lloyd, I should say, who recently negotiated the Cooperative Alliance Treaty. My lord? It’s indeed an honor to have you with us today.”
The faces of the chanting mob were replaced by the head and shoulders of Ambassador Lloyd, sharing a split screen with Delarosa. “It’s my honor to be here, Barbra,” Lloyd said, flashing a groomed and polished smile.
“So, my lord, what would you say to Lord Adler and his demands that the CAT be renounced?”
“Well, Barbra . . . first and foremost, it is vitally important to keep in mind that Lord Adler has been through an extremely . . . difficult time. He was driven mad by an encounter with the Dark, you know, and while his faculties were medically restored by an electronic backup transplant, there are still serious—extremely serious—questions about the former director’s health, emotional state, and stability. And, of course, that is why he was removed from the Council—by a two-thirds majority vote of the sitting members, I should add. We didn’t want to take that step, but the danger that the former cyber director was unstable or, worse, that he was under some sort of alien influence simply could not be ignored.”