Darkness Falling

by Ian Douglas

  “That assumption,” Dumont interrupted, his voice almost a growl, “is based on the unsupported interpretation of frankly alien motivations and decision-making.”

  “Let’s get back to that later,” St. Clair said, breaking in. The two had been going around and around on that point earlier, and he had no wish to see the argument resumed. “At this point, whether or not the Andromedan Dark is a monolithic whole or several different, competing powers is an interesting question, certainly, but we don’t have any solid proof one way or the other. Agreed?”

  Reluctantly, both Dumont and Aguilera nodded.

  “So as of right now, we just don’t know. So back to my question: What do we know?” St. Clair looked at the others, an expectant glare.

  “Honestly,” Dumont said, “Symms pretty much said it. It’s big, it’s potentially inhabited by billions, certainly contains at least a super-powerful AI, and it’s mobile.”

  “So it’s both world and warship,” St. Clair said. “Risky . . . putting all of your eggs in one basket like that.”

  “They may not distinguish between the two, my lord,” Senior Lieutenant Vance Cameron pointed out. The ship’s tactical officer hesitated, then added, “Especially if their culture, their social structure, is organized along strictly military lines.”

  “There’s another possibility,” Aguilera said. “And not necessarily an alternative one. The Andromedan swarms show some of the characteristics of what we might call a group social structure—a hive mind. They act like a super AI, operating through millions of peripherals.”

  “The Xam,” St. Clair said, seeing where she was going with this. “The ones we found in the Andromedan needleships we examined.”

  “Exactly,” Dumont put in, for once agreeing with the xenosociologist. “They were hardwired into their controls, and apparently were being directly controlled by an AI from some distance away.”

  “Actually,” Aguilera said, “I was referring to their tactics . . . or the lack of them.”

  “It’s not a lack of tactics,” General Frazier put in, “but it certainly does seem to represent a different approach from ours. A different way of thinking.”

  “Explain,” St. Clair said.

  “Correct me if I’m wrong, Doctor,” Frazier said, looking at Aguilera, “but human battle tactics tend to unfold according to a distinct plan. That plan will necessarily change during a battle; like they say, no battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy. A good plan will be flexible enough to allow for change if the enemy force is stronger than anticipated, or shows up in an unanticipated sector. But so far, the Andromedan Dark has been . . . I don’t know . . . acting like it’s afraid to commit itself.”

  “So have our so-called allies,” Symms put in.

  “That may be because individual citizens of the Cooperative are immortal,” Aguilera said, “or so close to it as makes no difference. If you possessed immortality, wouldn’t you be afraid of losing it?”

  “That may well be a consideration for the Dark,” Cameron said, nodding. “In fact, it almost certainly is, considering how long they’ve probably been around. But we’ve been analyzing their attacks, looking for patterns, and they appear to be both disjointed, given the asymmetry of the force structures involved, and hesitant. As though the controlling AI is constantly sampling its membership, looking for consensus.”

  “You’re saying these creatures are voting as to whether or not to attack us?” St. Clair said.

  “In a way, yes,” Aguilera said. “In a terrestrial ant colony, scouts return to the nest with, oh, let’s say the location of a food source. Several scouts, several food sources. The scouts will pass on information about what they’ve found, using chemical scent markers. The better the food source, the bigger or the closer or the sweeter, the more excited they are. They pass on the chemical scent of the source. They pass on their excitement. They may even physically pick up another ant and carry it to the spot where they found something of interest. Then the two return to the nest and recruit more ants to follow them . . . and more, and more. Each time they make the trip, they put down pheromone trails to lead the others. Which food source the entire nest reacts to ultimately depends on which scout has the most votes in the end . . . those with the most ants convinced that that food source is the best, the ones that are most excited about what they’ve found. In this way, the entire colony acts like a single organism. It makes a decision about which trail to follow, about where to focus the colony’s resources.”

  “Each time we’ve encountered the Andromedan Dark,” Cameron said, picking up the thread, “they’ve possessed what we would consider overwhelming superiority in numbers and in technology. In the fight with the needleships last week, it was superiority in numbers. With the Bluestar, it’s superiority in size and technology . . . and numbers,” he added ruefully. “In both cases, the enemy should have been able to obliterate us. But in both cases, they appeared to get cold feet halfway in . . . and they pulled back. Retreated.”

  “Thereby saving our collective sorry asses,” St. Clair said. “I’ve been wondering about that. We all have.”

  “That is what suggests the hive-mind nature,” Aguilera pointed out. “It is as though they are sampling us. Testing us. If we resist more strongly than they expect, if we’re not as . . . well, as tasty to them as we should be, to use the food source analogy, then they pull back and try something else.”

  “We should not attribute meaning to alien activities based on comparisons with ourselves,” Dumont pointed out. “We should not try to assume the nature of their selection criteria. They are, by definition, by their very nature, alien. . . .”

  “To be sure, Dr. Dumont,” St. Clair replied, getting a little tired of the xenosophotologist repeating that little chestnut. “But we don’t have much else to go on yet, do we? And the hive-mind theory might also explain their several attempts at coming at us through higher dimensions. The attacks on Lord Adler and Subcommander Francesca. The incursion belowdecks earlier today. They were tasting us.”

  “That fits with the AI model as well,” Jablonsky said. “They may not be trying to overwhelm us militarily. They might just be gathering information.”

  “Meaning they know as little about us as we know about them,” St. Clair mused. “That could be useful.”

  “On the other hand,” Symms said, “they’ve been fighting the Cooperative in both galaxies for a long, long time. What? Two hundred million years? Something like that. And the Cooperative isn’t that strange compared to the galactic cultures we knew in our home time. Us. And the Coadunation. You’d think they’d be able to formulate a strategy that would end the thing once and for all.”

  “I don’t know, ExComm,” St. Clair said. “That could actually fit the hive-mind thesis pretty well. Look, the current idea is that the Andromedan Dark is a completely alien kind of life, possibly made up of dark matter, right? Dr. Sandoval? Help me out here.”

  Carlos Sandoval was Ad Astra’s head of astrophysics. “We know less for certain about the physics here,” Sandoval replied, “than we know about the Dark’s motives. But, as you say, that’s one theory. For a couple of centuries, now, we’ve understood dark matter to be a different kind of matter, stuff that can’t interact with what we think of as normal matter in any way except through gravity. We can’t see it, we can’t touch it, we can’t sense it in any way except to note its gravitational effect on large structures like galaxies. By observing how quickly galaxies of known mass rotated, we were able to ascertain that some 84 percent of all matter in the universe was so-called dark matter—ethereal and unobservable.

  “What we think we understand now,” Sandoval continued, “is that dark matter is made up of its own periodic table of elements, that we can’t see it or touch it because it’s squirreled away inside the other, higher dimensions predicted by string theory. Only the gravity created by all of that mass leaks through into our three spatial dimensions.”

  “Okay,” St. Clair said. “Tha
nk you. And my point is that at some fundamental level they don’t understand us or the Cooperative at all . . . and never have. They’ve been happily slurping up their kind of life, high-D life, organizing it as some sort of hyperdimensional empire, and weren’t paying any attention to the crumbs left over . . . to us or the Cooperative. A couple of hundred million years ago (and that’s only one galactic rotation, remember, not a very long time at all) a couple of hundred million years ago they came up against the Galactic Cooperative and didn’t know what to make of them. They’ve been taking it very slow and cautious ever since.”

  “I would agree, my lord,” Cameron said, “except for the part about a galactic rotation not being a long time. Maybe it is brief on a geological scale, but we’re talking about organic beings, here.”

  “Potentially immortal organic beings, Lieutenant,” Aguilera reminded him. “Individually, they may experience time much as we do. But the entire hive mind might be operating on a completely different, a completely alien timescale.”

  “Excuse me, Lord Commander, ladies and gentlemen,” Newton’s voice said, breaking into the discussion on audio. The AI had not been excluded from the meeting, exactly, but St. Clair’s order that the conference be held physically to avoid the potential threat of electronic Dark intervention had kept Newton more or less in the background, an observer and a resource rather than an active participant. He was addressing them now over a speaker rather than through their cerebral implants. “We have a critical situation developing ahead.”

  “What do you have, Newton?” St. Clair asked. On the wall display, the external camera had pivoted to zero in on a spiraling whirlpool of blue light just emerging from emptiness.

  “The Bluestar object is returning to normal space,” Newton told them. “And the Vera Cruz has rejoined the fleet’s communication network. They are alive . . . but they are under attack.”

  “Let’s have a close-up, Newton,” St. Clair said.

  St. Clair and the others watched, fascinated and with growing concern, as the battle unfolded ahead.

  The shining white ground lurched underfoot as Kilgore stepped into the open. He helped Rees extract herself from the ruined gunship, then looked up in astonishment.

  The black emptiness of the alien dimension was gone. In its place, the two melding galaxies stretched from horizon to horizon, their interpenetrating arms looping high overhead in their frozen, mutual, eons-long embrace. A pair of Marine Wasp fighters shrieked overhead, dragging arrow-straight contrails of shocked cold atmosphere in their wakes. And armored Marines were descending, their drives deployed like dragonfly wings, their weapons hot and ready.

  “Move it, you two!” Captain Byrne yelled. “Get clear! Get clear!”

  “On our way!” Rees yelled back. “Who’s the hired help?”

  A black-armored Marine touched down meters away, his laser pulse rifle hammering at something behind Kilgore’s shoulder. When he turned to glance back, all he saw were those alien horrors, amoebic and hideously fluid, popping into existence on and near the Black Hawk’s crumpled hull as they stepped past the dimensions in an attempt to reach the retreating Marines.

  The MCA-clad Marine burned through a dozen of the squirming, churning bodies, but more, lots more, continued their advance.

  “Rees! Kilgore!” Byrne called. “Use your armor to fly yourselves out! We’re deploying the Toads to help cover you!”

  “Copy that, boss!” He extended his gravitic wings, kicked off the ground, and launched himself into a low trajectory skimming above the white blur of the ground. Around him, that surface appeared to be in constant motion, shifting, changing . . . and he realized that the Bluestar was pulling its trick with extradimensional geometry to re-emerge in normal space.

  The new Marines and the aerospace craft, he realized, were part of Vera Cruz’s combat support; that Marine’s electronic ID tagged him as Captain Greg Dixon, of Charlie Company, 3rd Battalion. The man was holding his ground, leaning into his rifle as it chewed through enemy bodies.

  Rees vaulted into the sky next to him, and together they curved up and away from the alien artificial world, angling toward the Vera Cruz visible now in the distance. And beyond, almost half an AU distant, hung a bright star—the Ad Astra.

  “Dixon, get the fuck out of there!” Byrne’s voice yelled. “You’re not going to stop them all by your lonesome!”

  “Coming, Mother,” Dixon replied, and then he was airborne as well, following Rees and Kilgore and most of the rest of First Platoon, Bravo Company as they got themselves off-world. Below them, the three Devil Toads edged in toward the Black Hawk, turret weapons pounding at the mass of alien life emerging from the downed human vessel.

  And Kilgore thought that over the hammering and the howling, he could hear screams from the advancing alien nightmares.

  Chapter Fifteen

  St. Clair and the others in Conference Room One watched the retreat from the Bluestar object, the scene relayed from camera drones and the vid gear mounted on the external hulls of the Devil Toads and the Vera Cruz herself. The images they were seeing were four minutes old, of course—Ad Astra was still half an astronomical unit from the battle zone, almost eighty thousand kilometers.

  “General Wilson on board the Cruz reports the MCA Marines all have been recovered,” General William Frazier said. “She’s pulling back, and the Toads are in her wake. No pursuit by the enemy. Not yet, at any rate.”

  “We’ll take them on board,” St. Clair said, “and then jump back to Ki.” If they let us, St. Clair added to himself, but he didn’t say the words aloud. He looked at the young Asian woman seated beside Jablonsky. “Lieutenant Lam?”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  “During the battle, we made several attempts to get Roceti torpedoes inside that thing. Did any of them . . . I don’t know . . . take? Are we receiving any data, any transmissions from the Bluestar object at all?”

  “Not so far, my lord. The nature of the object itself, the way it folds in and out of higher dimensions, may be interfering with the reception of signals.”

  St. Clair nodded. “I was half-afraid of that.”

  “We may need to try again, my lord,” Sandoval put in, “but with something other than EM signals.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like gravitational waves.”

  He remembered what Sandoval had been saying about gravity and dark matter earlier. So while electromagnetic transmissions—radio waves or modulated laser beams—traveled through normal 3-D space, but were unable to make the transition into higher dimensions, gravity seemed to permeate all of the special dimensions defined by string theory; only gravity could be “felt” across the barrier from dark matter tucked away inside its own high-D realm. Still, he wasn’t sure about the feasibility of the scientist’s suggestion.

  “Is that possible? Do we have that level of technology?”

  “Theoretically, my lord,” Sandoval said. His eyes were closed, as he closely studied something going on inside his head. “Yes . . . that might work. I’m thinking a couple of Martin-Teller gravitic thrusters could be set up side by side and tuned in such a way that they would amplify or interfere with one another. That would allow us to heterodyne messages, just like with a laser comm unit.”

  “Good,” St. Clair said. “Subcomm Jablonsky? We’ll need some of your best AI people to make it work.”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  “And Subcomm Hargrove. Your department as well.”

  The senior officer of Ad Astra’s communications department nodded. “Yes. My lord, a device like that . . . it’s going to have a hellishly small bandwidth.”

  “Meaning a slow rate of communication?”

  “Yes, sir. It may not function as much more than a bell ringer.”

  A “bell ringer” was a signal intended simply to announce that a longer message, one available at a higher bandwidth, was coming through. The term had been applied historically to ELF—extremely low frequency—transmissions, and they�
�d been used to communicate with submarines at depths too great for them to receive normal radio signals.

  “We’ll need more than that if we want to hear what our AI spies inside the Bluestar have to say,” St. Clair said. “Work on it.”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  “Weapons.”

  “My lord?”

  “I’m interested in what they have available. Except for reports of swarms of needleship fighters emerging from the Bluestar, I haven’t seen anything to suggest they even carry weapons. Comments? Anyone?”

  “I was curious about that, too, my lord,” Frazier said. “If these critters can move a planet through space they have plenty of power, enough for a planet-killer beam of some sort.”

  “The alien needleships have positron beam technology . . . antimatter,” Dumont said. “They must manufacture it to order, because the ships themselves aren’t large enough to store more than a few kilograms of the stuff. With that much power, they could probably generate antimatter particle beams with a staggering power output.”

  “How much is ‘a staggering output,’ Dr. Dumont?”

  “I don’t know. I’m guessing . . . but something on the order of one yottawatt, maybe?”

  “How much is that?”

  “Ten to the twenty-sixth joules per second. That’s roughly a quarter of the total energy output of our sun.”

  “With something like that, they could have vaporized the Ad Astra with scarcely a thought,” St. Clair said. “They could have vaporized the Ki Ring from 8 AUs away. Why didn’t they?”

  “If they didn’t,” Frazier said, “I would suggest that it’s because they can’t. If you’re locked in a do-or-die death struggle with someone, have been locked in that fight for hundreds of millions of years, there’s no sense in holding back.”

  “Limited warfare, perhaps,” Aguilera suggested. “You can’t conquer and use something you’ve just turned into hot plasma.”