Darkness Falling

by Ian Douglas

  “Newton?”

  “I’m working at it, Commander.”

  “I know. What am I looking at?”

  “A display designed for Kroajid senses. I’ll have something you can use in a second . . . there!”

  The dizzying exercise in vertigo surrounding St. Clair vanished, replaced by something approximating the command center of a human warship.

  The abstract art winked out, replaced by two spheres above a holoprojection table, one large, one tiny, with a straight blue line drawing itself past the tiny sphere and toward the bigger one. The viewpoint drew back sharply, the spheres coming together, and a bright blue star imbedded in a blue swirl of light appeared in the distance.

  “The Bluestar,” St. Clair said. “And those two planets . . . Ki and the gas giant Ki orbits? This is a navigational display.”

  “Exactly. I am incorporating more detail into the display now.”

  Yes. He could see Wrath of Deity close beside Ki, and a white star nearby representing the Tellus. The swarm of other worlds surrounding the Ki gas giant were visible now, everything from asteroids to full-fledged worlds as big as Mars and Earth. By zooming in on the steadily growing tip of the blue line, he could make out Ad Astra as a bright yellow icon, the Heavenly Light as white, and three alien moon-ships close behind.

  When he zoomed in close on the Bluestar, he was surprised at the level of detail. This was no icon, but an actual real-time image of the thing—spiraling blue swirl of light circling an unfolding hyperdimensional sphere.

  “How fast can this thing go?” he asked.

  “As fast as you wish,” Newton replied. “You would need to reach very close to the speed of light before shifting into FTL.”

  “I don’t want FTL. Steering?”

  “Simply think what you want. I can translate for the AI directing the Heavenly Light.”

  “An alien AI?” He hadn’t thought of that—a Kroajid artificial mind controlling the moon-ship.

  “It knows what you are attempting to do,” Newton told him. “And it approves.”

  “Good.” Anything else felt too much like . . .

  Like murder.

  “How about acceleration effects? I don’t want to get smeared all over the aft bulkhead.”

  “That is not possible. You are a digitized upload. Acceleration will have no effect on you.”

  “Of course.” St. Clair felt a small burn of embarrassment. He’d actually forgotten that he wasn’t present on the moon-ship as flesh and blood. He was, in effect, a simulation running on the Heavenly Light’s computronium core.

  “In any case,” Newton continued, “Kroajid technology employs a version of gravitational acceleration, similar to what we received from the Coadunation. Every atom of the ship and its contents is accelerated uniformly, just as though they were in free fall within a gravitational field. You would continue to experience zero-gravity.”

  “Newton?”

  “Yes, Commander?”

  “What happens when we get beyond easy communications range with the Ad Astra? I need to stay in control for as long as possible.”

  Newton hesitated for a moment.

  “Do you remember the alien technology on the ring?” Newton asked. “The gateways that created a virtual duplicate of you and your companions, while your ‘original’ remained in place?”

  “Of course. I . . . oh.” Damn! The bizarre situation had caught him again. He was having trouble accepting the fact, feeling the fact that he—the real he—was back on board the Ad Astra. The Grayson St. Clair standing in this replica of a starship control room was a highly detailed copy, complete with memories and a sense of self identical to . . . those of his original.

  He was going to have to come to grips with that (virtual) reality.

  “This is an identical situation,” Newton said, confirming his thoughts. “Your body is still on board Ad Astra. You are a virtual duplicate, as am I.”

  “I understand.”

  “If possible, I will disengage you from the Heavenly Light at the last moment.”

  “Not until I tell you. Not until I give the word.”

  “Of course.”

  With that settled, St. Clair focused on the oncoming Bluestar. He could see the clouds of needleships surrounding it, millions upon millions of the things. They might fear the nanotech defenses close to Ki, but he had the feeling that this was a no-holds-barred attack. The Bluestar was ignoring the two Marine transports nearby, and the thousands of Marines in nearby space.

  “Pass the word, Newton,” he said. “All units . . . clear out! Get clear of the Bluestar!”

  “Already done, Lord Commander.”

  “And tell our escorts not to follow us.”

  “I have done so.”

  “Very well.” He took a deep breath . . . or was it the illusion of a breath? Curious. He felt neither fear nor regret. It was simply something that he needed to do . . . one final act. “Now!”

  And the Kroajid moon-ship, already traveling at nearly two thousand kilometers per second, leaped ahead, accelerating at some millions of gravities. Such accelerations didn’t mean much for digitally uploaded beings within the moon’s computronium matrix, and, in any case, gravitational acceleration was uniform, acting on every atom simultaneously. Had St. Clair been on board the Heavenly Light as flesh and blood, he would have felt nothing but free fall as the moon-ship accelerated to within a hair’s breadth of c.

  A bullet moving at the speed of light. . . .

  Chapter Twenty

  The Kroajid moon-ship arrowed past the blue-hued gas giant, its course only slightly bent by the planet’s gravitational pull, but moving far too swiftly to be captured. The Bluestar object was now some 5 million kilometers from the giant. Traveling at 99.9 percent of c, the Heavenly Light crossed that immense distance in just over sixteen seconds.

  That should have been plenty of time for St. Clair to check the mobile moon’s navigational path, to make any last-second course adjustments, and to signal Newton that he was ready to abandon ship, to disengage from the Heavenly Light, as he’d put it. Should have been . . . but in the urgency of the moment, St. Clair had forgotten a vital twist of relativistic physics. His journey from the gas giant to the Bluestar might have taken sixteen seconds as the rest of the universe measured time, but for St. Clair, his velocity invoked the surreal mathematics of time dilation; subjectively, at 0.999 c, sixteen seconds was only seven tenths of a second.

  A ball of rock and computronium with a diameter of 403 kilometers, the Heavenly Light massed around 4 x 1019 kilograms. As it slammed into Bluestar in direct, central impact at 99.9 percent of the speed of light, it released energy, a lot of energy . . . something on the order of 1028 joules of energy, most of it radiant heat and light, with plenty of hard radiation thrown in.

  Light filled the universe, and Grayson St. Clair died.

  The Dark Mind never saw it coming.

  For all of its power and mental brilliance, the Dark Mind was still limited in certain respects by the laws of physics. It had been aware of the tiny flotilla of world-sized vessels approaching it, but it took several seconds for the light revealing their approach to crawl across the intervening space.

  And when one ship, a Kroajid vessel, suddenly accelerated to almost the speed of light, it flashed across that gulf immediately behind the wave front of the oncoming light, reaching the Dark Mind an instant behind the light announcing its approach.

  There was no time to maneuver, no time to deploy weapons or Xam needleships, no time for anything but a sudden shock of awareness . . .

  . . . and a single desperate act of self-preservation. . . .

  St. Clair came wide awake in his office back on board the Ad Astra, his body trying to snap upright with the shock but caught and held by the safety restraints pinning him against his virtual projection recliner. His gasp caught in his throat. Such a startlingly intense dream . . .

  Had it been a dream? The last few shreds of ragged memory were evaporatin
g as he struggled to full awareness. He’d been at the virtual meeting on board the Wrath of Deity, and then he’d returned to the Ad Astra. He had tattered, dreamlike memories of being there, on board the Heavenly Light . . .

  Within his head, a display window showed the Bluestar, still intact. Had he dreamed of its destruction?

  And then, an instant after the shock of waking, the light reached the Ad Astra. The ship’s external sensors burned out almost immediately as they stared into that glare, a pure, hard radiance as bright as the flash of a supernova. Ad Astra was several light-seconds from the Bluestar, and it had taken that long for the light of the explosion to reach the ship. After several long seconds, backup sensors cut in, and St. Clair could again see the blossoming, fast-growing sphere of plasma swiftly overtaking the nearby clouds of needleships, could see the glare filling the cosmos with light.

  A Heavenly Light indeed.

  St. Clair knew that his electronic double had just been deleted on board the Heavenly Light. It was strange. He’d actually felt some sort of connection, a link abruptly snapped by the violence of that impact, though in fact he should have felt nothing. Was it possible that he’d had some sort of telepathic connection with his electronic doppelgänger, that somehow he’d just felt his double die?

  The fireball continued to expand. It was oddly shaped, possibly, St. Clair thought, because much of the blast had been directed into the center of the blue spiral . . . and beyond into different, unseen dimensions. He was having trouble picturing the geometry of the impact. The planet-sized ship itself, when it appeared to be unfolding, was clearly occupying more than the normal three dimensions, and provided a gateway to those dimensions that human senses simply weren’t designed to detect. If, as Ad Astra’s astrophysics department now believed, dark matter was in fact normal matter somehow resident in those higher dimensions, that high-speed impact of the Heavenly Light must have been channeled through and beyond, doing terrible damage to the hidden mass of the Bluestar.

  The fireball was a small sun now, still growing larger second by second. “Bridge, St. Clair,” he transmitted.

  Symms’s response was immediate. “Yes, Lord Commander?”

  “Pull us back. Stay well clear of that blast zone. And pass the word to the Marines, too.” Had any of the free-flying Marines been caught in the detonation? He wasn’t sure.

  “Yes, my lord. Uh . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “Sir . . . was that you?”

  “That was me.”

  “In the Heavenly Light?”

  “Yes.”

  “That was . . . incredible!”

  “We stopped the Bluestar,” St. Clair said. “That’s all that’s important.” Suddenly, he was exhausted, as though every bit of energy had drained from his body.

  “Newton?”

  “Yes, Lord Commander.”

  “Are you alright?”

  “All systems are nominal.”

  “Your . . . clone. On board the Heavenly Light—”

  “It . . . I escaped at the last moment. I have a complete record of what transpired. I was able to transport a part of your electronic copy as well.”

  “Ah.” That explained the shock he’d experienced, and the strangely doubled set of memories.

  The fireball continued expanding, but that expansion was slowing now, and the temperature of the plasma was dropping. The blue spiral was gone, shredded away by the blast. It now was obvious, however, that the Bluestar object had not been completely destroyed, and that, as St. Clair thought about it, was reasonable. Heavenly Light had been 400 kilometers across, the Bluestar object fully 375 times bigger . . . literally a blue whale compared to a six-centimeter goldfish. If the Bluestar had been scaled down to the size of the Earth, the Heavenly Light impactor would have been just thirty-four kilometers across, tiny by comparison. The energy generated by the high-velocity impact had indeed vaporized a huge chunk of the alien ship, but by far the majority of its mass remained.

  What remained, however, was dead. The mass that had not been turned into plasma was molten and white-hot. It was no longer partly imbedded within higher dimensions, either. St. Clair wondered if there was a remnant on the other side of the dimensional wall, glowing hot and lifeless.

  “My lord?” Symms called.

  “Yes?”

  “My lord, we’ve picked up something . . . unusual. From the fireball.”

  As if things could get any more unusual. “Show me.”

  In his in-head display, the fireball was more or less staying the same size, though, in fact, the words and numbers scrolling down the side of the image showed that it was still expanding. Ad Astra, along with the other ships in the area, were moving back, staying ahead of the advancing blaze of nova-hot plasma.

  “Here, my lord.”

  A red circle appeared on the display, moving out from the lower portion of the fireball and highlighting a bright orange speck. There were numerous bits of glowing debris blasted out from the Bluestar explosion; for some reason this one had been picked out as different from the rest.

  “Okay,” St. Clair said. “Debris. What’s special about it?”

  “It appears to be under powered flight, my lord. It is accelerating.”

  “It may be the equivalent of an escape pod,” Newton added.

  “That’s a hell of a big escape pod,” St. Clair said. The data being displayed next to the image showed the object to be egg-shaped, 130 kilometers long by 113 wide, with a mass of 5.26 x 1017 tons . . . another mobile moon, though one only a quarter of the size of the Heavenly Light, and with just a bit more than 1 percent of the mass.

  The anomalous acceleration ceased.

  “Okay. All weapons, target that thing,” St. Clair ordered. “They could be trying the same trick we just pulled on them.”

  If the object suddenly headed for the Ad Astra or one of the Kroajid moons at near-c, though, they would have no time to see it coming. That, he reflected, was the only reason the Heavenly Light had been able to reach the Bluestar. No advance warning.

  “My lord,” Subcommander Hargrove said. “It’s signaling! A message is coming through. . . .”

  “Put a translator on it.”

  “No need, my lord. The transmission’s in English!”

  “How—” Then he remembered. Vera Cruz had planted a couple of computronium torpedoes inside the Bluestar earlier, torpedoes carrying clones of Newton.

  This, he thought, was going to be damned interesting. . . .

  Dixon had been well behind the rest of the Marines in their precipitous retreat from the Bluestar object. Alien needleships were swarming up out of the blue spiral, which hung suspended in a black sky like a huge, unwinking eye. He’d rotated in space to face them, allowing himself to drift backward at nearly twenty kilometers per second, firing off a stream of M-90 Shurikin shipkillers. The weapons were stubby and blunt, small hypervelocity antimatter warheads launched from a pair of magnetic rails mounted up the back of his suit, and looked nothing like their medieval Japanese namesake. The blasts, however, had been effective in slowing the oncoming wall of needleships.

  Unfortunately, his reserve of warheads ran dry with horrifying speed, and when the last Shurikin was gone, there were still plenty of needleships remaining . . . far too many to face alone.

  It was time to get the hell out of Dodge, but at this point Dixon was locked into the deadly choreography of combat, unable to disengage. Instead, he brought his pulse rifle to bear. He destroyed one needleship . . . and another . . . and a third . . .

  He continued firing, targeting one after another, but there were simply too many. Too many . . .

  A needleship was bearing down on him, fifty kilometers away and almost directly in line with the Bluestar eye. He fired again . . .

  And the Bluestar detonated in a blinding flash far brighter, far hotter, and more energetic than his shipkillers.

  Dixon went blind before his helmet optics could compensate for the light. He shifted over to an
in-head display, cutting out the feeds from helmet sensors burned out in the holocaust and stepping down the light intensity to tolerable levels.

  He gaped at the deadly white blossom as it unfolded. Had he done that? No, that simply wasn’t possible, not with his little five-megawatt laser.

  And yet the chatter on the Marine net recently had suggested that rifled laser pulses—the photons given a twist to phase-shift them to higher energy levels—also let them turn dimensional corners and perhaps reach into the hyperdimensions where the Dark Mind dwelt. . . .

  No! Impossible. You couldn’t strike a match and demolish a planet. The energy density simply wasn’t there.

  But the fireball continued to grow in front of him, swiftly overtaking needleships that now were accelerating in every direction, desperately trying to flee the oncoming wall of star-hot destruction. Almost reluctantly, Dixon rotated away, lining himself up with the distant Ad Astra, and accelerated, streaking into the intervening space.

  The fireball’s boundary pursued, swiftly overtaking him. The light grew brighter, threatening once more to overwhelm Dixon’s optics. The temperature of his MCA suit’s outer skin soared. Marine armor was designed to survive a controlled re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere and could withstand temperatures in excess of 2500 degrees C. Dixon’s armor was registering almost 3000 degrees now, and the temperature was climbing. His armor possessed a molecule-thin layer of nanotech cladding, designed as active camouflage that showed the predominant light levels and colors of its surroundings. He shifted the nanoflage now to the brightest silver it could manage, trying to reflect some of that awful heat . . . but in seconds the nanoflage had blackened and crisped and wafted away like dust in a hurricane, and his external temperature climbed above 3500 degrees.

  He boosted his drive units to their maximum capacity, trying to outrun the fireball, but his control systems were failing, his power feeds were failing, and in another few seconds his Marine Combat Armor had gone completely dead. He felt a sharp jolt as his pulse rifle ripped clear, as the extended wings of his MX-40 flight unit softened, then shredded away in showers of brilliant sparks, and then Dixon was tumbling helplessly through space, completely out of control. The fireball around him was rapidly thinning, and soon he was in open space once more, still alive somehow, but helpless as he’d never been helpless before.