Dark Matter

by Ian Douglas

  “You ready for this, Admiral?” one of the Marines asked him. He was Captain James Kornbluth, from America’s detachment of Marines. “These things are pretty ugly!”

  “Let’s have a look, Captain.”

  “Doc Hallowell is already inside, sir.” He touched the center of the door, which dilated open, and for the first time Gray saw one of the aliens.

  There were two more armored Marines inside the compartment, plus another human in a standard environmental suit. The blond head inside the fishbowl helmet turned as he drifted in, and Gray felt her ping his ID.

  “Oh, good morning, Admiral! I wasn’t expecting you. . . .”

  Gray checked her ID. Tara Hallowell was a civilian, one of the scientists with America’s xenosophontology department. He wondered why she was here, and not the head of xenosoph, George Truitt.

  “Carry on with what you’re doing, Doctor,” he told her. “Forgive me for not coming in person. I just wanted to see this thing up close. Well . . . as close as they’d let me get, anyway.”

  She smiled. “According to some of the human prisoners we’ve talked to, they call themselves Grdoch.” She gave the final ch the German rasp, as in Bach. “At least that’s as close as we’ve been able to shape the sound in our speech. Isn’t it magnificent?”

  Magnificent was not quite the word Gray would have used. It was large . . . and it was utterly inhuman, unlike any life form he’d ever seen.

  What struck him first was how it resembled the starship itself. He’d heard a description of the things when the Marines had first boarded the alien warship, but words simply hadn’t prepared him for the full, direct shock of the thing. The Grdoch was soft-­bodied and surprisingly imposing, perhaps two meters tall when at rest, but able to puff itself up to three meters high or more when it was alert or surprised, as seemed to be the case now. Varying between egg-­shaped and a fleshy mound wider than it was high, its deep scarlet surface was covered by hundreds of fleshy tubes, like short elephant’s trunks, attached to the body at one end, and with toothed suckers or mouth openings at the other, alternately gaping and puckering like the heads of so many blood-­sucking lampreys. The skin was wrinkled and convoluted, and looked quite soft.

  Three evenly spaced, jointed limbs stuck a meter out from the center of that pulsing mass—­legs or arms, Gray couldn’t tell—­each ending in three splayed, clawed digits. Those appeared to be tougher, covered with scales or plates of something resembling an insect’s chitin, black and shiny. As he entered the compartment, the creature flailed those legs wildly, scrabbling against the deck, and the body rolled back a ­couple of meters. It came up against a bulkhead and stopped there, quivering. Was it afraid? What was it feeling?

  There were no eyes or other sense organs visible, no other features at all that he could see. How did the being perceive him? What did it perceive?

  Gray thought about the alien Slan, another Sh’daar client race, beings that possessed eyes, but which relied more on tightly focused beams of sound to examine their surroundings, like the dolphins of Earth’s seas. “Is this another damned sonar race?” he asked aloud.

  “We’re not sure yet, Admiral,” Hallowell replied. “We’ve been recording all of the sounds in this compartment, and while it’s making a lot of noise, none of it is at frequencies that would be useful for sound imaging.”

  Gray was aware of sounds coming from the creature. He boosted his audio gain, listening. Squeaks . . . chirps . . . whistles . . . pops . . . a kind of background wail or groan . . . but all at audible frequencies. Sound had to be up in the ultrasonic range, with short, short wavelengths—­as for dolphins or terrestrial bats—­in order to carry echoes with enough detail to be useful in a visual sense.

  And yet Gray had the distinct impression that the creature was studying him, and closely. He also had the feeling that it was frightened . . . something about the way it was trembling, as though it were terrified.

  Of what? Of him? The being was larger and more massive than any human—­even than one of the Marines clad in massive combat armor. And at the moment, Gray was a rather unprepossessing black-­and silver sphere the size of a basketball, perhaps, with various slender metallic appendages and lenses for seeing.

  “The Confeds must have been communicating with them,” Gray said. “What have you learned . . . anything?”

  “We have AIs going through the Enceladus Station computer system,” she told him. “It looks like they released a worm into the base network, trying to destroy the translator program, but our ­people are working to reconstruct it now. And G-­2 is looking for records of human interaction that might help us.”

  That made sense. Gray didn’t know when the Confederation had first made contact with the Grdoch, but they would have kept meticulous records of each meeting since, and copies of those records—­some of them, at least—­would have been stored within Confed networks. Even such basic information as the planetary environment the Grdoch had evolved in could be tremendously useful in acquiring a basic understanding of them . . . their language, their culture, the way they saw the universe around them, both physically and emotionally.

  “Does it have eyes?” Gray asked, bemused. Clearly, the thing could sense him somehow—­was reacting to his presence—­but there was nothing like a face or obvious organs of sight.

  “Those appendages,” Hallowell told him. “It has about a thousand of them growing all over its body. Most are . . . mouths, though it seems to use them as manipulators too. They apply suction to pick things up, you know? But we think about five percent of those tubes absorb EM radiation at various wavelengths. That’s our working theory, anyway, until we can put some nanoprobes into its body and take a closer look at its nervous sysem.”

  “You’re saying it has over nine hundred mouths? What the hell does it eat?”

  “Unknown, sir. The . . . bodily fluids of some kind of prey animal is our best guess.”

  “There must be food for it on board this ship,” Gray said.

  “Yes, sir. We’re looking. It’s a damned big ship.”

  “How many Grdoch are there?”

  “We’ve found twenty-­three so far. They’re being kept under close watch, in separate compartments like this one.”

  “Any trouble from them?”

  “Negative, Admiral,” Kornbluth replied. “I think they know their only hope of seeing home again is to cooperate with us. Wherever the hell home is . . .”

  Twenty-­three individuals wasn’t much of a crew for a ship 700 meters long—­not unless they’d elevated robotics and automated control systems to a remarkable degree. Gray wondered about the alien fighters. Were those robots? Or were they crewed? At last report, there’d been about a hundred of the red fighters remaining. Most had fled with the Confederation ships; a few were still in orbit around Saturn or Enceladus, either shut down or . . . waiting.

  The Grdoch, Gray realized, did look like something he’d seen before. Certain marine sponges in Earth’s oceans had that same rugose surface and bodies comprising multiple tubes through which they filtered seawater. Sponges, however, had no nervous systems and were not exactly promising candidates for building starships . . . or even fire. The similarity, he thought, likely was a product of parallel evolution—­a case of dolphins looking like sharks even though they were not related.

  He drifted closer, hoping for a better look, and the creature erupted in a series of chirps, chitters, and squeaks, together with an oddly harmonious blend of separate voices from a number of those pulsing mouths, a kind of wailing that sounded like a human vocal choir.

  “They don’t like it when we get too close,” Hallowell warned. “And I don’t think they like machines, either. Your Noter . . .”

  “Understood,” Gray said, letting the NTE robot drift back again. The creature quieted somewhat. “You know, we may get more information from the human prisoners. They’ve be
en working with these things for a while, obviously.”

  Hallowell nodded inside her helmet. “I agree, sir. We’re working on the idea that they must speak LG.”

  LG—­Lingua Galactica—­was an artificial language, one of several, in fact, created by the nonhuman Agletsch during their explorations of the galaxy. “The Agletsch,” he replied.

  “Well, if they’re working for the Sh’daar, then the Agletsch probably know them.”

  “I’m curious, Doctor. Have you scanned yet for a Seed?”

  “Yes, sir. Nothing, not even way down deep.”

  Interesting. It didn’t confirm that the Grdoch were not a Sh’daar client species, part of their immense and far-­flung empire, but it didn’t rule it out, either. Sh’daar Seeds were minute—­about the size of a BB pellet—­but humans had learned how to detect them using non-­intrusive microwave scans. What to do about them, especially in the case of friendly ETs like the Agletsch, was still an open—­and extremely worrisome—­question.

  “We need to get these . . . these ­people to the XRD at Crisium,” Gray said. “President Koenig is just going to love this. . . .”

  The xenosophontological research department, occupying a vast subsurface facility in the Mare Crisium on Earth’s moon, was Humankind’s premier scientific facility for the study of nonhuman intelligences. They had a number of Nungiirtok POWs there, along with their odd little Kobold symbiotes. They had Slan as well . . . and a colony of several thousand Turusch. Technically, Earth was currently at war only with the Nungiirtok, since armistice pacts had been hammered out with the others.

  At least, they were armistices from Humankind’s perspective. What they thought of them was still open to question.

  Because of the uncertainty, many in both the USNA’s government and military disliked having that many nonhumans so close to Earth, especially since many carried the Sh’daar Seeds. Koenig wasn’t concerned about any danger the aliens might represent, but he did have to deal with senators, district congressional representatives, and generals who were.

  In fact, now that the civil war with the Confederation had turned decidedly uncivil, and with Geneva actively seeking an alliance with the Sh’daar, the Crisium facility was probably a Confed target for liberation. Something to think about.

  Fortunately, that was Koenig’s problem now, Gray thought. In war, knowing your enemy was of supreme importance. Sun Tzu had stated that deceptively simple fact almost three thousand years ago. When the enemy wasn’t even human, when he didn’t think in human terms and didn’t react to emotional stimuli like humans might, the problem became much, much worse. That was why the Crisium facility was so vital—­to learn how ETs like the Slan or the Turusch looked at the cosmos, to find out what motivated them, and why.

  Of course, the other half of Sun Tzu’s famous dictum was just as important: know yourself.

  Gray had the distinct feeling that humans would remain a mystery to other humans long after they understood perfectly what motivated the Turusch with their three-­part consciousness . . . or the hulking, belligerent Nungiirtok.

  But there was nothing more he could learn here. “Good luck, Doctor,” he told Hallowell. “Let me know if I can direct any assets, anything at all you might need, in your direction.”

  “Yes, sir. And we’ll call you if we learn anything important.”

  “Do that.”

  Anything important. Like what the Grdoch were getting out of an alliance with the Confederation. Surely they had enough in common with humans that they wouldn’t have offered their military help without an expectation of something in return.

  But what was it?

  His inner clock told him it was past 0930 hours. Time to compose an update for HQMILCOM Mars.

  And maybe a personal report for the president as well . . .

  Virtual Combat Center

  Colorado Springs, USNA

  1310 hours, CST

  “New orders, ­people,” Major Aldridge told his team. They were gathered again in the VCC’s briefing center, deep within the heart of Cheyenne Mountain. “Or . . . I should say . . . an addition to our orders. Just what we all wanted.”

  Several in the group groaned—­those with hard-­core military experience, and Shay Ashton was one of them. In any military operation, the key was keep it simple . . . and attempts by the brass to add on extra bells and whistles, extra objectives, extra constraints, or new complications were just about guaranteed to royally fuck things up.

  “Yesterday,” Aldridge went on, “Carrier Battlegroup 40 won a significant battle at Enceladus. In the process, they captured a ship belonging to an unknown alien species . . . critters that call themselves the Grdoch. Apparently, Geneva has climbed into bed with these things, and is working with them, at least to some degree.”

  In-­head windows opened for each of them, and they looked at a vid clip of one of the aliens—­bright red, covered with questing, pulsing tubes of a soft and fleshy material. Ashton had never seen anything at all like it.

  “The carrier America will be bringing some of these things back for study,” Aldridge told them. “In the meantime, though, it’s important to find out what the hell the Confederation knows about them. While most of the information is probably highly classified, there’s a good likelihood that at least some has been circulating through Confederation IS networks. Some of their AIs may know about it. Some of their senators might have files. Their intelligence ser­vices certainly do.

  “Our primary objective is the same: infiltrate Confederation computer networks and initiate a recombinant memetic attack. But I want two of you . . . Cabot . . . and you, Ashton, to volunteer for something a little extra.”

  Never volunteer was a standard piece of advice for military personnel that probably went back to Sargon the Great, but it was different when your CO pointed at you and said you . . . you just volunteered. It could have been worse, possibly. Lieutenant Commander Newton Cabot was a good guy . . . a fellow Navy Starhawk driver and a combat veteran.

  He was also a fellow Prim—­a Primitive from the periphery zone inland from the sunken wreck of Old Boston. A confirmed monogamist like many Prims, he’d encountered a lot of prejudice in the hidebound aristocracy of the Navy, and had eventually resigned his commission when he’d been passed over for promotion to full commander.

  He was back in military harness again, however. And he was going to be her partner.

  “You two,” Aldridge continued, “will be sniffing around for any hint of data on the Grdoch. If you find it, you’ll slap a siphon onto it and shoot it back here. You won’t have to worry about staying covert, or about deniability. We don’t care if Geneva knows we got the goods or not. Just get in, get the information, and get out.”

  Of course, unspoken was the knowledge that if Ashton and Cabot managed to set off the alarm bells when they reached Geneva’s electronic safeguards, there would be a full load of ICEscream thundering down on their virtual avatars, and it would not be pleasant.

  “The rest of you,” Aldridge said, “will plant your RM worms, then cover Cabot and Ashton as they complete their op and pull out.” He looked at the two of them in turn. “You will both carry RM worms as well, of course, and place them wherever you think they might do the most good. Questions?”

  There was one, from Cabot. “If the RM attack works, Major,” he said, “we’ll just be able to ask them for that information, won’t we?”

  “If it works, sure,” Aldridge replied. “And keep in mind that we’re dealing with an entire culture and government ideology here. Even if the RM insertion works perfectly, it might be months before we see any changes. Changing a government’s belief set takes time . . . and time is something we’re a little short of right at the moment.”

  The earliest, most primitive forms of recombinant memetics had been simple military or nationalist propaganda, an ancient science developed
more fully in the late twentieth century as military psyops programs. Do you need to unite your population against an enemy? Do you need to convince an enemy population that they should change sides and support you? Nothing simpler. You bombard the target audience with words, music, images, and ideas designed to nudge them around to your way of thinking.

  Four centuries before, that sort of thing had been all hit or miss. With enough data, however, plus the computational power and a delicate touch, it was possible to subvert entire populations. Global Net sampling and data mining, the manipulation of databases, and the precise, electronic subversion of entertainment and news media to introduce new memes to a social equation . . . some argued that these now were the most fundamental weapons in the human arsenal.

  As new memes and new memeplexes took root and grew, they could change old and well-­established memeplexes. By carefully balancing crafted meme against meme, a good RM team could convince a target audience that left was right, right was wrong, and blue was green.

  At least, that was the claim. Ashton hadn’t seen any evidence of major memetic rewrites . . . not since the social engineering that had led to the White Covenant in the late 2100s.

  The trouble was that this level of social manipulation took time, as well as incredible computing power and direct access to the target’s information systems. RM manipulation could not promise a rapid end to the war.