by Ian Douglas
The beams of plasma or energy that connected the nodes created the impression of a gossamer-fine webwork, a spiderweb, perhaps, built of purest light. The motes traveling within those beams appeared to be solid, however; they might have been myriad ships. More likely, they were habitats of some sort, a few scores or hundreds of meters across. Perhaps they were Web kickers, the inhabitants of this place.
"Labyrinthulids," Daren said over the comnet. His mental voice cracked. "God . . . labyrinthulids!"
"What are you talking about?" Kara asked her brother.
"It's a form of simple life," Taki explained. "Kingdom Protoctista on Earth, but there are analogous kingdoms and phyla on other worlds too." Taki uploaded a file, which Kara picked up and downloaded, quickly skimming through the information, which appeared to be part of a report of xenobiological studies made on Dante. The file included microscopic images and sims of Terran labyrinthulids, as well as scans from a teleoperated nanoprobe of a portion of the network embedded in a Dantean commune's brain.
Kara could see at a glance the similarities between the microscopic net amoeba and the far vaster network of plasma conduits connecting the myriad points of light surrounding the double star. She assumed that similarity to be a coincidence of form and function, but the mimicry was astonishing, though the larger, artificially constructed network was by far more rigid and geometrically crafted than the organic one.
She also realized that she was seeing Web engineering here, not human. The overall appearance, of a titanic spiderweb, was also coincidence, but the wholesale conversion of an entire solar system into some kind of complex mechanism looked more like the mark of a machine intelligence than of humans.
"Does this . . . does this mean the Web won?" Kara asked, feeling bleak. "After a thousand years . . . damn! I'd have thought humanity would have spread out this far by now. If they didn't—"
"Enough of that," Dev said sharply. "Even if the Web dominates the entire Galaxy now, remember that this is only one possible future. That's why we're here, to learn what we need to do to change things."
"Heads up, everybody," Karyu's weapons officer announced over the general tactical net. "I've got multiple incoming. Kuso! They're moving in gokking damned fast!"
Through her link, Kara saw the dazzling gleam of a million lasers shining from the inside surface of the shell surrounding star and stargate, with more winking on every second. Gauss's sensor AI put the laser spectra analysis onto a pulldown window and graphed out the absorption and emission lines and their meaning.
The incoming were tiny things, massing no more than a few grams apiece, but driven by that barrage of laser light, they were accelerating at nearly five hundred Gs. They had begun accelerating within seconds of the GEF's emergence from the gate. It would have taken a couple of minutes for the light announcing their arrival to reach that encircling shell, and two minutes more for the laser light of the Web's response to return. Kara checked her inner time sense. Somehow, knowing the Web, she was not surprised to see that they didn't deliberate on their course of action for more than a very few seconds.
Some of the lasers were playing across the surfaces of the three DalRiss cityships, carrying joules enough to damage their tough hides. "Change course!" Dev cried over the link. "Change course, fast!"
Kara saw what he was getting at. With a four-minute time lag from the stargate to the shell and back, the Web gunners would be firing at images seen a full two minutes earlier, aiming at where the cityships were going to be by the time the laser fire made the two-minute-long trek back to the Gate. If the GEF changed course several times each minute, the distant gunners would not be able to accurately predict where their targets were going to be.
The order had scarcely been given, however, when a sudden white flash erupted from the dark, knobbled flank of the Gharesthghal, the cityship carrying the cruiser Independence. Within the next five seconds, dozens of gouts of white light flared from Shrenghal, Gharesthghal, and Shralghal as the laser-wisps smashed home.
Driven to near-light velocity, the laser-launched gossamers were smashing into the DalRiss vessels' thick hides, causing terrible damage with each strike. Even as the city-ships changed course and began speeding up, the gossamers continued to streak home with deadly accuracy. Obviously, the gossamers themselves, though they massed only a few grams, had sensors and intelligence enough to correct their course en route, probably by tacking on the intense magnetic fields surrounding both stars and stargate.
In the near distance, visible as sinister silhouettes against the light-fog backdrop of the system, a half dozen bodies, roughly spherical, as massive as fair-sized moons, were moving now toward the intruders.
There could be no doubt at all that these were some sort of sentry squadron, posted to deal with unwanted or unidentified visitors arriving through the gate.
"Head back for the stargate!" Vic called. "If we stay here, they're going to take us apart!"
"What course?" Rear Admiral Barnes replied from Karyu. "We're not set for the next jump!"
The next jump was supposed to be into the future . . . but how far was to have been determined by what they found at Doval-Tovan. A fallback set of coordinates had been uploaded to the DalRiss that would—theoretically at least—have returned them to Nova Aquila at about the time they'd left . . . but that would bring them out in the middle of the battle between the Imperial squadron and the remnants of the Unified Fleet.
"We've got to go back," Vic called. "We either go back and face the Imperials, or we stay here and get fried."
"It's either that," Gauss's skipper added, "or we make a blind jump."
"That's no good," Dev said. "We'd be stranded. You're right, Vic. We have to return. Initiate the fallback path coordinates."
Ponderously, the three cityships, guided by their tiny human charges, swung about onto a new course, both spacelike and timelike, descending back into the rippling blue folds of twisted space and time in which the stargate nested. Their maneuvers had eluded incoming laser beams entirely, but the living gossamers continued to pursue them, flickering in from astern to detonate on the living DalRiss ships with grim and terrible effect.
Last in the line-of-three was Gharesthghal, and she was taking the heaviest volume of fire.
"I can't hold her!" Captain Hernandez, skipper of the Independence, called out on the tactical net. "I can't hold her!" Kara wondered what he meant . . . then decided he was referring to the cumbersome cityship Gharesthghal, which he was trying to con from the cruiser's bridge. The vessel was hard hit, rolling under the multiple impacts of the laser-gossamers. "I'm going to cut loose with the Indie and see if I can distract them!"
"Negative!" Vic ordered. "Jorge, stay in line!"
But the two-kilometer-wide mountain that was Gharesthghal was drifting off high and to starboard now, a huge and savagely wounded beast, falling out of control, bleeding gold and silver sparks from a dozen rips in its side. As Kara watched with mounting horror, the ship's arms unfolded from the long and wedge-pointed shape they carried. In the next moment, the cruiser Independence was drifting free of the larger carrier, swinging her prow around to stay clear of the intensifying fields of warped space near the gate and firing her main drives in a shaft of dazzling, blue-white light.
"Admiral Barnes!" Dev called. "Vic! Link up! We can't let ourselves be separated!"
Kara was aware now of a dull, far-off roar, like ocean surf, and could feel the trembling vibration as Shralghal plowed into . . . what? It was as though they were smashing through thickening clouds of dust and gas, but the likeliest explanation she could imagine was that space itself was growing thick, somehow, here a few hundred meters from the whirling stargate cylinder. Something was terribly wrong. They'd slipped clear of the safe channel leading on their programmed course.
Kara didn't know if it was even possible to get back on course once they'd slipped off. No one did. No one had ever tried this before.
Despite the worsening vibration, Shralghal nud
ged up close behind the Shrenghal. Long, silvery filaments extruded themselves from Shralghal's forward-center mound, penetrating the arms of the cityship ahead. It looked comically like the extrusion of a Companion's filaments from the head of a human seeking a direct interface . . . and in point of fact that was almost literally what was happening. DalRiss city-ships were grown about massive cores taken from domesticated planetary Nagas; the Naga cores served as enormous, organic computers, as well as portable nanomanufactories that could pattern and grow nearly anything imaginable, given sufficient raw materials.
The filaments took hold, tightened up, grew shorter, welding the two mountains together. Wherever, whenever they went, they would go together.
"We're off course completely," Vic said . . . needlessly now, for everyone could sense the roar and shudder of the passage through unmapped and uncalculated warped space-time. She glanced aft, seeking the Independence . . . and caught a final glimpse of a tiny, intense star-flare of light already red-shifting and moving quickly across the sky. The cruiser appeared to be accelerating at thousands of Gs—though it was actually Shralghal, Kara realized, that was accelerating forward in time. Suddenly, something that might have been a final, nova-hot eruption of energy where the Independence was fighting strobed in ruby-brilliance and winked out . . . but she couldn't be sure.
Then, they were down the rabbit hole, plunging through night . . .
Chapter 22
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
—Clarke's Third Law
ARTHUR C. CLARKE
Science and techfantasy writer late twentieth century C.E.
. . . and emerging once more, this time into unspeakable glory.
For long seconds, no one aboard either Gauss or Karyu spoke. Wonder caught hold of brain and voice—even the mental voice of Companion links—and enforced an awe-stricken silence.
They floated several tens of thousands of light years above and beyond the plane of the Galaxy, of a galaxy, rather, for there was no way to be certain that this blue and dusty whirlpool of light was the familiar Milky Way of Earth's sun, not from this vantage point. Shralghal and Shrenghal hung suspended well above the great spiral's plane, looking down on a vast and infinitely detailed swirl of dust and gas and stars. Looming huge opposite that stellar whirlpool was a second spiral, larger and more tightly wound, cocked at a different angle from the first and very nearly touching it. She could see the distortions in the outer spiral arms of both galaxies, where mutual gravitation had begun distorting the perfection of their respective shapes. With a jolt, Kara realized that there was nothing like that second galaxy in the skies she knew, nor were the two tiny attendants of the Milky Way, the Magellanic Clouds, in evidence; they must have covered an incredible distance in space, some hundreds of millions of light years, at least.
"I, uh, don't know if anyone's noticed," Vic said after a long moment's silence. "But there's no stargate here."
"God, no," Latimer said, her voice low. "We made a blind leap and came out at random."
Kara glanced around the vault of heaven, confirming that simple, stark pronouncement of doom. So stunning was the view of two near-entangled spiral galaxies that everyone had momentarily missed that small and all-important datum.
Fact. DalRiss Achievers needed a mental map of the place where they were going, in order to shift a cityship from one spot to another.
Fact. Without DalRiss transport, human starships were limited to their K-T drives, which could carry them along at a pseudovelocity of something like a light year per day.
Fact. Neither of those glorious spirals could be Earth's galaxy, for the simple reason that the Milky Way did not have such a close and large companion. Therefore, the Achievers would be totally lost, unable to navigate.
Fact. At a guess, the tiny GEF was something like fifty thousand light years from the nearest galactic spiral arm. That translated to something on the order of 140 years of travel . . . with a death sentence executed long before the ships' crews died of old age. The huge Naga fragments aboard the DalRiss ships could generate all of the food, water, and air that the humans could possibly use from sufficient raw materials—an asteroid of carbon, water ice, and frozen gases, for instance. Unfortunately, the human K-T drives couldn't be incorporated into the DalRiss ships, nor could human ships carry supplies enough to last their crews more than a year or two at most.
The relentless march of facts seemed to have doomed GEF.
"There are alternatives," Vic said at a ViRsimmed conference of department heads and senior officers several hours later. "Not many, and not good, but they're there."
"What alternatives?" Daren demanded. "A choice between dying of starvation, thirst, or asphyxiation?"
"The most attractive possibility," Dev said, "is to find ourselves an asteroid, A fairly big one, fifty or a hundred kilometers in diameter. We dock Shrenghal and Shralghal with it and turn their Naga fragments loose, with appropriate reprogramming that we could work out aboard Karyu and Gauss.
"We all know the Naga talent for burrowing through rock and converting it to other things. That's what they were designed for, after all, a few billion years ago. They could eat out the center of the asteroid, core it like an apple, and convert the rock to things we need. Air. The fixings for a power plant and a way to illuminate the 'troid's interior. Hell, even life, if we have good enough patterns in Gauss's data banks."
"We do," Daren said. "DNA mapping patterns, anyway, of most Earth life forms."
"Fine. It'll take years, of course, but we'd end up with a world. A small world . . . and it would be inside out. We'd give it enough rotation to create spin gravity."
"An inside-out world?" Kara said. "Sounds like the Naga were right all along!"
"We'll have to develop an even closer symbiosis with both the Naga and the DalRiss," Dev said. "Maybe the Gr'tak, too. We'd move ourselves and enough Naga core fragments and raw materials to manufacture whatever we needed. We'd hitch the DalRiss cityships to the outside and give the whole thing a boost. I have no idea how long it would take to reach one of the galaxies, but it would be a sublight voyage and require a good many millions of years, I expect."
"Hell, that doesn't help us!" Barnes exclaimed.
"No, Admiral. Our descendants might one day migrate to one of the worlds of those galaxies yonder, but for us, well, the asteroid would be our new home. For the rest of our lives."
"You said that was the good choice," Taki pointed out. "What else is there?"
"We could leapfrog," Dev admitted. "We send one of our K-T-drive ships ahead . . . oh, let's say one hundred light years. It carries an Achiever or someone like me, able to map space the way the DalRiss need, and sends the data back by I2C. The two cityships and the other human ship then use Achievers to leap one hundred light years. The process is repeated . . . and repeated. It would take longer than simply traveling by K-T drive all the way, because it takes extra time to map as you go. Say . . . two hundred years to reach the nearest galaxy. It still doesn't help us, and it's a damn sight harder on our descendants, since they would have to be born, raised, and live their whole lives aboard Karyu and Gauss. It would be crowded. There's also the need to stop every now and then to find another asteroid and let the Naga cores at it to manufacture more consumables. However, we, they, rather, might reach galactic space within a few generations."
"Carefully monitored generations," Taki pointed out. "Our birth rate would have to be sharply controlled."
"We might combine the two ideas," Barnes added. "Build a small asteroid habitat, a few hundred meters across, small enough to be strapped to Karyu as extra living accommodations."
"Reaction mass would still be a problem," Dr. Norris said. "The thrust-weight ratio would kill us."
"We might also look at putting most of the crews into suspension," Daren suggested. "Have them link into a program that would let them sleep, have the life-support systems take care of their bodies. Maybe most of us would make
it."
"I've never seen any hard studies on that kind of life suspension, Daren," Vic said. "Have there been any?"
"Not really. It used to be a hot idea for long-distance travel, of course, but K-T drives, then the DalRiss Achiever ships, kind of obviated the need. It ought to work, though. . . ."
"I'm not sure I want to be a guinea pig," Norris said.
"There's another option," Kara said.
"What's that?" Dev asked.
"That we carry through with our original mission."
"What do you mean?" Taki wanted to know. "That's not our galaxy out there. We might be hundreds of millions of light years from home."
"And who says that Humankind—or the Web, for that matter—are limited to the one galaxy? Or that other galaxies don't have their own communications networks? We could try to listen in, see if we can find the local equivalent of the Net, and tap in. We might find help. We might find friends."
"Damn," Latimer said. "She's right."
"It's certainly worth a try," Vic said. "Dev?"
There was no immediate answer.
"Dev?"
"Uh . . . sorry. Kara is absolutely right. We'll need a very large and very powerful Net of our own to do it, especially if we need to crack an alien language or computer code . . . but yes! We can do it! At worst, it'll add a few months to our schedule."
"Seems to me," Vic pointed out dryly, "that we're not in any particular hurry to get anywhere now. What do we need to get started?"
"An asteroid," Dev said. "Preferably a carbonaceous chondrite."
"We can use Gauss and Karyu as scouts to find the thing," Vic said. "Let's do it."
It took eight months to build the computer matrix that would support the new Net. Gauss, probing far in advance of the GEF, located a cool, dim, red star several hundred light years ahead, one of the billions of lonely halo suns slowly circling the two galaxies; and by good fortune aided by long range spectroscopic analysis, the star proved to be Population I—meaning that it possessed elements in its makeup heavier than the hydrogen-helium-only mix of Population IIs.