by Ian Douglas
Hojo nodded his understanding. Navigation from within the blue-litten Ocean of God was always problematical since the K-T plenum was essentially outside of normal space. There were ways, in principle, to detect nearby gravitational sources, but steering from point A to point B was mostly a matter of knowing exactly the distance between them… and timing the passage with obsessive precision. The longer the voyage, the greater the uncertainty at the end. Typical K-T jumps within the Shichiju—the realm of human colonized space—were generally on the order of a few tens of light years, no more. The Ophiuchan hypernode was 2,107.4 light years from Sol, and so the chance for error creeping in was correspondingly larger.
Human ships had traveled farther… much farther. Some made the voyage to the Galactic Core, some 26,000 light years from Earth… but the actual target there had been a volume of space thousands of light years across… not an area measured in light minutes.
The precision necessary for this piece of celestial navigation was unprecedented. Under normal circumstances, the fleet might have jumped to a way point some light years short of the objective... but they still weren't sure how good the hypernode's detection technologies might be. Better by far to jump directly to the objective. The only thing that made it possible was the fact that Shinsei had already blazed a metaphorical trail, and transmitted her precious data to Imperial Navy HQ.
"Your navigators," Hojo said, "have been briefed on the need for an immediate corrective jump."
It was not a question. Everything depended on the fleet's ability to make a second jump from wherever they emerged to a specific location in space. A location much closer to the objective.
"Yes, sir." Again, the bow. "Our primary capacitors will have been drained when we emerge from the K-T plenum, of course… but the secondaries are fully charged, and will enable us to make a second jump as soon as we have secured the necessary navigational data."
"Good." He considered the tactics of the problem. "Of course, according to classical naval strategy, if we emerge ten AUs from the objective we will have eighty minutes or so before the enemy becomes aware of us… plenty of time." One astronomical unit was a bit over eight minutes, so slow was the crawl of light through normal space. "But… we're not certain yet of the aliens' capabilities. We are facing the threat of true Clarketech here. We need to anticipate all possibilities."
" 'Clarketech,' my Lord?"
"Maho no tekunoroji," Hojo said, using the Nihongo term. "Clarke was a pre-spaceflight futurist who said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. The matrioshka aliens may have ways of being alerted to our presence long before the light front from our emergence reaches them."
Shiozaki gave a puzzled scowl, and shook his head. "How would that even be possible, my Lord?"
"If we knew that, Taisosan, it wouldn't be magic, now, would it? But… local space might be seeded with billions of small satellites—perhaps even nanosatellites smaller than grains of dust. If these could transmit a warning faster than light, the matrioshka intelligence could be aware of our arrival within seconds."
"Ah. I see…"
"Or… the matrioshka intelligence might have a way of peering through the dimensions at surrounding space, and see approaching vessels in real time, without a speed-of-light delay. Who can say?"
"But then, Lord… they might be watching us now, while we're here in the godsea! How could we even hope to surprise them?"
"Gambaru," Hojo said with a small shrug. "Gambaru, Taisosan." The word meant, roughly, doing your very best no matter what difficulties or obstacles you faced.
"Yes, sir."
"Don't look so unhappy, Shiozaki! We try to anticipate what the matrioshka intelligence might do… but we also take comfort in the fact that it took them some time to realize the Shinsei was there and spying on them. Over ten minutes! Frankly, that performance does not suggest superhuman technologies… or magic."
Shiozaki looked relieved. "I am delighted to hear that, Lord."
"However, we will take no chances… or, rather, we shall take as few chances as is possible. It will be imperative to make that second jump just as soon as we have the necessary navigational data. Understood?"
"Hai, Chusosama!"
"Good."
Shiozaki checked an internal clock. "Five minutes, Lord."
Hojo nodded, continuing to stare out into the blue currents ahead. He was under no illusions about the possibility of defeating the matrioshka hypernode in combat. No human technology could hope to stand against Clarketech.
But if he could just get them to talk.…
The last few minutes trickled away, and the Hoshiryu dropped out of the K-T plenum. Starlight blazed ahead… and Hojo stared into wonder.…
* * *
The following morning, Vaughn and Wheeler were on the Connie's mess deck, eating breakfast. The compartment's viewalls were set to show the high central Cambrian Plains of American Dream, an Earthlike world circling 38 Geminorum C. Some sort of herd animal, gray and green-striped, grazed in the foreground. A sister planet, pale white in a deep blue sky, hung suspended three-quarters of the way above the far horizon.
"The new striderjacks seem to be working out okay," Vaughn said.
"I hope so," Wheeler replied around a mouthful of fabbed chonpatty. "Simming isn't the same as striding, though."
"Point."
It was an old complaint. As good as direct link combat simulations were, they fell short of the raw emotion, confusion, and utter chaos of a real op. The new crop of jackers had been pulled from Connie's reserve jacker pool immediately after the Battle of the Catarata Cliffs and rushed into advanced training. Vaughn had helped put Green Flight's nubes through their paces, and knew they were good.
The question was how they would perform when the yokie lust hit their blood.
"That's okay," Vaughn said with a shrug. "It's all just one huge computer simulation anyway."
"What is?"
"The universe. Reality…"
"Oh. That again."
"I just keep wondering when someone is going to switch off the lights."
Vaughn had long been fascinated by the whole idea of the universe-as-computer. It had started with a keen interest in the so-called Anthropic Principle, which noted that the universe appeared to be very precisely tuned to allow the evolution of life and Mind. Change any of a handful of physical constants by the tiniest degree—the strength of gravity, the strength of the forces within an atomic nucleus, the size of the cosmological constant, and a few others—and stars wouldn't have formed, or all matter would have collapsed into black holes in the first instant of existence, and humans wouldn't be around 13.8 billion years later to argue about it.
Of course, if the universe was finely tuned, that presupposed a Tuner, a Creator. Vaughn no longer believed in God, but there was an odd satisfaction in the thought that what humans thought of as Reality was in fact a digital simulation on a vast, cosmic computer in some higher dimension or universe.
Maybe Reality was the result of a bunch of drunken undergrads running history sims and tinkering with the variables. It would explain so much.…
Vaughn was far from being an expert. He was a striderjack, not a cosmologist or physicist or even a programmer. But he was interested in the idea… especially in regards to how it suggested that life might not be as meaningless or as random or as empty as it would be if it was dictated by sheer chance.
Those civilians trapped in the church on Abundancia…
No one else shared his minor obsession, not even Koko. That was okay, though. He just wanted to know what would happen when those damned undergrads finished messing around with the supra-universal university's supercomputer. That was the long-running joke, anyway.
But that reminded him of something else. "I wonder how much longer?" Vaughn said, half aloud.
"What… until they switch off the power?"
Vaughn chuckled. "No. Actually, I was wondering when we're going to drop out of K-T
space. The trip is dragging on forever."
It had been more of a rhetorical question than anything else—he could easily have pulled the information down from the ship's Net—but Wheeler beat him to it.
"One hour, twelve minutes to go," she told him.
"Good. This was one hell of a long jump. I'll be glad to see the end of it."
"Me too. Of course, once we come out we get to find out what's waiting for us."
"You mean the Japanese?"
"That's one. A SAIco with giant squirt-suns for weapons is another."
" 'Squirt-suns?' " Vaughn smiled at the silliness.
"What else would you call them?"
"Terrifying."
"Well, yeah. But you have to admit that squeezing the plasma off a star to vaporize an enemy ship has all the finesse of setting off a nuclear warhead to slap a mosquito."
"True." Vaughn considered for a moment the idea of casually nuking mosquitoes. "My guess is that they really don't care. They may give no thought to their actions at all."
"You mean… they don't think about frying inquisitive starships?"
"I mean… they don't think at all. Not on that level of consciousness."
She shook her head. "I can't believe that, Tad! If you're unconscious you can't build starships. Or Dyson nodes. Hell, matrioshka brains are all about building smarter and smarter minds, right?"
"Are they?" Vaughn grinned. "Ant hills… termite mounds… bee hives.… All very complex structures that show cunning ingenuity. In termite mounds the internal temperature can be regulated to within less than a degree even in mid-afternoon on the African savanna. Social insect hives are sometimes referred to as 'hive minds,' but no one seriously contends that they're self-aware or conscious."
"You think the Dyson node was made by social insects?"
"Not insects, necessarily, no. I'm just saying that there might be other forms of intelligence… really different kinds of intelligence, and they might not have the same degree of consciousness—whatever that is—that we do."
"Well… I would say that consciousness is just the ability to receive sensory impressions from the outside world, right?"
Vaughn shrugged. "Most sophontologists say it includes the ability to reason, judge, hypothesize, plan… internal stuff. Some add that consciousness means the being is able to observe and report on itself, what's called internal monitoring. There's also what they call phenomonological consciousness… which is kind of hard to put into words. It means… what does it feel like to be a given entity? If it feels pleasure, or pain… what do those sensations feel like, not to the sophontologist, but to the entity?"
"I think you're splitting hairs now."
"Mind specialists have been wrestling with the concept since… I don't know. The twentieth century at least. Maybe before. They agree that what you perceive as—say—a spicy taste might not be spicy at all to me. I might taste sour instead."
"You do not!" She laughed, a wicked look in her eyes. "At least you didn't last night!"
Vaughn gave an exaggeratedly disgusted pretend-grimace and threw his hands in the air. "Why do I even try? Look—"
"Now hear this, now hear this," a voice said over their implants inside their heads. "All warstrider pilots report to your squad bays and jack in for combat operations."
"To be continued," Wheeler said, laughing as she stood up. "Maybe G2 can tell us whether the matrioshka critters are conscious… or just the builders of a big, unconscious ant hill!"
"I think the big question," Vaughn replied, picking up the remnants of breakfast and stuffing it in his mouth, "is what they'll do if we try to kick their ant hill over.…"
* * *
The Dai Nihon fleet had emerged dead on target, ten astronomical units from the cluster of stars and strangely dwarfed sub-stars that made up the Ophiuchan hypernode. At that distance, the hypernode had been so dim that it was invisible to the naked eye save as an extremely faint, reddish smudge, but optical magnification had revealed the true scope and spread of the object.…
The cluster—2,994 perfect red jewels in a tightly bound setting—gleamed against blackness. With increasing magnification, each red jewel revealed tightly organized loops, whorls, and orbital arcs of black dust; each ruby sub-sun was orbited by millions—perhaps billions—of structures. The entire cluster spanned at least three million kilometers—twice the diameter of Earth's sun.
Outside the volume of the cluster proper, six normal red dwarfs hung in a rough circle a bit more than a quarter of an AU from the central cluster—about forty million kilometers. One was feeding an intensely brilliant thread of white light into the center of the ruby cluster.
For long minutes, Hojo had stared at the cluster, marveling at the technology—sheerest magic!—that must have been used to create its artificial perfection. Then the final navigational calculations were completed, and the Hoshiryu slipped again into the K-T plenum… but only for a vanishingly small instant.
When the ship emerged, it was half an AU from the outer shells of the cluster, and well within the circle of red dwarfs.
Perfect!…
The question now was whether the masters of the hypernode could fire at the fleet without hitting their own swarms of orbital structures.…
Hojo's eyes widened at the sheer scope and scale of what lay before the Japanese fleet. Half the sky was blotted out by a black nebula shot through with the gleams and partially shrouded inward glows of ruby stars. From seventy-five million kilometers out, those stars were brilliant pinpoints of red light, the structures surrounding them bands and streaks of black and silver glitter, while the structures deeper in merged into black thunderheads illuminated from within.
Well outside the cluster nebula, six red dwarf suns hung in jewel-like splendor. Hojo noted that the closest, fifty million kilometers away, had begun rolling over, its axis of rotation shifting to fall into line with the Japanese ships. Was that a prelude to attack? Or simple caution on the part of the matrioshka intelligence?
At this point, Hojo's orders became somewhat less than helpful. He was supposed to make contact with the controlling intelligence of this cluster if possible, and to deny contact to the rebel fleet. There was no sign of enemy ships at the moment, though Hojo was certain they would be here soon. His focus, then, was on establishing contact with this… this monster.…
But where did you even begin when your target was a collection of trillions of orbital structures gathered through a volume of space a million and a half kilometers across, circling three thousand brightly burning artificial suns?
A standard interrogatory message had been prepared, of course—an invitation to communicate translated into the language used by the Naga with humans. Since the Web had created the Naga in the first place, there should be no problems with misinterpretation.
"Something approaches, Lord General," Shiozaki said. "Something big.…"
Hojo turned his attention to a pinpoint on the viewall highlighted by a red triangle. "What is it?"
"Purpose unknown, Lord," Shiozaki replied. "But it appears to be primarily carbon with traces of other elements… almost certainly arranged as pure computronium. Roughly two hundred meters wide… mass 1.45 times ten to the eight tons… closing at seven kilometers per second.…"
"A Naga," Hojo said. "It's an enormous fragment of Naga!…"
The thing was incredibly dense, 145 million tons squeezed down into a shapeless mass less than half Hoshiryu's length. He felt a familiar crawling sensation in his gut. Despite his work on the Nekomata project, the thought of osen, of contamination by such alien horrors was simply too much to accept. The massive object approaching the Japanese fleet was an irregular and writhing black and greasy mass of amoebic formlessness that seemed to Hojo to be the very epitome of foulness, of disease, of black horror.…
"Fire!" he snapped. "Kill it… now!… Before it hits us!"
Hoshiryu's primary particle cannon loosed a bolt of high-energy lightning, and a moment later, the other sh
ips of the fleet were joining in… Ryujo, Hiryu, and Unryu, destroyers and cruisers in a searing volley of destruction.
Over five million kilometers distant, the red dwarf sun had finished aligning itself with the Japanese squadron.
Magnetic fields surged, and white fire reached out.…
6
"Starmining technology would offer extremely long-lived technic civilizations a means of holding back the encroaching Galactic night and vastly expanding their expected lifespans. Where a type-G star like our sun remains on the main sequence for some ten billion years, a lower-mass red dwarf has a lifespan exceeding ten trillion years. The largest type-O supergiants burn through their full lifespan in a mere few hundred thousand years. Such a star might contain the mass of well over 100 typical red dwarfs, each with an expected lifespan equivalent to twelve million giants.
"Starmining civilizations might, then, be expected to parcel out the mass of rare, giant, short-lived suns to create large numbers of low-mass stars, misers hoarding their reserves of hydrogen fuel far, far into the impenetrable cosmic dark of a remote futurity."
Dr. Wataru Miyazawa
Deep Time
C.E. 2420
"Heads up, striderjacks," Lieutenant Vanderkamp's voice called through the cerebral links of the squadron's waiting jackers. "Emergence from K-T space in two minutes. Launch will be immediately after we drop into normal space."
Vaughn hung in his safety harness, cramped and in total darkness… but the feed coming through from the Connie showed him the writhing currents of the godsea as if he were hurtling naked through space, no starship, no warstrider, hell, not even a human body. He was an incorporeal viewpoint, the image filling his mind flowing in from Connie's computer network.
"Hey, Lieutenant," someone in the squadron called. Vaughn thought it was Hallman. "Are we sure the Empire didn't beat us in?"
"No, we're not," Vanderkamp replied. She sounded terse… a bit distracted. "There was no sign of Imperial ships from ten AU out… but it's tough seeing something as small as a starship—even one of their monster ryus—at that range. And if we happened to arrive within eighty minutes of them, we could be playing light tag."