by Ian Douglas
Even immortality might soon be within humanity’s grasp.
Changes already incorporated into Earth’s technology had transformed the planet in just the past decade. And more, much more, was soon to come.
And all we need to do to claim this unimaginable galactic largess was help support the Coadunation in a small, eight-millennium war . . .
“The Medusae liaison,” the ship’s voice announced in St. Clair’s head.
St. Clair rotated his command chair to face the alien’s floating e-pod as it drifted onto the bridge. Biological Medusae actually possessed a carbon biochemistry, but they still required an environmental tank when they interacted with humans. The Liaison’s heavily insulated pod was red and gray except for its transparent end cap, which was coated with droplets of water condensing over its frigid surface. Living in an environment that hovered around minus 100 degrees Celsius, Medusae breathed hydrogen, drank liquid ethane, and excreted methane. Hell, they would have considered Titan, the large moon of Saturn back in Earth’s solar system, a pleasant summer retreat. The face behind the transparency was the stuff of nightmares—squirming black and orange tentacles surrounded by a ring of six eyes so pale and electric blue in color they seemed to glow. What they called themselves was unknown, but somebody had suggested the name Medusa because of the tentacle mass—which was in constant and disturbing motion—and the name stuck.
“Lord Commander,” the liaison said formally. “We greet you.”
St. Clair heard the voice through his cyberimplants. The Medusae didn’t have a true spoken language, as such, but used a blend of luminous color shifts in their skin together with clicks and whistles to communicate. No human could imitate the sounds, much less the visual data, any more than Medusae could mimic human speech. At the moment, Newton was handling the translation on both sides.
“We greet you,” St. Clair replied. Even more untranslatable than the language, he thought, were the differences in mutually alien psychologies. Medusae didn’t think as individuals. Everything was we and our, not I or my. So far as human xenosophontologists had been able to determine, they didn’t even possess individual names, but instead used titles and job descriptors, like “Liaison,” as personal ID.
“You have the shift coordinates for the final dimensional transition,” it told him. St. Clair could see the ripples and pulses of color and texture flashing across the being’s tentacles behind its transparency. “The first shift has brought us to within a few light years of our objective. The next will put us close to Harmony itself.
“It is important that you realize that we will be emerging quite close to the capital. Quite close indeed. The moment you emerge, your vessel will be surrounded by robotic warships of the Coadunation, and you may feel that you are under threat. It is important that you not react to this perceived threat with emotion or aggression. You understand?”
“We do,” St. Clair replied. He grinned . . . though he doubted that the alien could read the expression, or even perceive it. “This is a diplomatic mission. We’re not here to flex our military muscles.”
The Medusae hesitated—possibly, St. Clair thought, because it was looking up the definitions of alien concepts like muscle or diplomatic through its on-line link with Newton. We really are that different.
“We must impress upon you, Humans, that any offensive action by you will trigger an immediate and autonomous defensive response from the Coadunation capital. You understand? This vessel would not survive.”
“If it makes you feel any better,” St. Clair replied slowly, “I can have our weapons department stand down.”
Another hesitation. Then: “That would be immensely wise, Humans. That wisdom is appreciated . . . and it is most encouraging.”
St. Clair nodded, then gave the mental orders for the ship’s weapons department to disengage, powering down all but a handful of antimeteor weapons and switching off the targeting scanners. He didn’t like it—no, that was an understatement. He hated it. But his orders required complete cooperation with his Medusa guides, and for him to impress upon them UE Worldgov’s willingness to work with them, whatever that might entail.
So while St. Clair didn’t agree with Worldgov’s alien policy, he was willing to make this particular gesture. After all, Tellus Ad Astra was not a warship, at least not primarily, and her onboard weapons—mostly grazers mounted up forward to clear meteoric debris from her path—were strictly defensive. She carried a fair amount of firepower in her onboard fleet of fighters and escorts, but those ships were bottled up within her flight decks right now, where they could safely ride out the coming jump.
Based on his pre-mission briefings back on Earth, St. Clair fully expected the Ad Astra to emerge in a heavily guarded region of space, one where any overt hostile action would be met with overwhelming firepower. The Medusae, and, by extension, the Coadunation—the far larger and older galactic culture of which they were a tiny part—possessed technologies that were sheer magic to 22nd-century Humankind, technologies that made Ad Astra’s gamma-ray lasers seem about as high-tech as a 15th-century matchlock.
And, in fact, Tellus Ad Astra’s passengers were mostly civilians. There were two divisions of UE Marines on board—about 24,000 in all—plus a large naval contingent, but the vast majority were scientists, technicians, logistical-support personnel, cultural and xenotechnological researchers, and exchange colonists, all traveling to the Coad core hab to initiate a formal cultural union with the Coadunation.
ST. CLAIR WAS curious about one thing, though. He addressed the liaison again. “Do you really expect trouble with the Denial in here?” he asked.
“Anything is possible,” the Liaison replied. “The Denial represents a poisonous, dangerous ideology, and it has been spreading.”
“Are you saying that Denial philosophers are going to show up at the galactic core with a battlefleet?”
“I do not understand your use of the term philosophers in this context, Humans. However, numerous civilizations have fallen to Denial dogma. Some of those are well armed and possess dangerous fleets, yes.”
“Just what is this Denial dogma, anyway?”
“A contagion, Humans.” The Liaison seemed to grope for the right words. “Anarchy . . . despair . . . the abandonment of long-held coadunation principles . . . a turning away from the light of civilization. . . .”
“I don’t understand.”
“I doubt that you can understand. Humans do not have the cultural background to grasp fifth-level cultural expression.”
“Try us.”
“I suggest, Lord Commander,” a human voice said in St. Clair’s mind, “that you not pursue this line of inquiry. The Medusae can easily become upset by what they perceive as an attack upon their belief systems.”
“And I’m upset by their damned condescension,” St. Clair replied over the same mental channel. “They’re treating us like children, damn it.”
“By their standards, we are children,” Günter Adler told him. “Don’t cross them.”
St. Clair scowled, then sighed. “Aye, aye, sir.”
Giving the naval phrase meaning “I understand and I will obey” was a very small and rather subtle act of defiance on St. Clair’s part. Günter Adler was the expedition’s senior representative on the UE Cybercouncil, and as such he definitely rated a “my lord” instead of a mere “sir.” But by saying “aye, aye,” he was gently reminding the director that St. Clair was still the military leader of the expedition. St. Clair was responsible for military decisions, and that included decisions affecting the expedition as they shifted into the unknown within the next few minutes.
While St. Clair was in command of both the ship and the military forces embarked within her, however, Adler was in charge of all civilian personnel within the Tellus Ad Astra, save only for those working directly for the Marines. Technically, Adler was an advisor and consultant in military matters; in practice, he was the expedition’s senior director and, by extension, St. Clair’s boss.
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At least in theory. In St. Clair’s experience, divided commands never worked—not well, at any rate—and mixing military leadership with political leadership generally was a recipe for disaster.
Still, Adler was a decent enough sort, if a bit on the arrogant side, and St. Clair was confident that he would be able to work smoothly with the man. His real concern was Worldgov’s love affair with the damned Coadunation.
If Humans are children, he thought, then Worldgov is like a puppy—show them something shiny and new, pat them on the heads a few times, and they’ll follow the Coadunation anywhere.
The trouble was that the politics of that Galaxy were . . . alien. There was no better word for it. This Coadunation seemed like a loose association, a trade collective or alliance, but was that really true? What were the responsibilities of the member polities? The social and legal expectations? The background systems of belief and worldview? And this Denial . . . was it a religion? A philosophy? A political movement? A terrorist organization? No human knew, and the Medusae representatives of the vaster Coadunation seemed unable—or unwilling—to make things clear. St. Clair hoped that the Coad leadership at the Harmony Habitat would be able to clarify things . . . including telling him more about this enigmatic alien threat to a galaxy-wide civilization. But for now, being kept in the dark was something that didn’t sit well with St. Clair, especially with more than a million souls relying on him.
“Aye, aye,” he said again, very softly.
“Sir?” Newton asked.
“Liaison?” St. Clair said, ignoring the AI’s question. “Tell me again about this capital of yours.”
“It is not ours, Humans. Not of the Medusae. It was constructed tens of millions of your years before the Medusae allied with the Coadunation by a consortium of advanced species as a kind of galactic capital and data-processing center.”
As the alien spoke, Newton pulled up computer-generated schematics of the structure as described by Medusan technologists. A spiraling disk of white light encircled a black sphere. Well beyond the edge of the accretion disk lay the artificial world—a Bishop ring, as it was known to human futurists—a thick and massive tube, open at its ends, rotating about its long axis. The structure was named for the man who’d formulated the concept, back in the 1990s—Forrest Bishop.
Until now, Bishop rings had been purely theoretical constructs, something that humans might one day use to create deep space colonies. They were a larger version of the O’Neill cylinders like those of Tellus Ad Astra; this one was two thousand kilometers across—twice the diameter of the dwarf planet Ceres—and almost a thousand kilometers long. The inner surface was living space—cities and forests and plains in roughly 6 million square kilometers, or about twice the surface area of Argentina. The open land was not enclosed; retention walls two hundred kilometers high kept the atmosphere in under the effects of spin gravity. Reportedly, the surface was under about a half G from the cylinder’s rotation.
The thick body of the cylinder was also habitat—many enclosed habitats, in fact—that allowed a vast diversity of galactic space-faring species to live together. The enormous ring orbited a small and probably artificial black hole of about three solar masses, which in turn orbited Sagittarius A*. The larger orbit required several centuries for each circuit.
That central supermassive black hole had a diameter of 44 million kilometers, and was in turn surrounded by an accretion disk of infalling dust and gas circling the object out to a distance of nearly 150 million kilometers—the size of Earth’s orbit. The black hole supporting Harmony Habitat—which they also called the Harmony Singularity—orbited the larger black hole at a range of about half an AU outside the accretion disk.
Harmony. An optimistic enough name. St. Clair had stared at the drawings and images long enough for the sheer awe at the thing’s scale to wear off—the human mind, it seemed, could only accept so much before simply shrugging that scale off as big.
“Okay . . . but why? Is it supposed to be some kind of symbol of galactic government?”
“The Coadunation is not a government as you think of the word,” the Liaison replied. “But Harmony does provide a neutral meeting place for the numerous species that comprise the alliance. It is also useful for extracting energy—a great deal of energy—from the object you call a black hole.”
St. Clair nodded. It made sense. Human technological theorists had been talking for over a century about ways of extracting energy from mass falling into a singularity. Evidently, someone had figured out how to do that.
“So what’s the mass of that thing?” he asked, pointing at Harmony.
“In your terms, roughly two times ten to the twenty-four kilograms,” the Liaison replied.
St. Clair bounced the reply through his cybernetic math coprocessor, asked for a comparison, and whistled softly. That damned thing’s mass was almost a third of Earth’s.
His cyberimplant pulled up a reference to a twentieth-century work of fiction—Ringworld. The scale was not quite the same—the book described a ring as big across as Earth’s orbit rotating around its sun—but it was still enormous. Large enough, according to the Medusae, to provide myriad environments inside for billions of intelligent beings from ten thousand civilized species, in conditions ranging from far colder than the Medusae liked, to temperatures that would melt lead.
The radiation flux, he thought, would be fearsome in there, that close to a supermassive black hole prone to periodic outbursts of X-rays and hard gamma. For that matter, how did they deal with dust, gas, and meteoric debris sweeping in from outside the habitat’s walls?
That was one of the things they would be learning during the next several years. He had so many questions, as did most aboard Ad Astra. The million-plus humans on the O’Neill cylinder would be transferred to their new home within Harmony as a part of a research initiative cooked up by UE Worldgov and the Coadunation representatives, a kind of exchange program designed to ease Humankind into the galactic community. Most of the people would be living here for the next couple of years—longer if they requested it—studying the rich diversity of alien life and technology that made up the Milky Way Galaxy.
St. Clair and Ad Astra’s crew would not be staying, however. They were scheduled to take the ship back to Earth with a few thousand nonhuman passengers, including Medusae, Volech, K’tarid, and others. Habitats were being constructed for them in Earth orbit, giving them the opportunity to study human culture and technology.
He hoped the guests wouldn’t end up laughing too hard.
“One more question?”
“Yes, Humans.”
“You say we’re coming out right alongside Harmony. We’re going to have some velocity. Quite a bit of velocity. My briefings said you had a way of dealing with that, but they didn’t give me specifics. How do we stop from slamming into your core habitat at a few hundred kilometers per second?”
“We will emerge within a . . . call it decelerative field. It will safely bleed off your excess velocity and store it in the Harmony Singularity.”
“How does that work?”
The Liaison hesitated. “It involves an application of directed gravity and the hyperdimensional metric of local space. If the Coadunation receives assurances that you humans will help with the Denial, they may transfer details of that technology to you.”
Ah. A bribe, then. Help us in our war, and we’ll give you technology so advanced that it seems like magic to primitive savages like you.
St. Clair scowled. Nothing had been said yet, so far as he was aware, about the specifics of Humankind’s participation in the Denial War. So far as he was concerned, no amount of free technology was worth human involvement in a war Earth knew nothing about, fought for causes humans did not even comprehend. The whole idea was insane.
Antigravity.
Decelerative fields.
Human immortality.
None of it was worth that.
“Ad Astra is at full charge, Lord Commander,”
Symm told him, interrupting bleak thoughts. “We’re ready for the final shift.”
“Very well. Liaison? Lord Adler? Give the word.”
Adler nodded. “Do it, Commander.”
“Take us to Harmony,” the Liaison added.
Time to start the next chapter for humanity, St. Clair thought.
They jumped.
Ad Astra shuddered and lurched, wrenched by a sudden, sharp bang.
“What the hell?” Symm shouted.
“Attitude control!” St. Clair yelled. “Get us stabilized!”
Something was seriously out of kilter, but St. Clair couldn’t yet tell what the problem was. Normally, hyperdimensional transitions were as smooth as silk, a smooth passage from one volume of space into another by way of the timeless non-space of the Bulk, which embraced the universes.
There was nothing normal about this time.
Clinging to the arms of his command chair, St. Clair stared up into the light above his head with a growing sense of horror. The Galaxy’s central black hole was there, looming, huge, with its accretion disk spread out like a gleaming blue-white whirlpool around it, hotter than the surface of Earth’s sun. Ad Astra was skimming above that plasma, close enough that her hull temperature was already soaring. Particles banged and thudded off the ship’s skin. Their speed was . . .
My God! How can we be going this fast?
“Weapons!” St. Clair screamed. “All weapons . . . back online!”
And why the fuck had he agreed to switch the meteor-defense grazers off in the first place? He looked back and forth wildly. Rocks tumbled and jostled above and around his head, enveloped in a cloud of glittering sand. . . .
“Harmony!” the Liaison said, its translated voice curiously flat and machinelike. “Harmony . . .”