Andromedan Dark

by Ian Douglas

  Together with the other Wasps in his squadron, Merrick spun his fighter about, aligning with the still-distant cluster of targets aft.

  “Keep it cool, people,” the squadron’s skipper, Senior Lieutenant Janis Colbert, announced. “We are not, repeat, not cleared to engage. Just take up your assigned positions and match course with Nasty Asty.”

  Her use of the Ad Astra’s irreverent nickname made Merrick grin inside his helmet. Military personnel were always renaming everything around them, including each other—a cultural imperative. He’d been saddled with his own squadron handle—Kit-Kat—back in flight school, a name he disliked but tolerated. As a kid growing up in North California, his family nickname had been Kit, and somehow his squadron mates had managed to twist it into something else.

  “Okay,” Colbert went on, “boost at eight hundred Gs in three . . . and two . . . and one . . . engage!”

  Smoothly, the flight of Wasps accelerated clear of the ship with its huge, side-by-side habitat cylinders. In seconds, the Ad Astra dwindled into invisibility. Five hundred kilometers astern of the larger vessel, the fighters decelerated sharply, flipped end for end, and fell into formation, tracking the colony ship’s wake.

  “What are those characters up to, anyway?” Lieutenant Sam Vorhees asked.

  “They’re decelerating,” Lieutenant Rick Thornton told her. “They’ve probably never seen anything like ol’ Asty, so they’ll be coming in extra cautious.”

  “I think we should go do a close run of those guys,” Merrick said. “Let’s see what we can stir up!”

  “That’s a negative, Kit-Kat,” Colbert told him. “We’re not going to provoke them—at least not until we know a bit more about these guys. Understood?”

  “Copy. Understood.”

  Merrick opened an electronic window in his mind and accessed his fighter’s warbook, studying the AI-generated graphics of the distant alien vessels. There wasn’t a lot to see at a range of over 200 million kilometers, but Ad Astra’s long-range scanners were picking up a few details: needle shapes 40 meters long, with slight swellings at their sterns. The ship’s records had nothing on the design . . . scarcely surprising, given that they were 26,000 light years from Sol and no human vessel had ever been out here before.

  The lack of information chafed Merrick more than a little. He knew Ad Astra and the fighter squadrons embarked within her were under specific orders not to muddy the galactic waters out here, which meant keeping a low profile and staying—as much as possible—out of the way of other cultures. But that didn’t mean that Merrick didn’t feel a degree of impatience right now. No matter how alien these critters were, having a flight of Wasps make a moderately close passage across their bows—say at a distance of a few thousand kilometers—should serve to warn them off if they were indeed hostile.

  Evidently, the people and AIs in command of this mission didn’t subscribe to the same standards of common sense as he.

  The aliens, he noted, were accelerating.

  Perhaps they weren’t under the same constraints in terms of engagement. . . .

  “THE FIGHTERS are in position, Lord Commander.”

  “Very well, CAS,” St. Clair replied. “Hold them there until we see what’s going down.”

  CAS—Ad Astra’s commander aerospace—was a Class-3 cyborg wired directly into Newton and Ad Astra’s combat center. The human part of her was named Maria Francesca and she carried the naval rank of subcommander, but on board ship she was known simply as CAS.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Newton!”

  “Yes.”

  “I need to talk with the Coad liaison.”

  “The Coad liaison is not at present available,” the ship’s AI replied. “However, I can connect you with its electronic agent.”

  “Do it.”

  “Opening channel.”

  The alien interface exploded into St. Clair’s awareness, softened somewhat by the ship’s AI to make it more accessible by humans. Electronic agents, common within human communications and AI networks, were software—often highly intelligent software—designed to help humans navigate through computer-generated virtual worlds or to connect with other minds. The Liaison’s agent, St. Clair knew, had been specifically designed to help the Medusae communicate with humans.

  “You have a question, Lord Commander?” the software whispered in his ear.

  “I do. Have you seen ships like these before?”

  He opened the channel from Ad Astra’s long-range scanners and fed through the image of one of the alien vessels, now 200 million kilometers distant and rapidly closing.

  The alien software didn’t hesitate at all. “We have never encountered this type of vessel, Lord Commander.”

  “You’re certain?”

  “We have never encountered this type of vessel, Lord Commander.”

  I guess that answers that, he thought. “Okay. Are there parts of the Coadunation that are unknown to you, a region where a star-faring civilization might have developed without your awareness?”

  “Extremely unlikely, Lord Commander,” the agent replied.

  “How can you be so certain? You’ve been overlooking my species for quite a long time. True?”

  This time, the agent did hesitate, as though it was carefully choosing its words. “The Coadunation has existed in its current form for nearly ten million of your years,” it told him, the voice whispering in his mind. “During that time, Humankind has existed for only the last two or three hundred thousand years . . . and you have possessed interstellar capabilities for a mere few decades.”

  St. Clair nodded, understanding at once where the agent was going with this. “Thirty-eight years ago,” he said. “Our first test runs with the Alcubierre Drive . . . and then the Alpha Centauri Expedition in 2120. And Sirius four years later.”

  “Among the four hundred billion suns of this Galaxy,” the agent continued, “it is, I assure you, quite easy to overlook a technically unsophisticated species. It is difficult, however, to overlook a star-faring species—particularly one, like this, that can operate within the galactic core. Once your species began traveling among the stars, we were certain to detect you sooner or later. And we should have detected this species as well.”

  “Point taken. Thank you.”

  St. Clair made certain that the agent’s words had been recorded within his in-head RAM. That admission would be of considerable interest to the UE officers who would debrief him when he got back to Earth. It strongly suggested that the Coadunation had technic means of detecting faster-than-light spacecraft across extremely large distances—hundreds, perhaps thousands, of light years.

  The government’s xenosophontology department had suspected that the Coad possessed that kind of technology, of course. After all, just six years after the first tentative out-system maneuvers by the Stephen Hawking—the very first Alcubierre test platform—the Coadunation had a fleet at Sirius looking for whoever had disturbed the ether out that way. That was way too much of a coincidence to be believed.

  But of more immediate interest was the agent’s certainty that the Galactic Coadunation had never encountered ships like these before. That suggested that the Coadunation was fallible or, far worse, that its representatives were deliberately lying.

  Or it meant something that seemed so far out of the realm of possibility that it seemed absurd. As such, St. Clair was unwilling to believe that those three ships out there were visitors from some other Galaxy. Even the relatively nearby Magellanic Clouds were up to twice the entire span of the Milky Way galaxy distant, an appalling distance even for the shift drive.

  Maybe, in fact, the Coads couldn’t detect all forms of superluminal travel . . . and the unknown ships were from another little-visited backwater like the Orion Spur. Maybe. But what if they were lying?

  If they were lying, what would be their motive?

  What might they be hiding, and why?

  He suspected that if they were lying, their reasons might have to d
o with the Denial. He was still angry at the Medusan Liaison’s condescension, at its assumption that humans were incapable of understanding . . . What had it said? “Fifth-level cultural expression,” whatever that was. But perhaps there was more to it than a simple unwillingness to bring humans into their confidence. Maybe they feared that Humankind might join the Denial, and so were telling them as little as possible.

  Whatever the reason, he still had three ships bearing down on the Ad Astra, and he was a long way from knowing their intentions.

  “I want some recon drones in that area,” St. Clair said, indicating the volume of space surrounding the three aliens.

  “Yes, sir. The targets are accelerating. Estimate . . . fifteen minutes until they reach us.”

  “Engineering! How long until we can shift?”

  “Unknown, Lord Commander. We’re working on it. We may need to grow a whole new power transfer web.”

  “Then do it. Fast as you can, Carlos. I don’t think we want to play with these people.”

  That was the hell of being the new kid on the block when it came to interstellar travel. Everybody out here was more advanced than Earth.

  Within the galactic core, that was almost certainly even truer. The searingly high radiation levels meant that few among these teeming billions of stars would host life, and fewer still would ever give rise to technic civilizations. The three approaching alien vessels, he thought, must be from outside the core.

  Not that their home address was of any real importance now. What they were homing on was another matter.

  And, of course, their attitude toward strangers.

  “Lord Commander!” Lieutenant Denisova called. “Double image! Double image!”

  “CAS!” St. Clair snapped. “Bring in the fighters! Now!”

  The aliens had just revealed a key point of technological superiority.

  MERRICK HEARD the order coming down from flight control. “All fighters! Close in on the Ad Astra!”

  “Accelerating,” Colbert, the squadron CO, replied. “What’s the sit?”

  “The aliens have shifted. You’re looking at old data!”

  Merrick glanced at his in-head, and saw the icons marking the three alien vessels still some five light-minutes astern of the Ad Astra. But when he checked forward, he saw three identical icons now right alongside the O’Neill cylinders and just five hundred kilometers from the human fighters.

  There was only one possible explanation. The aliens had jumped to faster-than-light, leapfrogging past the blocking fighters and dropping back into normal space directly alongside the human colony ship. The light from the three aliens astern was from five minutes ago; those three targets were luminal ghosts, images showing them before they’d shifted.

  And that meant that the aliens could pack a star drive into a slender hull a scant forty meters long, something well beyond the current capabilities of human technology.

  “Right, people!” Colbert called. “Close on the Asty!” A white flare of light pulsed from dead ahead, briefly outshining the surrounding clouds of bright stars. Merrick felt a stab of apprehension. Something big had just slammed the mother ship.

  “Fighters, you are weapons free, repeat, weapons free! Ad Astra is under attack!”

  “Kick it, people!” Colbert ordered. “Full boost! Let’s get in there!”

  The fighters accelerated.

  FROM ST. CLAIR’S perspective, the alien craft had simply materialized out of emptiness, three needle-shaped vessels that had just outrun the light signaling their presence. Those ships were minute compared to the vast and looming bulk of the Ad Astra—slivers of red and black that looked like sardines slipping into the shadow of a blue whale.

  But then one loosed a burst of high-energy particles tightly bound in a thrusting spear of electromagnetic force. The beam struck the port-hab cylinder, releasing a fiercely radiating burst of nova-hot light and heat. The burst expanded, then faded, replaced by a glittering cloud of ice crystals falling into vacuum.

  “Seal that breach!” St. Clair ordered, watching the attack from the vantage points of a dozen external sensors, drones, and cameras. “Mr. Webb! What the hell did they just hit us with?”

  Subcommander Davis Webb was Ad Astra’s weapons officer.

  “Positrons, Lord Commander. Anti-electrons!”

  “The burst didn’t go through!” Symm added. “The under-deck reservoir absorbed the beam.”

  The Ad Astra carried her own oceans with her, in a sense—reservoirs of well over a trillion liters of water stored in honeycomb compartments beneath the maintenance levels and ground level of the hab module interiors. The water served as a reserve for drinking, washing, and cooking for the human population; to distribute heat evenly throughout the rotating living spaces; and—vitally—to provide shielding against any radiation that made it past the ship’s far-flung magnetic screens.

  That water, St. Clair thought, had also just saved the life of every person in the port module. As the alien antimatter beam had clawed through Ad Astra’s thin outer hull, it had punctured the ship’s skin . . . but then the water gushing out into space had absorbed the beam’s hellish energy, annihilating each incoming anti-electron before it could burn deeper into the ship.

  The beam snapped off—that was the good news. The bad news was that water continued to erupt into vacuum, freezing instantly as it expanded into a vast and glittering cloud of minute particles.

  Ad Astra’s grazer turrets had already slewed around to bring them to bear on the alien vessels. A dazzling point of actinic light appeared against the black-and-red hull of one of the intruders, sharp and blindingly intense. An instant later, other gamma-ray lasers in Ad Astra’s point defense network joined in, adding their load of coherent energy to that of the first. The alien vessel pivoted sharply, trying to avoid the intolerably brilliant star of light . . . and then with a final flash, the alien’s hull burned through and the vessel came apart, bits and pieces of black debris trailing across space, as the main hull section dropped into a slow tumble. The other two aliens were pulling back.

  But the first of Ad Astra’s fighter squadrons was arriving now, decelerating from high velocity to nearly zero in an instant. One of the alien needles fired a bolt of antimatter particles, engulfing an ASF-99 in a blinding flash of light, hard radiation, and evaporating metal.

  But fighters have one key strength in space combat—their unparalleled maneuverability. Low in mass and high powered, gravitic spacecraft can literally move, stop, move again, change direction, dodge, and in an instant be someplace else, making tracking and targeting them a challenge for even the most sophisticated weapons system. NGM-440 Firestorm smart missiles, nuke-tipped and deadly, snapped in toward the surviving aliens, and then Ad Astra’s external sensors blanked out as a nuclear fireball erupted against the hull of one of the aliens. The fireball faded, leaving in its place a thin smear of gas and fragments; the lone surviving alien began accelerating out and away from the Ad Astra, with a swarm of angry wasp fighters in close, hot pursuit.

  “CAS!” St. Clair ordered. “Make sure they kill that last ship!”

  “Yes . . . yes, sir.”

  He heard the puzzlement in her voice. They’d clearly won the battle, and St. Clair’s insistence that they destroy that last, fleeing survivor seemed . . . out of character. Needlessly violent. St. Clair, after all, had been chosen to command this mission for his diplomatic record, not for any blood-lusting determination to wipe an enemy from the sky.

  But he heard her passing his order on to the fighters. He just hoped there was time before the alien went FTL. If they were able to shift to faster-than-light, there was no way in hell the fighters would be able to catch them.

  Firestorm missiles lanced out from the pursuing fighters.

  The silent pulse of detonations a moment later decisively ended the alien threat.

  Weirdly, the image of the three approaching alien vessels remained on Ad Astra’s long-range scanners, Einstein ghosts that would
not vanish until . . .

  Ah. There it was. The ghosts were gone.

  And Ad Astra and her few, scattered fighters were again alone in the eerie, star-thick jungle of the galactic core.

  CHAPTER

  FOUR

  St. Clair stepped out of the lift tube and into Number Three conference room. It was located within the outer level of the ship’s Carousel, a wheel two hundred meters across set into the engineering section’s support hull behind and between the twin hab cylinders. Like the cylinders, the Carousel was rotating—turning a hair slower than three times per minute to generate one G of spin gravity.

  More than two centuries of living and working in space had amply demonstrated that humans could not tolerate long periods without gravity. Within just a few months, muscles began to deteriorate; calcium leached from the bones, making them weak and fragile; and the heart rate and arterial pressure fell until it became extremely difficult—even deadly—to re-enter a normal gravity field. Drugs helped, exercise helped, but there were no good and long-term replacements for gravity in one form or another. Until and unless the Galactics saw fit to share their secrets of generating artificial gravity at the flick of a switch, human spacecraft and orbital colonies would have to make do with cumbersome rotating wheels and cylinders for at least some of the time their occupants spent in otherwise zero-gravity environments.

  The conference room, one of a suite of offices and compartments dedicated to the running of the civilian aspects of the ship, was a large space with a dome overhead, centered on a long mahogany table. Currently, the dome and the deck beneath were set to display circumambient space; the table, and the UE Directorate seal on one bulkhead, appeared to be floating in space, a vista of starclouds and towering nebulae bright enough that the room didn’t need its usual indirect lighting. Stars hung so thickly across that crowded sky that very little empty space showed through. St. Clair glanced at the display and, once again, wondered at the number of brilliant blue and blue-white stars strewn across the background.