Andromedan Dark

by Ian Douglas

  “We’ll wait a few minutes,” he said, “until we see if the alien ship reappears.”

  Ten minutes dragged past, with no sign of the moon reappearing in the distance.

  “Launch the work drone.”

  “Work drone away, Lord Commander.”

  He watched as the RS-59 accelerated into the distance . . . then slowed. Telemetry from the robot showed details of the alien object as the drone came alongside. It was ebon-black, and . . . shifting. There was no other word for it. The object was constantly changing shape, though its overall appearance remained more or less cylindrical: sometimes long and thin, sometimes short and squat, sometimes with flutes or wings or sponsons, sometimes smooth and unadorned. . . .

  “Lord Commander!”

  “Yes, Mr. Martinez.”

  “The stardrive is back on-line, my lord. I’d like time to run it through some tests, make sure it’s properly balanced, but—”

  “Carlos, that’s the best damned news I’ve heard all day. Stand by, please.”

  “Aye, aye, my lord.”

  Okay . . .

  He could just turn the Ad Astra around, reconnect with the Tellus, and jump back to Earth. He allowed himself a heartfelt exhalation of relief.

  It was going to be okay.

  On the other hand, what was he going to do—scuttle back to Earth and tell HQ that the Coad ringworld capital was gone, blown apart by unknown enemies of the galactic civilization? That, aside from the liaison’s off-tentacle reference to the “Deniers,” he didn’t have a clue as to what was going on in here at the Galactic Hub, or who the attackers were?

  Was it possible that Earth was now at war with an alien force, and didn’t even know it?

  That thing drifting out there might be a weapon, but he doubted that. Something as big and as powerful as a 400-kilometer mobile moon could have swatted the Ad Astra out of space with hardly a thought. Hell, they could have accelerated forward and Ad Astra would have ended up smeared across that moon’s already well-cratered surface.

  No . . . that shape-shifting black enigma was either for communication, or it was designed to study the Ad Astra. St. Clair was confident that even if it was a kind of scout, his crew would be able to learn something from it in exchange.

  “CAS,” he said. “Have the drone take that object aboard.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  Gently, the worker drone picked the object up. After a further delay of nearly an hour, St. Clair gave the order to bring it in.

  The alien moon-vessel had still not reappeared even on Ad Astra’s most sensitive deep-space long-range scanners. Either the alien had left this part of the Galaxy entirely, or it had shifted to another point more than ninety light-minutes away, because light reflected from its hull had not yet reached the Earth vessel. Something that big should have been visible, even at a range of a couple of light hours.

  St. Clair had hesitated before bringing the drone and its strange cargo on board, but he was more certain than ever that the enigma must represent an attempt to communicate, not launch an attack. While the moon-vessel had not given him a reason to trust it, neither had it done anything to suggest that it was hostile, except for following Ad Astra in the first place.

  Besides, while there were plenty of linguistics and computer experts on board the Ad Astra, there were more on Tellus, the twin cylinders they’d left behind. He wanted to get all the experts together and working on this, and the faster they did so, the better.

  He gave the order to retrieve the RS-59. When, after another thirty minutes, nothing untoward occurred, he ordered the ship to return to the O’Neill cylinders. Lieutenant Mason took the Ad Astra up to the aft end of the two cylinders, and Newton took over for the final rendezvous and lock. With all seals in place, Tellus Ad Astra was once again complete . . . and finally ready to engage her stardrive.

  “All hands and passengers, this is St. Clair,” he announced over the ship’s internal comm, speaking inside the minds of every person on board. He was seated in his command chair on the bridge, the dazzling gleam of brilliant stars encircling the bridge crew in the darkness. “Subcomm Martinez informs me that our drives are again operational. I am going to take the Ad Astra out of the galactic core . . . a jump of about fifteen thousand light years, and the first leg of our trip home to Earth.

  “We have now, on the main flight deck, a work pod containing an alien artifact, which, I believe, is a communications device of some kind. I want all senior IS, XE, XS, and XL department personnel to gather for a briefing in the Carousel in two hours, after which I’m going to ask you to give me some answers. We need to know what has been going on in the galactic core . . . and what happened to the Coadunation capital. I want those answers before we get back to Earth. Liaison . . . I request your attendance at this meeting as well.”

  He said nothing about the bizarre change to the look of the galactic core. If Ad Astra had indeed slipped into the heart of another galaxy, or been thrown, somehow, to another part of the Milky Way, or been moved through time . . . well, they soon would know.

  Mental confirmations flickered back through St. Clair’s in-head hardware. His bridge crew gave him a final check and a countdown to jump.

  “. . . four,” Mason said, “three . . . two . . . one . . . jump!”

  There was the slightest of shivers, and the belt of brilliant stars encircling the bridge was gone. In its place was . . . something other, something horribly and awesomely and inconceivably other.

  Adams screamed, a piercing, strangled shout. Mason and a half dozen others gasped. Denisova and Symm and Forrester all swore or bit off startled exclamations. St. Clair started to pull free from his seat, staring into that awful splendor, eyes widening as he tried, tried to take it all in.

  Tried to understand.

  “What’s going on?” Symm finally managed to say. “What’s happened to the sky?”

  St. Clair could only stare into the three-dimensional projection surrounding the bridge, at stars and loops of gas and dust and galactic chaos frozen across an impossible, alien sky, before blurting out:

  “What in the fucking hell has happened to us?”

  CHAPTER

  SEVEN

  The cacophony of voices—shouts, screams, confusion—grew louder. Several officers panicked and rose from their seats.

  “Belay that!” St. Clair bellowed into the noise. “Everyone! As you were!”

  The noise faded. Those who’d been about to bolt for the bridge entryway—and where the hell had they thought they were going?—took their seats once more.

  “Everyone stay calm,” St. Clair added. “We are officers of the United Earth, and we will behave as if we have faced crises before.”

  The change to the central core of the Galaxy had been startling, to say the least, evidence, perhaps, that the Ad Astra had indeed slipped through a wormhole and into the core of a different, distant galaxy. What they were looking at now, however, was proof of something else, a change more profound and far more devastating than a mere jump across space.

  Humor, St. Clair thought, his mind racing wildly. Something to break the tension. “Toto,” he misquoted slowly, “I’ve got a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.”

  “And just what was your first clue, Dorothy?” Symm asked. Several nervous chuckles sounded around the bridge.

  “There’s no place like home,” Mason added.

  Ad Astra had emerged from Jump in a place where not one, but two spiral galaxies filled the sky, like towering walls of swirling stars to either side of the ship. The two were colliding, caught in a mutual interpenetration, the central hub of one galaxy slicing into the hub of the other. Together, the two galaxies formed an immense V with a shallow angle between them. The golden mean spiral perfection of both had been savagely distorted by their gravitational interaction; spiral arms and streams of dust and gas arced far out into intergalactic space, trailing stars. The cores of both galaxies, instead of consisting of ancient red stars, were brilliant
with young, hot, intensely blue-white stars. Vast clouds of interstellar dust and gas were colliding within the cores, generating pressure waves rippling out and compacting the surrounding dust clouds into myriad newborn suns, an intense starburst display lighting up both galaxies.

  The whole was a spectacular panorama, a play of light and shadow where massed suns cast beams of golden light across banked clouds of dust like blue-black thunderheads, where novae burned blue-white among dimmer suns, where galactic spiral arms stretched and tattered and trailed off into the intergalactic night. There was a tremendous sense of raw and violent motion in that vista, though the entire scene was frozen and unmoving.

  What St. Clair was most aware of, by far, was the oppressive sense of sheer scale, as two whirlpools of stars, each a hundred thousand light years or more across, collided. Caught between them, far down in the notch of the V, Ad Astra was a speck—was less than a speck—a single molecule hanging above the storm-tortured vastness of an ocean.

  If there was one benefit to all this, it was that after that first outburst of exclamation and shock, the bridge crew now remained silent, caught up in the impossible vista frozen in the sky around them.

  “At least,” St. Clair said, “now we know where we are. Or, I should say, we know when.”

  But he couldn’t name the figure, the number of years—not yet. It was too . . . outrageous, a number threatening to shatter the sanity of every person in the expedition and stealing from them all the hope and expectation of ever going home.

  Symm looked at him with a growing horror. “What are we going to do, my lord?”

  “Hold that department-head briefing,” he replied. “Number Three conference room. Include all department heads . . . and move it up to thirty minutes.”

  It was, he thought, an appropriately human response. There didn’t seem to be anything they could do about their situation, so they would gather around the campfire and talk about it.

  ST. CLAIR WASN’T sure about the wisdom of setting the conference room display to show the scene outside—a sky filled by two towering, distorted spiral galaxies in mid-collision. The sight was oppressive, and not a little terrifying.

  But, he reasoned, they were going to have to get used to it because he was aware of no way for them to go back. So he told Newton to show the exterior space display, and if any of the department heads couldn’t deal with it, better to find out now.

  The conference room was filled to capacity and then some, with every place at the large table taken, and quite a few other people standing around those seated in the middle. Perhaps half were military officers—mostly Navy, but the Marines were represented as well. The rest were civilian department heads, along with a sizeable number of assistants and secretaries. St. Clair was interested to note that very few were there as projected holograms. By now, everyone on board the ship knew what had happened, and when St. Clair had called the meeting, everyone who could be there wanted to be there physically. He couldn’t blame them—when faced with something as immense as this, it was a very human reaction to want to seek out other humans. For all their technology, there was something inherently reassuring about the presence of others—especially if those others might have solutions.

  St. Clair desperately hoped someone in the room might actually be the person with the answer.

  They’d been discussing the situation for several minutes, and it was clear that no one, save for a few of the physics and astronomy people, was certain what had happened.

  “This does answer the question of what happened to us at the supermassive black hole,” Paul Tsang was saying.

  “Would you mind explaining it to those of us who aren’t as astronomically inclined as you?” Webb asked. “I mean . . . clearly we’re not in our own Galaxy any longer.”

  “Actually,” Tsang said, “we are . . . or, rather, we’re just outside.” He pointed at one wall, where the smaller of the two galaxies soared off into vastness overhead. “That’s us . . . the Milky Way. Four hundred billion stars in a whirlpool a hundred thousand light years across. And over there”—he pointed at the other, larger galaxy—“is M-31, Andromeda. About one point two trillion stars in a slightly larger spiral. Maybe one hundred twenty thousand light years across.”

  “Galaxies in collision,” Denisova said quietly.

  “We’ve known this was going to happen for, oh, a hundred fifty years or so,” Tsang went on. “The Andromedan Galaxy is—was—headed straight for our Milky Way at something like one hundred ten kilometers per second. A breakneck pace, but since it was still two and a half million light years away, there was no urgency to the matter.”

  “What the hell happened?” Webb said. He sounded puzzled, and it was clear he hadn’t yet been able to come to grips with what happened.

  “Time, Mr. Webb,” St. Clair said. “Time happened . . . about four billion years’ worth.”

  There. He’d finally named the number. It was out there, now. He heard several soft gasps from around the table.

  “Exactly,” Tsang said. “We knew that Andromeda would collide with our Galaxy in roughly four billion years’ time. Evidently, our close passage of Sagittarius A-Star catapulted us into the future. The remote future. Four billion years.”

  “God in heaven,” someone murmured out loud.

  “Dr. Sandoval?” St. Clair said.

  “Sir.” Tina Sandoval was the civilian head of Ad Astra’s astrophysics department.

  “I’ll want you to work closely with Dr. Tsang’s people. See if you can put together a solid working theory on how this happened. Third Navigator mentioned a . . . what was it? A frame-dragging effect.”

  “A Lorentzian manifold,” Newton’s voice supplied.

  “Right. Anyway, I want your best guess as to whether this was frame-dragging, or just a case of time dilation at the black hole’s ergosphere.”

  “But what the hell’s the difference, Lord Commander?” Dumont asked, his voice ragged with barely suppressed emotion. “It doesn’t matter how we got here. . . .”

  “Actually, it does, Dr. Dumont,” St. Clair said. “It matters quite a lot.”

  “Absolutely,” Tsang added. “There are two ways that we might have moved through time. If we just got too deeply into the SMBH gravity field, simple time dilation would have slowed the passage of time for us. A few seconds passed for the ship . . . while four billion years passed outside. Time travel . . . but strictly one way. Into the future.”

  “You mean there’s a way we can go back?” Howard Moore asked. Moore was head of Ad Astra’s nanotechnology office, a GS-14 civilian, like Tsang, who worked for the military.

  “We don’t know, Doctor,” Sandoval told him. “Theoretically, a Lorentzian manifold would allow travel forward or backward through time, but . . .” She shrugged. “The mathematics initially suggested that you need a rotating structure of infinite length and mass to create such a gateway through time. The fact that we’re here suggests that we may not have the last word on the matter.”

  “Yet,” St. Clair added, stressing the word. “That’s what I want the astronomy and astrophysics departments to tell me: Can we go back?”

  “I would have to point out,” Sandoval said slowly, “that the chances of getting home are small. Vanishingly small.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Essentially, we would have to return to the SMBH and probe the region close around it—possibly with small drones. They would have to go through, map their exact course, and figure out where and when they are when they emerge . . . and then return with the data. There are, I would guess, some trillions upon trillions of possible pathways. The chances of stumbling across the right one by sheer chance are . . . well, to say they’re tiny is something of an understatement. Kind of like saying that Dr. Moore works with small robots.”

  “But there is hope,” St. Clair said. “I want all of you here to emphasize that when you talk to your departments. There is hope. I don’t want a panic within the general populace. General F
razier?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “If there is panic, your people will have to take care of it.”

  “Understood, Lord Commander.”

  “Coordinate with the ship’s master-at-arms.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  “Ms. Kalmar.”

  “Yes, my lord.” Christine Kalmar handled public relations and the liaison work between the military and civilian authorities.

  “It’ll be up to you to take care of putting out the news, breaking it gently, if you can. We won’t lie to the civilians on board, but I want them to stay calm. No panic.”

  “No, sir.”

  “Subcomm Symm, you’ll be responsible for the military end of things.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Now: other questions. Dr. Sandoval? While they’re digging into the mechanics of what happened, I also want your department to take a look at why the hell we popped out here and now. It seems like a pretty long shot that we would emerge from the black hole just now with . . .” he waved at one wall, “. . . all of that going on.”

  “I think I can give you a probable answer on that right now, my lord.”

  “I’d love to hear it.”

  “We were in a kind of equilibrium with the black hole,” Sandoval said. “Balanced at the edge of the ergosphere, you might say. We know the SMBH had a mass of a little more than four million solar masses, right?”

  “Yes . . .”

  “Then suddenly we’re bumped out away from the ergosphere. We find ourselves out in open space, and the black hole has increased in mass seven times.”

  “I think I see what you’re getting at.”

  “Yes, sir. Obviously, another, much larger black hole arrived and merged with the first. At a guess . . . I’d say the central SMBH of the Andromedan Galaxy collided with our own SMBH. Increased the mass and the diameter . . . and, just incidentally, we got tossed out on our ear. Might have been a kind of tidal surge or a ripple or a bulge in the black hole’s ergosphere—that’s not really important. Anything like that would have disturbed our equilibrium with the SMBH. Whatever it was, we can just be thankful it tossed us farther away, out to where time was passing at a normal rate, and didn’t result in us getting dragged down that thing’s throat.”