Andromedan Dark

by Ian Douglas

  Staring into darkness, her body on fire, she became aware of . . . something . . . a door opening . . . a shift sideways in space. Air blasted past and around her, funneling into emptiness, and she felt the sharp bite of freezing cold. Swirling fog appeared as the temperature dropped.

  Hull breach!

  But that was impossible! Physically, she was buried deep in the belly of a starship five kilometers wide and as many deep. Nothing could get at her in here, not unless half of the ship had just been vaporized.

  And then she felt the thing, an ooze of black tentacles that slipped disturbingly in and out of existence, a thing enveloping her mind, embracing it, filling it, tasting it. . . .

  She triggered a ship-wide alarm.

  It was the last conscious thing she did. The blackness was all around her, was inside of her in some horrific, indefinable way, releasing a tumble of memories.

  It was eating her mind.

  She was falling inward, becoming the darkness. . . .

  SUBLIEUTENANT OGDEN Maxwell heard the alarm in the same instant that all of his approach indicators and ship telemetry went dead. The 3-D navigational grid, the landing approach beacons, the computer-drawn and highlighted shape of Ad Astra’s flight deck all winked out, leaving him with nothing but Mark 1 Mod 0 eyeballs and no electronic guides or references at all.

  His ASF-99 Wasp fighter was hurtling toward the Ad Astra’s magnetic trap at almost 200 meters per second—720 kilometers per hour—fast enough that the surface of the ship’s belly was a gray blur.

  There was no way PriFly could have gone off-line in an instant, with no warning, no way in hell. He spent no time at all wondering about it, though. Maxwell’s training saved him from a messy and most likely fatal trap on the landing deck; he killed his velocity, decelerating hard, then added a new vector component that kicked him out of the approach path and away from the ship’s belly. To try to continue the trap on manual when something was seriously wrong with the ship’s flight control systems was suicide.

  “Ad Astra,” he called. “Blue Seven! What the fuck is going on in there?”

  His course change wasn’t quite enough. His Wasp clipped an antenna mast, sending him spinning wildly into darkness.

  ST. CLAIR HEARD the alarm shrilling in his head. “Bridge! What’s happening?”

  He’d only just swum his way off the bridge and been making his way toward the AI department aft. It never rained, apparently, but it tsunamied.

  “CAS, down in PriFly,” Symm replied. “Something . . .”

  “What?”

  “Not sure, my lord. Sensors are reporting a sudden loss of atmosphere. Pressure is down . . . my God! Almost fifteen percent!”

  St. Clair felt a sharp, cold chill at that. Whatever had happened on the lander down on the Alderson disk evidently was now happening here, on board Ad Astra.

  Not good.

  “Can CAS get out?”

  “We’ve lost all telemetry with the department. Major electrical interference . . . and the PriFly AI connections are off-line. Newton says it can’t get through.”

  “Who’s got the MAA watch?”

  “Lieutenant Billingsly.”

  “Have him get to PriFly with a team. Fast!”

  “Aye, aye, my lord.”

  Ad Astra’s Marine contingent served as the colony ship’s onboard police force, headed up by the master-at-arms. Lieutenant Randall Billingsly was one of the Marine officers holding down that billet, and the one currently on watch.

  Ad Astra was under attack, of that much St. Clair was certain. Despite his own doubts about the idea, it was possible that what Patterson had encountered down on the disk had been some sort of automated defense system, or, just possibly, a surviving inhabitant of the structure. But whatever had happened to CAS made those possibilities much more unlikely. An automated defense system might involve projecting a holographic image into a spacecraft tens of thousands of kilometers above the disk’s surface, but it didn’t seem likely, didn’t feel right. Much more likely was a deliberate attack.

  But by whom? And how?

  St. Clair reached the transport-capsule node nearest the bridge, but instead of heading aft to the AI department, he thoughtclicked directions for forward and down, to PriFly.

  He wanted to see this for himself.

  LIEUTENANT BILLINGSLY and his four-man response team reached PriFly first. He’d seen a report already about what had happened to Patterson down on the disk’s surface, and immediately noted the similarities—loss of cabin pressure, dropping temperature, disruption of local computer nodes. Whatever it was that had attacked Patterson appeared to have struck on board the Ad Astra.

  The airtight entrance to PriFly was sealed, the controls, both manual and in-head activation, inoperative. “Burn it, Kat!”

  Sergeant Katrina Doleski unholstered her plasma torch and aimed it at a specific part of the bulkhead directly alongside the door. All five Marines were in armor; their visors automatically darkened to protect their eyes against the actinic glare of the cutter. A piece of bulkhead drifted clear. Anchoring himself from a convenient hand grip, Billingsly reached into the smoking hole, found the manual lock release, and squeezed it.

  A burst of air hissed into the room as the pressures equalized. The door slid open. . . .

  Billingsly had been in combat before. Had served in Kazakhstan and Chad and in the Labyrinth of Night on Mars. He’d seen blood before, and the gory horror of combat. He’d been there.

  But he couldn’t help himself this time. He gasped . . .

  Then vomited explosively inside his helmet.

  CHAPTER

  TWELVE

  The vid images shot by automatic security cameras inside PriFly had showed Maria Francesca’s death with nightmarish clarity and detail. Unfortunately—or, possibly fortunately, depending on how you looked at it—exactly what had happened to the aerospace commanding officer was still unknown. St. Clair had watched the imagery several times, now, and still wasn’t sure what he was seeing. The scene was so horrific it was difficult to make sense of it.

  He’d seen the results, however, in person . . . a narrow compartment filled with drifting globules of blood and a vaguely human-shaped mass of unrecognizably pulped tissue.

  “This ship, this expedition, is under attack,” St. Clair told the assembly of department heads. Unlike the last meeting, some were there in person, in the Carousel’s Number Three conference room, but many, including all of the civilians, were logged on in telepresence. “I want to know who’s doing it. Who is the enemy?”

  “Not much of an attack, if you ask me,” Adler’s voice said over the link. “One dead, one wounded? That’s nothing.”

  “No, my lord. It is most definitely something. Maria Francesca was killed horribly . . . her body . . .” He stopped, unable to continue. The sight of that blood-filled compartment would be with him for the rest of his life. He swallowed, hard. “And young Patterson,” he continued, “is being kept in a medical coma because when he’s awake he’s raving. Dr. Sokolov—what did you say your diagnosis was for Patterson?”

  “Provisionally, acute psychotic schizophrenia,” Sokolov replied. “Based on the observed symptoms. That may change as we learn more.”

  “We also have an enemy that can cause pressure loss at a distance, and without any observed weapon. Nothing kinetic, not directed energy. Anyone who can reach across ten thousand kilometers of empty space without being detected, cause a pressure hull breach, and kill one of my people has my full attention and respect.”

  “But there’s no point, no unified purpose, to the incidents,” Adler insisted. “If you ask me, Dr. Dumont is right. We’ve woken up some sort of automated defense system and it’s trying to scare us away from the disk.”

  St. Clair refrained from pointing out that he had not asked Adler. “I might have bought that with that first attack in the lander,” he said. “But they targeted PriFly with that last one, deliberately and directly.”

  “Do I und
erstand right?” Clayton Lloyd said. “We’ve moved away from the Alderson disk?”

  “We have, Mr. Ambassador,” St. Clair said. “If we did wake up an automated defense system of some sort, maybe some distance will help. I want these attacks stopped.”

  “How far out are we?” Adler asked.

  “Fifty astronomical units . . . about seven and a half billion kilometers. We’ve left a few robots on and near the disk to keep an eye on things, but that’s about all. And now that we have Mr. Jablonsky’s report on the alien torpedo, I think we can safely abandon the disk in favor of another objective.”

  “But there’s so much we could still learn there,” Dumont protested. “The Alderson disk represents technologies literally tens of thousands of years in advance of what we have now!”

  “Quite true, Doctor,” Senior Lieutenant Christine Nolan said. “And how many years will it take to understand that xenotech? To reverse engineer it so that we can use any part of it?”

  St. Clair nodded to himself. Christine was head of Ad Astra’s xenotech office, a branch of the contact department. The civilian mission was partially duplicated by the Navy xeno departments on the ship, and he found it interesting that the two were aligning themselves on different sides of the argument, the military versus the civilians.

  But he needed to keep the discussion on target.

  “We won’t have the chance to learn much if monsters keep popping out of nowhere to attack our people,” St. Clair said. “Besides, the disk will still be there if and when we decide to come back. It’s been here for a long time already, hasn’t it?”

  “Just how old is the disk?” Symm asked. “Do we know yet?”

  “At least two hundred million years old,” Dumont told her. “That’s a minimum, based on potassium-forty/argon-forty ratios in the samples we took. Maximum age is approximately three hundred million years.”

  How long to wear buildings down to dust, for three quarters of the atmosphere to sputter away into space, for the monuments of a brilliant civilization capable of astonishing feats of mega-engineering to decay to the consistency of chalk?

  A very long time indeed. The time, apparently, that separated Humankind from the very earliest dinosaurs.

  “So how old is the star?” St. Clair asked. He was wondering if there’d been a planetary system here once that subsequently had been destroyed to manufacture the disk . . . or if the builders had brought the building materials in from somewhere else.

  “It’s a pretty ordinary type K1,” Wanquan replied, “so it fits the standard model well. The age works out to about one point five billion years.”

  It was sobering to realize that, ancient as it was, the Alderson disk still had been constructed at least 3.8 billion years after the Tellus Ad Astra mission had departed for the Coadunation capital.

  In fact, during the Age of Humankind, the star around which the disk eventually had been built hadn’t even been born out of its primordial cloud of dust and gas.

  “The star is only one and a half billion years old?” Dr. Hatcher put in. “That’s not enough time for a local sapient species to evolve.”

  “Someone else, an alien ecosystem, might have evolved intelligence faster than we did on Earth,” St. Clair suggested.

  “Not that fast,” Christine Nolan said. “Life—single-celled life, like cyanobacteria—evolved very quickly after the Earth’s early crust cooled enough to support liquid water. It took four billion years, though, before those one-celled beasties learned how to join together as multicelled animals. And another half billion years to go from there to us. Wherever the disk’s builders came from, it was an older star than that.”

  “They must have come from somewhere else,” Dumont said. “A part of a colonization wave going out among the stars, maybe even direct descendents of the Coadunation. As life and advanced technology spread across the Galaxy, they began making use of younger stars as sites for new centers of civilization.”

  “Any idea how long the disk was inhabited, Doctor?” St. Clair asked him. “Between when it was built, and when it was deserted?”

  “We have no way of ascertaining that, Lord Commander. But it’s been deserted for a long time. The remaining structures and monuments, we think, were once constructed of a kind of plastic, but they’ve degraded, possibly due to spontaneous nonradioactive decay, but more likely from long-term exposure to sunlight or other EM radiation.”

  “Why more likely?”

  “The stuff underground appears to still be working,” Dumont told him. “Like the neutrino beacon. But on the surface, everything is crumbling.”

  “Maybe,” Adler’s voice put in, “it hasn’t been deserted at all. There might even still be intelligent life down there.”

  “That seems unlikely,” Nolan said.

  “It’s a big world. Bigger than any of us can imagine! There’s enough room within the disk for millions of civilizations. Maybe they moved underground as things began deteriorating on the surface.”

  “They were star-farers, obviously,” Nolan pointed out. “Wouldn’t they have just left when things started breaking down? Gone somewhere else to start over?”

  “Who’s to say what an alien civilization’s motivations might be?” Dumont said. “In any case, it seems unlikely that everyone would leave. There would be stay-at-homes, less adventurous sorts, religious groups or cultures that didn’t agree that migration was the answer. There’s room enough. There might be trillions of individual beings living inside the thickness of the disk.”

  “That’s right,” Cameron said. “And two of them attacked us.”

  “Whatever attacked us, it didn’t try to communicate,” Lieutenant Arnold Gonzalez said. He was head of Ad Astra’s xenolinguistics lab. “I suspect that it wasn’t intelligent at all. More like a wild animal. Or a savage.”

  “Maybe, Lieutenant,” Adler said, “they’re responding to us as savages. Destroying their statue wasn’t exactly a civilized act. ”

  “Neither is an unthinking attack entirely out of proportion to the provocation, my lord,” Gonzalez said.

  St. Clair listened to the back-and-forth around the conference table and across the shipboard Net. There was no way to settle the argument without returning to the Disk, but he’d already decided that the Ad Astra was going to keep clear of that enigmatic structure, at least for now. The mobile science colony was well-equipped and staffed to address such questions, but they were also absolutely and irrevocably alone in a way that no human group ever had been before. Trapped 4 billion years in their own future, they had no other resources but themselves—no base of operations, no headquarters, no supply depot, and no one at all to report to.

  Alone.

  The weight of years—of gigayears—pressed down on St. Clair’s shoulders.

  “Okay,” St. Clair continued. He wanted the discussion back on track. “Do we have any additional information about the attacks? What the hell hit us?”

  “That’s actually fairly obvious from the various vid imaging,” Dr. Sandoval said. “We’ve been witnessing five-dimensional intersections.”

  “You mind repeating that in English, Doctor?”

  “Sure. When you try to visualize dimensional physics, you have to work with analogies, okay?” In the minds of those linked in, a point of green light appeared as Sandoval spoke. “Here is a zero-dimensional point . . . but for it to exist, you need a one-dimensional line, like this.”

  The point moved, drawing a green line to illustrate.

  “A point can only exist on a line made up of points. But for one dimension to exist, you need two dimensions.”

  The line moved sideways, drawing a flat, green plane.

  “Two requires three . . .”

  The plane moved at right angles to itself, drawing a green cube.

  “And, theoretically, you could say that for three dimensions to exist, you need a fourth.” A second, smaller cube appeared centered inside the first, with each of its corners connected by a line with the
corresponding outer corner. “This is a hypercube . . . a kind of 3-D shadow of a 4-D object. Unfortunately, human brains aren’t wired to see how a fourth dimension works.”

  “I thought the fourth dimension was time?” Symm said.

  “Depends on how you look at it, Subcommander,” Sandoval replied. “Actually, space and time are interchangeable—spacetime, as Einstein referred to it. But for now, we’re only looking at the spacial aspects of higher dimensions.”

  St. Clair concentrated on the hypercube, trying to understand. “You’re saying that the thing we encountered on the disk, the thing that killed Maria, that was something from a fourth dimension?”

  “Partly. Here . . . take another look.”

  A side window opened next to the hypercube, showing the vid footage from PriFly. Subcommander Francesca hung weightless in the compartment, twisting against the web of cables connecting her with the ship. Behind her, a kind of doorway had opened, as though a flat wall bearing the image of the far side of the chamber had rotated. Three watery-looking, jet-black spheres appeared, then were growing, then were merging as Francesca shrieked and struggled. One sphere actually seemed to be emerging from within her body. In places, her body was horribly distorted, bulging as if to make room for something suddenly materializing inside.

  “Freeze image,” Sandoval’s voice said. The vid halted, Francesca’s taut body frozen in a horrific instant of nightmare. “Take a plane . . . two dimensions.” The hypercube next to the vid was replaced by a flat, green surface. A human hand materialized above it, colored bright blue. “As I said, you need to work by analogy. Pretend that this two-dimensional surface represents three-dimensional space . . . and that my three-dimensional hand is representing something in the fourth dimension. It exists in a space outside of the normal three . . . do you see?”