Andromedan Dark

by Ian Douglas

  “It looks,” Leonov said slowly, “like it’s coming off of Andromeda and moving into the space between the galaxies. Toward us. . . .”

  “The longer I look,” Collins told them, “the more I see. Or think I see. It looks to me like . . . I don’t know, streamers or threads or something reaching from Andromeda out toward us.”

  “I see them too,” McAuliffe said.

  “Impossible!” Musgrove snapped. “Gravity doesn’t work like that!”

  “Maybe it’s not mass the way we think of it,” Leonov suggested. “It looks . . . I don’t know. Biological.”

  “A life form that envelops an entire galaxy?” Collins asked.

  “You know, there’s something else,” McAuliffe said. “The nearest of Andromeda’s stars are—what do you think? Fifteen, twenty thousand light years away from where we are right now?”

  “Something like that.” Collins thought she knew where the other vac was going with this, and it wasn’t a comfortable thought.

  “So what we’re seeing happened twenty thousand years ago, right?”

  “Except that I’m seeing movement at the far edge of Andromeda, on the other side of the core. See it? And those stars have to be at least fifty, sixty thousand light years away.”

  “So what you’re saying—” Musgrove started to say.

  “Right,” Leonov said. “Whatever that is, it must already be here . . . already have passed through here and into the Milky Way. It happened a long time ago.”

  “Like, maybe, when the Alderson disk was destroyed?”

  “Are you guys recording this?” Collins asked. The others chorused in the affirmative. “Okay, good. Because we’re going to need to show this to the saps.”

  Yet even with multispectral recording, she didn’t think they would be believed.

  ST. CLAIR, TO be blunt, was bored out of his mind. He hated these social functions, and would have been happy to ignore each and every one. As lord commander of the expedition, though, he was expected to attend them, to at least put in an appearance. Adler would likely have called it “embracing certain basic amenities of protocol.”

  But at the moment, all he could think about was poor Patterson’s face as he shrieked out word salad. Of the sight of Maria Francesca turned inside out.

  One thought drove him: Ad Astra was under attack. The question was . . . by whom?

  And perhaps more important, what was he going to do about it?

  “Lord Commander! So good of you to come!”

  He turned. He didn’t recognize the woman at first. The upper half of her face was masked by a black-and-silver sensenhance helmet. When he ID tagged her through his in-head hardware, the name “Gina Colfax” and the words “Diplomatic Corps” hovered in the air next to her. She was one of Lloyd’s people, then, a diplomatic specialist who’d been heading for the Coadunation complex at the galactic core, and instead had ended up here.

  “Ms. Colfax. Good to see you.”

  She laughed, and he immediately regretted the verbal slip, which amounted to a minor sexual innuendo. Colfax wore a kind of liquid silver choker necklace or collar that covered her throat and shoulders, but was otherwise nude. A magnificent spray of fiber-optics rose in a white halo above and behind her head and upper torso, and animated tattoos chased one another across her exposed skin. Her pubic hair, neatly trimmed, was a brilliantly fluorescent purple, matching both her lips and her nipples.

  “You can see me anytime, my lord,” she said. “As much as you like!”

  St. Clair decided to beat as dignified a retreat as was possible. “Yes, well . . . if you’ll excuse me . . .”

  “A question first, my lord?”

  “Of course, my lady.”

  A group of three men and two women had been standing a few paces behind Colfax, obviously listening. One of them stepped closer, now, a tall man in red, black, and a spray of red light.

  “They say,” the man said, “that you have a lead on a new ACGI. Is it true?”

  ACGI—advanced communicative galactic civilization, and pronounced “ack-gee”—had been a buzzword since the discovery of the Coadunation. Even before that, it had been used to describe the goal of the old SETI programs—someone else out among the stars with whom Humankind might be able to communicate.

  The man’s ID popped up in St. Clair’s in-head—Lord Jeffery Benton—a Senate-corporate liaison, a corprep, and a member of the Tellus Cybercouncil.

  “We do have a target, my lord,” St. Clair told him. “But it may be just another beacon, like the one at the Alderson disk.”

  “These gentlemen and ladies,” Colfax said, gesturing, “are corpreps on the Cybercouncil, and we’ve been discussing the possibility of establishing an industrial base in this . . . ah . . . place and time.”

  “I see.” Long ago, court rulings had established that corporations were persons in every legal sense. With that precedent, it hadn’t been long before such persons were represented in Congress. “Corps” or “corpreps” were the senate and representative assistants and liaisons who acted as go-betweens. Constitutionalists like St. Clair tended to mistrust the system, which had played a large part in the political corruption that had led to the last American Revolution. The new government’s failure to get rid of the corpreps had played a large role in the breakdown that followed . . . and in the rise of the U.E. Directorate. They were an unfortunate reality now, though, and that meant he couldn’t just ignore them.

  One of the women spoke. “If we’re truly stuck in this time,” she said, “we’ll need to establish a manufacturing base, perhaps colonize a new world . . . in essence start Humankind over again. To do this, we’ll need local contacts. As you can imagine, my lord, we’re eager to kick things off.”

  The woman was Lady Angelica Braun, who represented, St. Clair knew, a nanotech corporation.

  “Well, we should know soon enough,” St. Clair said. “We’ll be making a shift sometime tomorrow.”

  “And will you be using the Diplomatic Corps to establish contact?” Colfax asked.

  He started to say “No,” but then reconsidered. Nothing could possibly be gained by antagonizing the expedition’s civilian component.

  “That, my lady, will depend on the circumstances. Initial contact will be through my bridge team, of course . . . assuming we find anyone there with whom we can make contact in the first place. After that . . . we’ll see.”

  “Some of us are wondering, my lord,” Hsien Tianki said slowly, “if you just have the rest of us along in this vessel for the ride.”

  “That’s certainly not my intent, Lord Hsien.” What industry did Hsien represent? St. Clair wondered. Bioengineering and genetics, he thought, and then it clicked: a megacorporation called Dynamic Biogenics. “But keep in mind that we have been attacked—twice. Let the military find out what we’re up against before you start negotiating treaties, okay?”

  “Of course. I might have expected as much from you.”

  He almost demanded what the man had meant by that, but shrugged it off.

  Damn but he hated these affairs.

  CHAPTER

  FOURTEEN

  “Did you load the latest ’sode of Tangent last night?”

  “Wouldn’t miss it. That Cavi is gamma hot. . . .”

  “Hey, did you load the ’sip about Gina? They say she—”

  “You know, there are rumors that the Medusan ambassador killed itself. It wasn’t an accident . . .”

  The agony of the party at the Lloyd residence dragged on. For half an hour, now, St. Clair had been wondering when he could in good conscience cut the damned thing short. He had work to do, damn it. He didn’t have the time to listen to vac-headed nonsense about entertainment sims or virtual holography stars or random gossip.

  The worst of it was, a lot of the background chatter was flowing over the local network conversation channel, and there was no way to avoid it. If he killed the channel to stop the whisper in his head, he would miss it when someone actually addres
sed him directly.

  “They say he’s sleeping with all of them . . .”

  “Well, what’s wrong with that?”

  “And I was like, ‘Oh, my God . . .’ ”

  “Lord Commander?”

  It was almost a relief to hear someone speaking a language he understood.

  “Yes, Ambassador Lloyd?”

  “I wanted to talk to you about the Gressman Initiative.”

  The question caught St. Clair by surprise. “As in Ander Gressman? Cyber Legislature?”

  “The same.”

  Ander Gressman was a member of the Tellus Cybercouncil, St. Clair knew, but he’d not been following expedition politics much. He knew Gressman was a staunch imperialist, and as a member of the Ad Astra expedition he would support closer human-alien relations. But St. Clair had not met the man, and was unaware of any initiative.

  “And what is he initiating?”

  “He’s proposing that we go back to Sagittarius A-Star, back where we met that alien moon ship. The Roceti torpedo, clearly, was a gift designed to let us communicate with them. Now that we’ve unwrapped it, we need to use it. As the givers intended.”

  “I see.”

  St. Clair was tempted to go back to what he’d been doing before Lloyd had approached him. He had been simply wandering inside the residence, occasionally grazing at the buffet and half listening to a live string quartet playing Hammond’s Starglow. He’d engaged in chitchat with a few of the guests, but for the most part he was just counting down the minutes until he could leave without causing undue commotion.

  He’d been bored, but at least he’d been left alone. Now, with the ambassador before him, he longed for that boredom.

  Because there was something he’d discovered years before: the military and civilians rarely had very much to talk about socially. The gulf between them was simply too great.

  The people here tonight—politicians and diplomats, most of them—talked about other politicians and diplomats, about meetings and parties and entertainment sims, about concerts and artists, sports and faux pas within their own social circles and carefully avoided the important things.

  Like the fact that Tellus Ad Astra was lost in both time and space. Take away the weather—and the weather was always pretty benign inside an O’Neill habitat cylinder—and there weren’t many options left for small talk. And no one wanted to engage in big talk. No. He looked around the room, and it was obvious nothing of substance was being talked about.

  He spotted Lisa on a sofa nearby, where she was talking with one of Dr. Dumont’s staff members. He wanted to go over to her and suggest they start politely saying their good-byes, but Lloyd seemed determined to pursue his question, and St. Clair doubted that he would be allowed to make his escape.

  “So . . . what about it, Lord Commander?”

  “What about what?”

  “Have you thought about the Gressman Initiative?”

  “Actually, my lord,” he said, “no.”

  “The proposal passed in the Legislature this afternoon, Lord Commander,” Lloyd told him, “by a vote of two hundred four to eighty-one.”

  “And this means what, exactly?”

  “It shows the will of the people, of course.”

  “Oh. Of course.”

  Lloyd seemed to hear the sarcasm in St. Clair’s voice. “I know Lord Adler has already spoken to you about the need for establishing a civilian government as quickly as possible.”

  St. Clair nodded. “And I couldn’t agree more, Mr. Ambassador.”

  Lloyd smiled at that. “You sound almost imperial, my lord.”

  “In what way?”

  “The Imperium, Lord St. Clair, is not military, not at heart. It’s a way of thinking, of governing, that recognizes the simple fact that some—a very few—people have the talent, the assertiveness, the gifts to guide Humankind into the future, and that most do not. If you agree that a civilian government is the best course for us to set for ourselves, then you are calling for the establishment of an imperial state.”

  “Ah. And why not a republic?”

  Lloyd snorted. “Come, now. Be realistic, Lord Commander. That peculiar superstition was swept away a century ago, and rightly so. First with the failure of the so-called ‘people’s democratic republics,’ the communist states of the twentieth century. Then with the failure of the American republic fifty years later.”

  “Don’t presume to teach me history, Mr. Lloyd,” St. Clair said. “And, for the record, even the Earth Directorate of today is a representative democracy.”

  “In name, at least.”

  What the hell was Lloyd driving at? “Didn’t you just tell me that the vote in the Legislature represented the ‘will of the people’?”

  “Come, now. The people—the demos of a democracy—they never know what’s best for themselves. Mob rule sweeps the masses along on tides of emotion or greed or selfishness or a tyrant’s rhetoric, not reason. Surely even an unreconstructed democratic constitutionalist like you knows that! The people’s representatives in government know what is best for them.”

  “Ah. And how do these representatives know what’s best?”

  “By their superior education, intelligence, and their top-of-the-line cybernetic links to AI, communication, and megadata sources, of course. They see the larger picture, and have access to all of the necessary information.”

  “Of course.”

  A loud guffaw, a shout, and a crowd’s laughter, followed by a splash caught St. Clair’s attention. Across the room, a nude, hairy man in a bright red sensenhance helmet had been trying to gather together a number of women in his outstretched arms, and then somehow managed to fall full-length into a hot-water pool. St. Clair focused his in-head software on the man as he clambered out of the steaming water. Yes . . . he’d thought so. Lord Gorton Noyer . . . a senior member of the Tellus Legislature.

  “Don’t look now,” St. Clair said, “but Lord Noyer, by virtue of his superior education, intelligence, and cybernetic software . . . is falling-down drunk.”

  Lloyd turned, glaring at Noyer. The demonstration really had been superbly timed, as if deliberately arranged to refute Lloyd’s statement.

  “It’s no secret that I don’t like the idea of the Directorate, my lord,” St. Clair said before the ambassador could respond. “I’m sure every man, woman, and AI on this expedition is aware of that quirk. But I take my orders from the Earth Directorate Navy Command, and I’ve sworn an oath to uphold the Constitution. The Directorate Constitution.”

  Lloyd looked puzzled. “What does that have to do—”

  “My Lord, for the moment I am in command of a military expedition, and so far I’ve seen no reason to assume that the military phase has ended. Those three needle ships in the core, then the things that attacked us—first on the Alderson disk and then in PriFly . . . We have been under attack, my lord, one way or another, ever since we arrived here. You will have your civilian government, with my full cooperation and blessing . . . the moment we are no longer fighting for our lives. Do I make myself clear?”

  Lloyd gave a small, perhaps ironic bow. “You do, Lord Commander. What about the vote to return to the core?”

  “That’s actually an excellent idea, my lord,” St. Clair said.

  Lloyd blinked, startled. “I—what? You agree?”

  “Oh, yes. I’d very much like to establish contact with whoever was piloting that four-hundred-kilometer spacefaring moon. Since the Roceti torpedo has proved not to be a weapon after all, I’d have to say that the intent was peaceful and directed toward establishing contact. Of course, they did vanish after dropping the torpedo off, and we could spend a small eternity searching among the core stars for them, but I think it’s a safe bet that Roceti will summon them when we want them.

  “However, Roceti has also given us a possible target considerably closer—a modulated neutrino source located a fraction of the distance between here and the core, and very nearly on a straight line between us and Sag
A-Star. As such, we will stop at the neutrino beacon. Navigation has given it the rather dull name of NPS-024, and it may be as dead as NPS-076, the disk. But we’ll try out Roceti anyway, see if there’s anyone there to talk to, and then we will return to the vicinity of Sag A-Star if that doesn’t pan out. Does that meet with your approval, my Lord Ambassador?”

  Lloyd scowled at St. Clair’s heavy sarcasm, but after a brief hesitation, he gave a short, curt nod. “It does, sir.”

  “I’m so glad that meets with your approval, my lord. And now, I regretfully must return to my duties. Thank you for the invitation and for a lovely party. Lisa?”

  She looked up from the AI she was talking with, one of Lloyd’s pets, eyebrows arching a question. He replied with a jerk of his head, indicating that he wanted to leave.

  She excused herself and walked over to where he was standing. Lloyd turned away to help himself to something from the bar.

  “Let’s go home,” he told her.

  “I’d like to stay a little longer, Gray.”

  He considered this. Ancient social mores about things like escorting ladies home from a party didn’t apply here, save strictly as outward show. Lisa wasn’t a lady—not in an organic sense—and crime within the colony was unknown.

  Hell, Lisa was a lot stronger than he was, despite her small frame and feminine bearing. Any human assailant who attempted to waylay her would be lucky to get away alive.

  “Sure,” he told her. “I’ll leave you the ’floater. See you at home.”

  He kissed her lightly, then strode out of the residence, summoning a public flyer through his in-head link.

  And no sooner was his request acknowledged than the emergency call came through from Personnel.

  “YOU DIDN’T need to come in and see me personally,” St. Clair said. He was floating in microgravity on Ad Astra’s bridge, facing the odd little H. cael who had asked to talk with him. “You could have used an in-head channel.”

  “No, my lord,” the creature said. “I need to see who I’m talking to.”

  St. Clair nodded his understanding. The celestimorphs were a funny bunch, hard for Original-Genome humans to completely understand. Unable to speak, they possessed all of the in-head hardware most Homo sapiens did, and used electronic telepathy both when talking with others and among themselves. So far as St. Claire knew, they didn’t need to be face-to-face when conversing with their own kind.