Andromedan Dark

by Ian Douglas

  “Take them through into the next segment,” St. Clair said. “You’re following probe 115-Bravo.”

  “Aye, aye, Lord Commander.”

  The Marines would be able to look through some of those massive skeletons, and perhaps cut open the skulls to see what lay within. The drones had manipulator arms built into their casings, but they were limited in what they could do, both in terms of strength and in dexterity.

  While they waited for the Marines to arrive, St. Clair checked in with a number of separate drones sampling the variety of environments. A number were dead and dark. Several were dark and apparently without power, but still possessed atmospheres, including a couple that were oxygen-nitrogen in mixes close to that of Earth’s surface.

  In each, there were signs of advanced civilization, though a few, like the crystalline world St. Clair had seen first, were so alien it was tough to tell what they contained.

  Nowhere they investigated, however, had a still-living civilization. Many had life—vegetation, animals, or things that shared the characteristics of both—but of intelligent life there appeared to be none. St. Clair returned to probe 115-Bravo when the Marines showed up.

  The unit was coming in aboard a quartet of Devil Toads—flying personnel carriers, or FPCs—which hovered on four tilt-jet thrusters, lowering ventral ramps to disgorge platoons of combat-armored Marines. The first two down moved out to establish a defensive perimeter around the site. The second two touched down inside the circle; St. Clair watched through the probe’s imagers as the armored figures, their surfaces shifting and blurring with the optical effects of active nanoflage, spilled out from the landing ramps.

  One bulky figure moved to front and center of St. Clair’s view. “Captain Hanson!” the figure snapped, identifying himself. “Sir!”

  “Good to see you, Captain. Put your men well out, please . . . and have them keep alert. If there are any live critters in here, we want to know it.”

  “They’re Marines, Lord Commander. They’re alert.”

  St. Clair smiled. You did not tell Marines how to do what they were trained to do. “Of course.”

  “Are these the skulls you want cracked, Lord Commander?”

  “Yes they are, Captain. But be gentle, okay? We want whatever is inside to remain intact.”

  “Aye, aye, sir. First time I was ever ordered to smash skulls gently.”

  St. Clair couldn’t tell if the sarcastic remark was addressed to him or to one of the other Marines. It didn’t matter. As Hanson held the skull in place, a staff sergeant used a pen-sized laser cutter to slice open the bone.

  His probe was reading spectroscopic data off the gasses released by the cutter. “Not bone like ours,” Guo pointed out. “Silicon, not calcium. The skeletal structure must be a lot tougher than in Earth-native species.”

  “Makes sense,” Symm put in. “Higher gravity, stronger skeletons.”

  “What makes you think they’re high-gravity organisms?” St. Clair asked. “The spin gravity in that segment is only half a G.”

  “She’s right,” Guo said. “If these guys evolved in half a G, they wouldn’t have needed to plod around on six legs. The local trees look high-G too . . . low and spread out flat. I would guess that this species originally evolved on a super-Earth, under two, maybe three gravities.”

  St. Clair saw the logic of that. Maybe the species had enjoyed moving to a new home with a fraction of the gravity of their homeworld.

  The skull came apart in the Marines’ armored gauntlets. The brain had long since decayed, of course, like the rest of the organism’s soft tissue, but a double handful of metallic and plastic parts lay in the hollow shell.

  “Christ,” Nolan said. “It’s melted! You guys got a little too vicious with your cutter!”

  “Negative, ma’am,” Hanson replied. “Look at it under IR. The interior of the skull and the metal is cold.”

  True. The pieces of technology revealed inside the freshly opened skull were the same temperature as the outside environment—about two degrees Celsius. And yet many of the pieces were little more than half-melted blobs. Some of the plastic had melted or charred as well, as though it had been heated by the metal when it had turned molten.

  And St. Clair felt an inner chill far deeper than the cold of that alien landscape. He was remembering Maria Francesca.

  “Check the other skull!” Gonzalez said.

  “If it is a skull . . .” Guo added; he no longer sounded certain.

  Within a few more moments, the issue had been resolved. These aliens had indeed possessed skulls, with brains, at both ends of their bodies, and those brains had been laced with high-tech implants, probably using a form of nanotechnology, the same as human bionanoelectronics. And as the Marines examined several more of the alien bodies, it became evident that all here had died when their implant hardware had short-circuited and melted.

  “Lord Commander,” Newton said in his head.

  “Eh? Go ahead.”

  “I have established communications, of a sort, with an advanced AI residing within this LIO.”

  “ ‘Of a sort?’ What does that mean?”

  “The AI is functioning at an extremely low level, and experiencing events very slowly. I would estimate that its experience of time is running at approximately one to five hundred, compared with normal human consciousness.”

  “I’ll be right there.”

  With a thoughtclick, St. Clair disconnected himself from the probe’s telemetry and reawakened back in his office on board the Ad Astra. If Newton had something important to tell him, he wanted to be fully present and unencumbered with other data.

  “So what’ve you got?” he asked.

  “Trouble, Lord Commander,” the AI told him. “A very great deal of trouble, and it may already be too late to avoid it.”

  “LIEUTENANT!” GUNNERY Sergeant Paxton called. “We’re getting activity back here in these tunnels!”

  “What kind of activity?”

  “Heat and movement, sir. Lots of it.”

  “On my way.” Lieutenant Greg Dixon, the temporary CO of Charlie Company, 3rd Battalion, waved at a couple of nearby Marines. “Philips! Santiago! With me!”

  “Aye, aye, sir!”

  A company numbered 120 Marines in four platoons normally skippered by a captain, in this case Captain Hanson, but Hanson was back at the “Bone Pile” with two platoons and the three other FPCs. He’d deployed two platoons, First and Third, to check out the tunnels under Dixon’s immediate control. First Company’s CO was Lieutenant Nakamura, who actually had seniority over Dixon, but Nakamura was in sickbay, down with an e-virus, and Sublieutenant Nicholson, his exec, was in charge. Dixon had sent Nicholson’s platoon—thirty Marines—and stayed with Third at the tunnel mouth as reserve.

  The deployment had been by the book, but Dixon was beginning to regret having followed it. His first impulse had been to stay with First Platoon as it explored those black chambers in the rock ahead.

  The Charlie Company’s Marines had been spread out across the hills close to one end of the violet jungle habitat, the end through which they’d come earlier. They’d set up a heavily defended perimeter around the FPC landing zone, an area designated as the “Bone Pile,” for the alien skeletons.

  The hills piled up and up along the slope toward the endcap; the habitat cylinder was much larger than the Tellus habitats—over one hundred kilometers across. The cylinder’s axis emerged from the endcap some fifty kilometers up, where rising hills became mountains, then a vast expanse of bare metal surrounding the hab’s central sunbeam and the airlock through to the next hab over.

  At the base of those mountains, tunnel openings led into the artificial substrate there . . . entrances, perhaps, to service areas or underground storage. With their dissection of the Bone Pile skeletons complete, Hanson had ordered Dixon to take Charlie Company up and scout out the tunnels, checking for signs of life.

  It sounded as though Gunny Paxton had found it.

&
nbsp; The nearest tunnel entrance was half a klick from the Bone Pile, a tall, narrow gateway made of tough plastic, like the local buildings. Inside, the tunnels were quite high, with vaulted ceilings, as befitted a species that must have stood seven meters high at the shoulder. Pipes lined the walls—water mains, possibly . . . or, rather, pipes for the local water equivalent. Philips and Santiago hurried along just behind him, weapons at the ready. Everyone, Dixon thought, was on edge. The attacks at the Alderson disk had unnerved everyone. Scuttlebutt had it that the attackers had come from Andromeda . . .

  . . . which was exactly where they were now.

  The tunnel opening yawned around him, and Dixon led the way in.

  Into the belly of the beast.

  “JUST WHAT are we up against, Newton?” St. Clair asked. Monitor displays around his office showed telemetry feeds from a number of Marines inside the spaghetti. A patrol inside what appeared to be a labyrinth of service and access passageways had encountered signs of life, though whether it was organic or machine was yet to be determined.

  “An alien mind, Lord Commander,” was Newton’s reply. “A very large, very powerful SAI mind. So far, it’s not fully engaged against us. It may not even be consciously aware that we’re here. But I expect that to change momentarily.”

  Humans were still working at the definitions of artificial intelligence. Newton was an AI, of course, and by some definitions he was a super AI, a machine intellect far faster, far more powerful than the mind of any merely organic brain.

  But machine and organic minds were enormously different in both their design and their evolution. All machine intelligences were faster than humans, if what you were measuring was speed of computation. Mathematical calculation came very easily for a machine.

  On the other hand, something a human child did quite naturally—learning to recognize the concept of chair, for instance—came only with great difficulty for a newly assembled robot.

  Most AI specialists—both organic and electronic—agreed that the term super AI should be reserved for artificial intelligence at least an order or two of magnitude more powerful than a system like Newton.

  How intelligence should be measured was still a matter of debate. The most common unit of measure was the number of synapses—the connections among neurons or the electronic equivalent in an AI brain. Humans possessed something like 1 × 1014 synaptic connections in their brains—500 trillion; Newton had 5.4 × 1016 connections, which put him on a par, evidently, with the Kroajid. Ad Astra researchers had estimated that the SAI running the matrioshka brain that housed the Kroajid intelligence used the equivalent of 1017 connections.

  “I estimate,” Newton told St. Clair, “that the alien intelligence exceeds my own by at least three orders of magnitude . . . and possibly four.”

  What would a mind arising out of 1020 neural connections be like? A brain literally a million times more powerful than its human equivalent? St. Clair couldn’t even imagine what it would be like talking to such a mind.

  “Are you saying this mind is resident within the spaghetti artifact?” St. Clair asked.

  Newton hesitated before replying, a mildly startling mimicry of human cognitive processes. “Not quite. The torus knot habitats possess an artificial intelligence approximately equal to the SAI we encountered in the matrioshka brain, with a neural connection equivalence of very roughly 5 × 1017, though the system is operating at such a low level that establishing a precise figure is impossible. Are you with me?”

  “So far. Why is it operating at a low level?”

  “To escape detection by a higher-order intelligence that has invaded it.”

  “Ah . . .”

  “For clarity, I have designated this higher-order intelligence as the ‘Dark Mind.’ It may be the result of a quite extensive technological singularity, possibly one of galactic scale and scope.”

  “You’re relating it to the Kroajid term, to the Andromedan Dark?”

  “Correct. And to dark matter as well. The attacks at the Alderson disk are evidence of a life form that can interact with normal matter only under certain narrow and specific circumstances.”

  A narrative summary opened in St. Clair’s mind, an abstract of what had been learned so far. The torus knot habitats, according to the Roceti database, had in fact been a colony created almost 100 million years ago by a group of star-faring intelligences from the Milky Way, an early attempt at colonizing the approaching Andromedan Galaxy in order to establish contact and trade with sophont species within it—so in that respect, he had been correct. The double-brained titans, it turned out, were known to Roceti as the Agrrth—a technic species that had evolved in a massive, cold world within the Milky Way.

  St. Clair was reminded of accounts of dinosaurs in Earth’s remote past—and how some were supposed to have possessed a nerve plexus in their hips that acted like a second brain and helped them walk. That idea, it had turned out, was a myth, but the Agrrth evidently had evolved from large, browsing animals with just this sort of neural arrangement. A hundred million years ago, as Andromeda loomed huge in the night skies of worlds across the Milky Way, the two-headed Agrrth had been among the principle leaders of galactic civilization, the founders of a rich and flourishing culture throughout the home Galaxy. According to Roceti, there’d been at least a dozen colony systems founded by the Agrrth and others within the outlying spiral arms of Andromeda.

  But 30 million years ago, contact with the colony—called Ea Hovjin Neh in the records—had been lost. At about the same time, attacks by Andromedan raiders had begun increasing dramatically within the home Galaxy, and nothing was done.

  The slow-living AI’s memories had recorded the colony’s history . . . and its fall. The colony had been invaded by a powerful AI. The super AI running Ea Hovjin Neh had attempted to fight off the invader, but ultimately had, in effect, gone underground. The civilizations living within Ea Hovjin Neh’s tangle of habitats had, one by one, gone extinct.

  And the habitat mind had survived by reducing its clock speed to a tick every couple of thousand years, too slow for the Dark Mind to even notice that it was there. Those ticks were also irregular. Nothing to show an intelligent pattern.

  “So how did you talk to it?” St. Clair wanted to know.

  “There was a—call it a watchstander program. A marginally intelligent subroutine that did nothing but watch.”

  “Watch for what?”

  “For other AIs, mostly. When it sensed my presence, it woke up the main SAI. I suppose that is a reasonable description of what happened. It sequestered a part of itself to carry out negotiations with me, as I did with it. We interacted entirely through our respective virtual compartmentalizations. This reduced our mutual vulnerability to the Dark Mind—or each other.”

  “How does the Dark Mind detect us?”

  “Heat, apparently—the waste heat emitted by large-scale computing, for example. And it may have means of detecting electron flow in circuits. According to Ea Hovjin Neh, the Dark Mind actually somehow feeds on electronic minds, though whether this is merely a draining of electricity from active circuits, or if this means something more involving memory and CPU tasking, I have not yet determined.”

  “But, if this Dark Mind is in fact dark matter—”

  “The reality,” Newton told him, “may be far more alien than our best attempts to understand it would allow. Clearly, these organisms can sense us through, or from, higher dimensions, for example.”

  “The things that attacked us on the Alderson disk?”

  “Exactly.”

  “We’re going to need confirmation of all of this,” St. Clair said. “And, just as urgently, a way of fighting back.”

  A SHRILL scream sounded over Dixon’s command channel, and his in-head telemetry on Private Solinsky flashed red.

  “Solinsky! Solinsky, what’s happening!”

  The scream cut off short . . . but other screams and yells blocked the channel, and Dixon heard the heavy snap and whine of port
able laser weapons cycling, the far heavier thump of rapid-fire explosive rounds. “Damn it! What’s happening? Nicholson! Report!”

  Sublieutenant Nicholson, First Platoon’s CO, was in charge of the men Dixon had sent into the tunnels. “They’re coming out of . . . tunnels!”

  “You mean they’re in the tunnels?”

  “I mean they’re coming out of fucking tunnels. Tunnels out of the fucking air!”

  Nicholson’s voice ended in a piercing shriek, and his telemetry cut off.

  Damn!

  The passageway through which Dixon was running took a sharp turn, then opened into a large and labyrinthine underground chamber, a high-tech cavern with a domed ceiling so high it had clouds, lit by sunbeams shrouded in mist high overhead.

  Dixon had seen recordings of the thing that had attacked Ad Astra’s CAS—the black, fluid shapes spilling out of thin air, growing, merging, splitting apart, constantly and impossibly shifting in size and shape. A dozen gateways yawned in midair, with writhing worm-tangles exploding from each.

  Is that what we’re facing now?

  Gunny Paxton was lugging an M-410 autocannon, a massive, high-cyclic weapon firing magnetically accelerated 15mm explosive shells. Most of those shells were vanishing into the maw of the extra-dimensional openings, however, passing right through the black horrors without effect.

  Beside him, Corporal Donaldson staggered, dropped her weapon, and scrabbled wildly at her helmet. An instant later, the helmet came apart as one of the black masses emerged from inside her head, then peeled open the rest of her armor from the inside out. Nearby, a screaming Private Fredericks was surrounded by three black spheres that closed on him, enveloped him, plucked him up off the cavern floor struggling . . . and vanished. He reappeared a moment later, everted, armor and body somehow flipped inside out in a spray of blood and gore.