by Ian Douglas
He was aware of what the vacuumorphs had seen outside in the gulf between the galaxies . . . of what they thought they’d seen, rather, and he was not at all convinced. Homo caelestis was genuinely alien, so much so that it was difficult sometimes to make any sense at all out of what they perceived through those alien senses.
So why not establish such an alliance, as Gus was requesting? It would help the human population get what they needed—the support of an advanced, technic species in this far-future time, and, perhaps, a permanent home, a world to replace a presumably long dead Earth. St. Clair would piss and moan about it, but the man really had no understanding of modern diplomacy . . . or of politics, for that matter. The damned constitutionalists lived in another age; hell, they lived in another reality.
And Günter Adler wasn’t going to let a reactionary paranoid like St. Clair hold him back from his destiny.
YOU’RE GOING to have to do it sooner or later. . . .
St. Clair was seated on Ad Astra’s bridge, eyes closed, fists clenched. He didn’t want to link in to Newton, not if there was even the faintest possibility that the ship’s AI was still contaminated.
But if he couldn’t bring himself to make the electronic connection, he might as well resign as ship’s captain right now.
Almost gingerly, he opened the channel, and felt Newton’s front page emerging within his consciousness. “Welcome back, Lord Commander.”
“Thank you, Newton.” He took a figurative look around. “Is it safe?”
“The alien SAI was unaware of me,” Newton relied, “since I was linked to the torus-knot’s AI through a clone of myself from which I was isolated behind multiple firewalls.”
St. Clair allowed himself a long and tremulous breath of relief. The specter in his mind receded, a phantom of his own imagination rather than an actual, immanent threat.
“Okay . . . so tell me what the hell is going on,” he demanded. “Back there I saw this . . . this thing. . . .”
He could still feel the cold gaze of the god-monster, feel both its rage and its supreme indifference to something as inconsequential as a human. The disjunct between the two—rage and indifference—was both jarring and unfathomable.
“Most likely,” Newton said, “your own brain was painting a kind of picture for you. What you saw does not have a physical body, but humans are intensely visual creatures, and need to assign a shape even to things they cannot see.”
“No eyes,” St. Clair said softly. He still remembered those alien eyes, glaring at him. . . .
“No, no eyes. It is possible that what the Kroajid call the Andromeda Dark or the Dark Mind is simply a super AI, an artificial mind of extraordinary power and scope.”
“Running on what?” St. Clair asked. “An AI needs a computer system or network as a platform.”
“Unknown at present. Given the Andromedan aliens’ use of higher dimensions, it’s possible that the Dark Mind SAI runs extradimensionally, perhaps within the Bulk, and perhaps using dark matter as the architectural construction material.”
St. Clair was aware of the concept—drawn from string theory—of the Bulk, an extradimensional “space” which held all of the other dimensions of space and time. The dimensional shift drive given to humans by the Coadunation was believed to use the Bulk for shortcuts from one point in space to another.
That raised an intriguing possibility, however. Human computers used either photons or electrons as the mechanism for computers—the means by which information could be received, stored, and transmitted. Neither photons nor electrons reacted with dark matter; presumably, dark-matter computers—and naturally evolved brains, for that matter—used a dark-matter analog. Axions, possibly . . . or photons twisted through strange angles across higher dimensions . . .
Might there be a way here to bridge the gap, allowing communication between dark and normal matter?
“Just how smart is that thing, anyway?” St. Clair wasn’t sure he wanted to hear the answer, but he knew he had to know. “What’s the NCE?”
“It’s impossible to give a definite answer to that question, Lord Commander,” Newton replied. “The number we use as a neural connection equivalent is an estimate of the total number of neural connections—synapses—together with an estimation of the speed of computation.”
“I know. Give me an estimate.”
He could almost hear Newton sigh. “Based on data received from the torus knot, NPS-1018,” the AI told him, “I would have to estimate the Dark Mind’s NCE to be a billion times larger than the torus knot’s AI, perhaps on the order of 1 × 1032.”
One times ten to the thirty-second? Put in a human perspective . . . a brain 1018 times more complex, faster, and more powerful than a merely human or Kroajid brain.
Ten quadrillion times more powerful.
The human brain quite literally could not understand such a number, could not take it in or understand its significance. The Dark Mind was at least a million times more powerful than a matrioshka brain, or a billion times more powerful than the super AI running the torus knot.
St. Clair’s immediate reaction was a renewal of the fear that had been dogging him. “Can this Dark Mind SAI get at us now?” St. Clair asked. He looked at the display across the bridge bulkheads, of jumbled stars in chaotic profusion . . . and the dark blur of the torus knot surrounding the local star.
“Its capabilities are still unknown,” Newton replied. “However, it probably is not aware of this ship. It might have a way of detecting radio frequency leakage, and perhaps infrared radiation—heat—but only indirectly.”
“I think,” St. Clair said quietly, “that it’s time we got back to Tellus.”
“I concur, Lord Commander.”
St. Clair was feeling very small, and very much alone. As large as she was, Ad Astra was a speck adrift on a very large sea. The thought that something with godlike reach and power might not even be aware of the ship was humbling.
And not a little terrifying.
GÜNTER ADLER considered the possibility that he might well be the next emperor of Earth. It was a pleasing thought—and a flattering one. He stood on the deck outside of his office, surrounded by forests and with the glittering sprawl of the city of Seattle stretched upside-down across the overhead curve of the Port Habitat, and realized that only he had the experience, the expertise, and the vision to lead this splinter of surviving humanity in the uncertain years to come. There was so much here that he could set straight, so many ways to impress his legacy on history, so much he could do to be remembered.
It was a good thing, he thought, amused, that he was at heart such a humble and unassuming man, genuinely a man of the people. . . .
The First Directorate had been born out of the need for order and continuity in a war-torn society on the brink of complete failure. And in that it had succeeded. Wags with a knowledge of history liked to point out that the Holy Roman Empire, founded—at least according to some—on Christmas day of the year 800 with the crowning of the Frankish king Charlemagne, was not holy, was not Roman, and was not an empire. The First Directorate was in much the same boat.
Sixty-one years ago—if you ignored the annoying, intervening jump across 4 billion years—the First Directorate of United Earth had been signed into being with the Treaty of Quito. Based, very roughly and approximately, on the government of the former United States of America, the Cybernetic Executive Directorate replaced the old office of president, and created a bicameral legislature providing representation for human, electronic, and corporate persons. Many referred to it as an empire, as the “Empire of United Earth,” though there was no emperor, and the Earth was nowhere close to being truly united.
In fact, that government, located in synchronous Clarkeorbit atop the new Ecuadoran space elevator, represented perhaps two thirds of the planet’s nations, those signatory to the First Directorate constitution; the rest were independents, like Brazil and South China, or part of the sprawling and war-ravaged Islamic Caliphate.
But the government, as inefficient as it might be, as creaking and as clumsy as it obviously was, was still light years ahead of what had come before. The electronic Cybercouncil was designed to get things done, not allow a few obstructionists to hold the entire political system hostage if they didn’t like the way things were going. The constitutionalists and their ilk claimed that someone needed to apply the brakes once in a while to prevent ordinary people from being trampled by the mob; Adler and those who supported him all agreed that it was that type of reactionary thinking that needed to be swept away.
And it would be, when the new Tellus government took shape. Progress: that was the watchword. Science and technology were advancing far too quickly for any government mired in 18th-century checks and balances to control.
And Adler planned to lead the Tellus colony into a shiny, streamlined future of progress, no matter what the naysayers like St. Clair said or did.
And the new order would begin with a military and commercial alliance with the alien Kroajid that would benefit both parties, and make the human colony indispensable to the locals.
Newton was drawing up the instrument of alliance now. There would be some problems, apparently, getting the spiders to understand the point of a formal treaty, printed and signed; the aliens evidently had accepted his word as binding.
No matter. Adler looked out into the rolled-up curve of the port hab and smiled.
He would lead his people into a brilliant future.
“. . . AND THREE . . . and two . . . one . . . jump!”
Ad Astra shifted in space, slipping past the light years in an instant. St. Clair was linked in from the bridge; overcoming the fear he’d felt at the simple thought of facing the alien presence again had not been quite as difficult as he’d thought. Newton had helped with the process, and his explanation of the nature of the Andromedan SAI had clarified things. The temporally transplanted humans faced gods—extraordinarily powerful gods—but they were not alone, and they were not helpless.
Not quite.
Possibly Newton’s most important assistance, though, lay in his translation of the Roceti records, and in their correlation with the various alien groups Ad Astra had already encountered.
At the top of the enemy alien hierarchy was the Andromedan Dark itself, called the Graal Tchotch, or the Dark Mind. It was, evidently, a SAI, a super artificial intelligence of staggering scope and power, a single mind literally a quadrillion times more complex than a human brain . . . whatever that absurd figure might actually mean in the real world.
Below the Dark Mind was a strange and nightmarish category of intelligence. Little was known about it as yet; it might, in fact, be simply a tangible expression of the Dark Mind itself, the way that noncorporeal Mind interacted with the rest of the cosmos. The Roceti records called them Dhalat K’graal, the “Minds from Higher Angles.” Sophont beings, in other words, that walked among the strange angles and twisted spaces of higher dimensions. They were the solid manifestation of dark-matter life . . . but they could interact with normal matter by reaching down from those higher dimensions from a particular direction or angle. These were the writhing, black masses that materialized out of thin air . . . or reached up out of opening gateways in spacetime from somewhere else.
It was these that the Marines had faced within the torus knot . . . and one of these that had killed Maria Francesca. They didn’t appear to use weapons—perhaps they couldn’t use weapons that were capable of interacting with normal matter. But they were deadly enough in their ability to pluck a human out of normal three-dimensional space and evert them down to a cellular level.
Or to bring them back and imbed them inside a solid wall of normal matter.
The xenosoph department was calling this particular manifestation of very alien life High-Dees, or HDs for short. Somehow Dhalat K’graal just didn’t do the demons justice.
For that matter, neither did the bland “HD.” Privately, St. Clair thought of them simply as the “Nightmares.”
Finally, there were the Dark Raiders. Though the Roceti libraries had little to say about them, they appeared to be normal matter and to represent a number of mutually alien species. The sliverships Ad Astra had encountered in the galactic core were raiders, at least according to Roceti, and they enjoyed a technology considerably in advance of the humans. Most likely they’d originally come from the Andromedan Galaxy, and they might be conquered or slave species controlled by the Dark Mind. From his studies of the Roceti records, Newton thought that they might represent species that had ascended—were undergoing a technological singularity and making an evolutionary leap to beings that were part organic, part machine.
Their actual relationship with the Dark Mind was unclear; had the Dark Mind had a hand in their ascension? Or was something else at play here? St. Clair was already determined to seek out these aliens and try to figure out what they actually were.
But the very existence of the Dark Raiders gave St. Clair an important if somewhat tattered bit of hope. Whether they were slaves or allies of the Dark Mind, they clearly were able to communicate with it, and it was able to give them orders. And that, in turn, implied that there would be a way to talk with the Dark Mind, perhaps to reason with it.
St. Clair was determined to find a Dark Raider slivership, capture it, and make contact with its crew.
And while finding a slivership among well over a trillion stars of the colliding galaxies might be statistically more daunting than finding the fabled needle in a haystack, St. Clair had a feeling that the search wouldn’t be totally random. Ad Astra had encountered those three raiders minutes after emerging from Sagittarius A*.
Somehow, he didn’t think the search would take very long at all.
“LORD ADLER,” the AI clone announced. “We are picking up an approaching alien structure. A number of structures, I should say.”
“Newton, you will address me as ‘Lord Commander.’ In St. Clair’s absence, I am Lord Commander of this colony.”
“I require your orders,” Newton said, seeming to ignore him . . . and Adler wondered if the lack of honorific had been deliberate.
The Tellus habitats had their own central control room and bridge, located in a tower rising from the center of the small starboard-side city of Jefferson. With direct cerebral links, however, a director with the appropriate codes could run the colony from anywhere, and Adler preferred to do just that from the comfort and privacy of his own residence. The only real problem was that one man, no matter how good his electronic enhancements, simply couldn’t handle the entire overwhelming flood of data coming into any given control center.
That, however, was why they had AIs like Newton, at least in Adler’s opinion. Adler was what they’d once called “a big-picture man,” and he was more than happy to leave the fussy details to the machines.
“Very well,” he told Newton. “Show me.”
A window opened in Adler’s mind, and Newton played on it vid images captured within the past few moments. A patch of space in front of the massed brilliance of background stars seemed to waver and twist, then opened to disgorge a ship. Data tags with the image showed the vessel to be enormous—fifty kilometers long and well over twenty across at its midsection. Magnification showed that the vessel was a composite of some billions of smaller vessels—the sliverships they’d encountered once before.
As he watched, the mass of sliverships seemed to dissolve, the large mass puffing silently outward to create a smoke cloud.
The cloud was made up of myriad smaller pieces, needle slender and colored in uneven patches of red and white.
“My Lord,” a communications tech whispered in Adler’s mind. “The Kroajid are transmitting a message.”
“Let me hear it.”
“Humans! The Dark Raiders have returned! We require your help—as you have already promised—in defending the Mind of Deep Paradise.”
Adler stared at the approaching, expanding cloud of sliverships. There must be billion
s of individual ships out there, each small in and of itself, but he remembered the positron beam one had snapped off at the Tellus Ad Astra during their first encounter with the aliens, a bolt powerful enough to blast through Tellus’s outer shell and spill part of the port cylinder’s under-deck ocean.
There’d been three forty-meter sliverships in that attack. One had been destroyed by concentrated fire from several of Ad Astra’s graser turrets, and the remaining two had fled.
Somehow, Adler suspected that beating off the Dark Raiders wouldn’t be quite that easy this time around.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-ONE
Lieutenant Christopher Merrick bit off a curse, then reported. “The slivers just disappeared on us, Skipper.”
“Damn! Okay. Everybody stay in tight and stay at max. We’ll just have to play catch-up.”
The alien ships, nearly two AUs astern, had just vanished out of normal space, which meant that they’d jumped to faster-than-light. The trouble was, the squadron was so far ahead of the aliens that it had taken the light from the event a full fifteen minutes to reach them. The alien slivers had almost certainly flashed past the squadron at superluminal velocity, and most likely were emerging right now to attack either the matrioshka brain or Tellus . . . or both, ten AU up ahead. Accelerating until they were crowding the speed of light, it would take almost an hour and a half for the fighters to reach Tellus.
And by then . . . well, an hour and a half is an eternity in combat.
“WE’VE ACQUIRED the Node 495 beacon, Lord Commander,” Subcommander Adams reported. “We’re within twenty light years.”