Dark Mind

by Ian Douglas

  “Geneva is saying the loss of their carriers in the civil war has left them vulnerable,” Sharpe said, “and that we’re going to have to pick up the slack.”

  “Exactly what are we supposed to do out there?” Koenig demanded. “If the Rosette Aliens are as powerful as we think, a carrier battlegroup isn’t going to do diddly-squat.”

  “Maybe not, sir,” Armitage told him. “But they need help looking for survivors—both from the orbital colony that’s been lost, and from the ships they’ve sent to find out what happened to the monitor Himmelschloss and her escorts.”

  “Okay . . .”

  “Ultimately, they want to mount a large expeditionary force that can grab the Rosette entity’s attention and force them to talk with us.”

  “I can’t get away from the fear that what we’re going to do is force them to swat us like an insect.”

  “Maybe. But they’re twelve and a half light years away, Mr. President. That is entirely too close for comfort.”

  “Agreed. What else?”

  “We need a carrier group for Konstantin’s suggested mission,” Vandenberg said. He frowned. “Personally, I don’t think that Tabby’s Star is critical, or even relevant, but Konstantin seems to think it is.”

  “Konstantin is strongly suggesting that we send America out there,” Koenig said.

  “And maybe Konstantin can’t always get what it wants,” Armitage said. “My recommendation would be to send something small and unobtrusive out there . . . a frigate or a light cruiser, maybe. Let’s see what we’re dealing with before we commit a carrier battlegroup.

  “And we need at least one carrier group for what we’re calling Operation Tripwire,” Armitage said. He gestured, and an area of space around Sol glowed red. “Deep recon and perimeter defense.”

  “I didn’t realize this was an actual operation,” Koenig said. “Why is it necessary?”

  “We are in an extremely vulnerable position with the Rosette Aliens, Mr. President,” Vandenberg told him. “They appear to have dispatched a large force all the way from Omega Centauri to here,” he said, pointing at the map, “Kapteyn’s Star. From sixteen thousand light years away . . . to twelve.”

  “That’s like going from the far side of the country all the way to our front porch in one step, sir,” Neil Eskow, the secretary of science, added, “and it makes it highly likely that they will detect Earth, Earth’s civilization, by picking up our stray RF leakage, if nothing else. We could be fairly confident that we were lost in the forest, invisible, before. Now, though . . . not so much.”

  “Exactly,” Vandenberg said. “That’s why we’d like to send at least two battlegroups to Heimdall, but we also want at least one more close in to Earth, serving as a tactical reserve. If they send another force toward us, either from the Black Rosette or from Heimdall, we need to know about it, and we need to have a force to block them.”

  In his head, Koenig tallied up the number of carrier battlegroups discussed so far. “Okay . . . so at this point we need five to six battlegroups . . . and we have four available. Am I understanding you people correctly?”

  “That’s about the size of it, sir,” Armitage said.

  “Okay. Why do we specifically need that many star-carrier battlegroups? We have Marine carriers, like the Inchon and the Nassau. And we have lots of naval task forces built around railgun cruisers or battleships. Why can’t we use those?”

  Armitage sighed, and spread his hands. “Mr. President, you of all people know that a star carrier is the single best naval asset we have for the widest range of missions, bar none. Showing the flag, projection of force, doing maximum damage to an enemy’s system infrastructure, planetary bombardment, responding to the unexpected, the unknown . . . A carrier’s fighter squadrons project force across an entire star system, and can do so at close to the speed of light. They can patrol, engage in deep recon, investigate deep-space RF leakage, protect the fleet. Simply put, no other warship can do the job as effectively.

  “We do have Marine carriers, yes, but they only carry two or three squadrons, not six. They also carry at least a battalion of Marines for ground ops, and we don’t like keeping them locked up in a tin can for months at a time. Railgun cruisers can pound a planet’s surface infrastructure and operate against the enemy’s large-scale space-based structures, but they’re not as flexible when it comes to reconnaissance.

  “Sir, we just don’t have enough of the ships that count.”

  Koenig nodded. Normally, although the president was the commander in chief of the USNA’s military, he or she refrained from direct involvement in the strategic planning. The president had other things to do besides micromanage the Navy.

  But Armitage was an old friend and close confidant, and—as Armitage had just pointed out—Koenig himself had had years of experience commanding Navy ships. His experience counted for something. Counted far more than the mere fact of his office.

  The hard part was resisting the urge to meddle. Standing here, looking down into the three-dimensional swirl of suns and fleet icons, it was easy to imagine himself back in America’s combat command center, giving orders to deploy the battlegroup.

  He had to throttle the impulse, to hold himself back.

  That didn’t mean he didn’t still have questions.

  “So what are the currently scheduled deployments?” Koenig asked.

  “America and Declaration were slated for Omega Centauri, Mr. President,” Vandenberg said. “Lexington for Heimdall. Constitution . . . well, we could cancel her tour into Ophiuchi space—maybe replace her with a couple of heavy cruiser groups—and instead deploy her here in the Sol System, both to keep an eye on the Confederation and to watch for the Rosetters coming toward us from Kapteyn’s Star. I think my recommendation is to forget about Tabby’s Star . . . at least for now. It’s been there for over fifteen hundred years, it’ll be there for a while longer.”

  “We do have several task forces available,” Armitage added. “No more available carriers, but we have five ships organized around the railgun cruiser Decatur at Chiron. Seven with the Porter at Tau Ceti. Four ships with the Jones at Osiris. And five ships with the Rogers at Cerridwen. We might be able to pull one of them back for redeployment to Tabby’s Star, and maybe use another to beef up our forces here at home.”

  “Konstantin strongly recommended a carrier group be deployed to Tabby’s Star,” Koenig said, thoughtful. “He was somewhat . . . insistent about it. And he suggested—again strongly—that we send America.”

  “We just don’t have the naval assets to stretch that far, Mr. President,” Armitage replied.

  Almost . . . almost, Koenig took a breath to deliver a sharp and direct order: forget about watching the Pan-Europeans, send the Lexington to Heimdall, Declaration to Omega Centauri, deploy the Constitution as strategic reserve, and send America out to investigate Tabby’s Star. That should work. . . .

  But he would not micromanage his people. “Gentlemen . . . I appreciate you keeping me up-to-date. The decision is, of course, entirely yours. Just keep me up-to-date on your plans.”

  “Thank you, Mr. President,” Armitage said, staring into the layers of holographic stars. “I think . . .”

  But Koenig did wonder what he would tell Konstantin. The colossal machine intelligence would know what the decision would be almost as soon as it was made, but Koenig sometimes felt uncomfortable having to justify human decisions to an artificial intelligence.

  He wondered, often, who was really in charge.

  Chapter Nine

  5 December 2425

  TC/USNA CVS America

  Flag Bridge

  1512 hours, TFT

  Stardrive technology had improved tremendously in the past two decades. When Gray had been a young and uncertain lieutenant strapping on one of the old SG-92 Starhawk fighters, a capital ship like America could manage an Alcubierre rate of between 1.7 and 1.9 light years per day, and the 210 light-year voyage in from Texaghu Resch took between three and
four months.

  But drive engineers had continued their tinkering and, more important, powerful AIs had turned their artificial minds to the problem of increasing drive efficiency. Currently, the most powerful capital ships could manage fifteen light years per day, and could make the passage from Texaghu Resch to Sol in two weeks. Some smaller warships—the frigates and destroyers and gunboats—in a counter-intuitive reversal of ancient maritime technology—were a bit slower, the consequence of having smaller power plants and less available vacuum energy dragged from the Void.

  Riding a gravity wave of her own making, then, America swept into the outer Solar System fourteen days after her departure from the TRGA at Texaghu Resch. In a soundless nova of photons released from the tightly bunched space that held her, America dropped into normal space once again, emerging some eight astronomical units from Sol.

  That was another engineering improvement, Gray thought as familiar stars became visible around a shrunken yellow sun. The Alcubierre Drive required what the engineers called a flat metric—space not warped by the gravity of nearby worlds or stars—in order to gather a closed pocket of spacetime about itself and accelerate. Two decades ago, forty AUs was pretty much the limit for emergence near a star of Sol’s mass; now the limit was five AUs—about the distance of Jupiter from the sun. America’s navigation watch had emerged a hair early because Jupiter currently lay close to the straight-line course linking the TRGA with Earth, just thirty light-minutes ahead and slightly off to one side.

  Only three of the original twelve ships of the battlegroup had accompanied America back to Sol—the heavy cruisers Deutschland and Bunker Hill; and the missile cruiser Burke. The badly damaged Leland and Verdun, plus the monitor Ceres, had remained at DT-1, while the slower destroyers Diaz and Mattson and the battlegroup’s three frigates would be arriving in a few more days. Normally, the battlegroup’s metaspace velocity would have been limited to the pace of its slowest vessel so that all could emerge together, but Gray’s orders had been to get the star carrier back to Sol in as short a period as was possible. America, he knew, was scheduled to be taking part in the planned recon-in-force of Omega Centauri, and there was scuttlebutt that the star carrier would be given some upgrades first at SupraQuito.

  And, of course, there was the minor epidemic on board to consider. Three more people had come down with cold symptoms, bringing the total number of those infected to eleven.

  Eleven out of almost five thousand crew members was not terrifying in and of itself, but America’s medical AI had not yet been able to isolate the contagious element, and that most certainly was. Paramycoplasmid, the medical AI had said. Unfortunately, after that initial identification, the organisms had refused attempts to culture them.

  It was almost as if the bacteria were in hiding. . . .

  “Admiral?” Captain Gutierrez said, interrupting dark thoughts. She’d actually come aft to the flag bridge to speak with him personally, rather than using implant-to-implant electronic telepathy . . . a precaution against accidental eavesdropping. “The alert has been transmitted. Sixty-one minutes one-way.”

  “Good. Thank you, Sara.” No one else was within earshot. He could drop some of the formality of rank and command.

  “You realize that we’re going to be quarantined . . . possibly for a long, long time.”

  “Yes, I do. But there’s no alternative, really. Not until the medicAIs either decide this bug is harmless, or find the right nano to neutralize it.”

  America’s medicAI might so far have failed to isolate the organism, but Gray was confident that once the full weight of Earth’s medical infrastructure was brought to bear on the problem, it wouldn’t be long before a solution was found.

  It had better be found . . . or America and her crew would not be allowed to set foot on Earth—or any other human planet or colony—again.

  Jupiter hung against the starfields ahead, a brilliant white star a few degrees to the left of the wan and diminished sun. America’s instruments announced the arrival of the Deutschland into normal space, and then, a moment later, the Burke.

  “Make sure a complete report gets transmitted to the rest of the battlefleet, Sara.”

  “Already done, Admiral. As soon as we picked them up.”

  “Good.”

  “Orders?”

  “Commence acceleration toward Earth . . . five hundred gravities. They’ll come out and meet us before we get there, but I imagine they’ll want us either in Earth orbit or at Mars.”

  “Will do.” She hesitated. “Admiral?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Is it true the infection is alien?”

  “That’s what the medicAI thinks. It called it a paramycoplasmid.”

  “What the hell is that?”

  “I had to download the definition myself. It’s in the ship’s database if you’re interested. The short story is that Mycoplasma is a genus of bacteria . . . Earth bacteria. It’s characterized by no cell walls outside the cell membrane, which makes them resistant to drugs or nano designed to attack cell walls. Some are pathogens in humans; one type causes a kind of pneumonia. Paramycoplasmid just means it’s like mycoplasmids. I gather from the medicAI that it doesn’t have a cell wall either.”

  “So why can’t they find it?”

  “Good question.” Gray opened a shared window . . . a view within a tube crowded with dark-hued wheel shapes—like doughnuts with flattened centers instead of holes. The inside of the tube itself was made up of distinct, roughly hexagonal shapes, like closely fitted brickwork. A scattering of tiny, translucent spheres raced ahead of the camera recording the scene, like minute bubbles each a fraction of the size of the larger shapes. They outran the reach of the camera’s lights and vanished into shadows. “That was what America’s medicAI picked up in me during my physical,” Gray said. “The big tire-shapes are red blood cells . . . each about five microns across. Those little spheres are each a tenth of a micron across . . . a fiftieth the size of a red cell.”

  “They’re tiny.”

  “Roger that. They’re cocci, which means they’re spherical rather than rod-shaped. About the same size as terrestrial mycoplasmids . . . and those are the smallest true bacteria we know. Viruses and nanobacteria are smaller . . . but they’re not really alive.”

  “And the medicAI couldn’t find them again, after that one sighting?”

  “Correct. I gather they’ve also been detected through some chemistries, but they haven’t been able to culture them. And they’ll need to, in order to find out what makes them tick.”

  “Sexually transmitted . . .”

  “Um . . . yeah. Although one of the ship’s docs told me they’re assuming it spreads through any kind of contact . . . possibly within liquids. Saliva, skin secretions . . . If so, they could spread just by means of breathing in droplets in the air.”

  Gutierrez actually pulled back a bit at that . . . then relaxed. If the alien invaders spread by means of airborne droplets, every person on board the ship likely had already been infected. Air was screened for contagious organisms, of course, as it was recirculated through the ship, but the nanofilters had to know what they were looking for to block it.

  It was a hell of a problem, and not one they could do much about. . . .

  At least the illness itself wasn’t bad . . . not yet, anyway. Gray still felt like he had a cold, with congestion, headache, and sore throat. Sick bay was treating the symptoms while they continued searching for the organism causing them.

  But while researching mycoplasmids, he’d also seen an article about the Blood Death, a plague that had killed a billion and a half people in the turbulent last years of the twenty-first century.

  That one had started off as a case of flu too. . . .

  TC/USNA CVS Lexington

  Approaching Heimdall

  Kapteyn’s Star

  1710 hours, GMT

  The star carrier Lexington emerged from its tightly warped sphere of metaspace five AUs out from the ruby-red pin
point of Kapteyn’s Star. Captain Terrance Bigelow was on the bridge. His second-in-command was Commander Laurie Taggart, newly assigned to the ship as executive officer.

  The Lady Lex had only completed her shakedown cruise two weeks earlier, and had received her orders for her first active-duty deployment four days ago, on December 1. A full kilometer long, she was bigger and more massive than Taggart’s last ship, America. Until the Lexington had launched, America had been the biggest warship in the USNA fleet.

  Along with the heavy Pan-European cruiser Valiant and the USNA Marine transport Marne, she’d made the passage slowly—twelve light years in two days—to accommodate her slower escorts: the destroyers Falk and Ramirez, and the frigates Gottlieb, Carruthers, and Ramaputra. The other ships were dropping one by one into the reach of Lexington’s scanners as the light of their emergence reached the carrier.

  “There,” Bigelow said sharply. “That’s the sucker. . . .”

  “Yeah, but what the hell is it?” Lieutenant Donahue, jacked into the Lex’s helm, wanted to know.

  “It’s big,” Taggart suggested. “Gods . . . it’s big.”

  And is this what you’ve been waiting for? she asked herself.

  The gas giant Bifrost hung suspended against the panorama of space ahead, a sharp crescent bisected by edge-on rings of silver-gold. Beyond the crescent’s bow, Kapteyn’s Star gleamed a deep ruby red, a star’s pinpoint of light so small that the disk wasn’t visible to unaugmented vision. Off to one side, a smaller crescent bowed away from the tiny sun, its poles aglow with ghostly auroras.

  Space around gas giant, moon, and star was filled with something like mist, tenuous and translucent, all but invisible to the unaided eye. Within that mist, Taggart could make out complex shapes, alien geometries formed by the haze itself. Arcs and beams and more complex shapes appeared to interconnect the three, as the ship’s sensors detected other, more solid forms adrift in the haze. As her eyes gained experience picking out the subtle details, she began to see something like a gossamer web stretching across space, lines and curves of light barely visible against the void.