by Ian Douglas
“What do we have on the system?” Bigelow asked the Lexington’s AI.
Kapteyn’s Star
Star: Kapteyn’s Star
Coordinates: RA: 05h 11m 40.58s Dec: -45° 01' 06.29" D 3.91p
Alternate names: VZ Pictoris, GJ 191, HD 33793, CD-45°1841
Type: sdM1
Mass: 0.274 Sol; Radius: 0.292 Sol; Luminosity: 0.012 Sol
Surface temperature: ~3570°K
Age: 11 billion years
Apparent magnitude (Sol): 8.85; Absolute magnitude: 10.89
Distance from Sol: 12.76 ly
Planetary system: 4 planets, including 1 Jovian and 1 sub-Jovian bodies, 2 rocky/terrestrial planets, plus numerous dwarf planets and known satellites, with numerous planetoids and cometary bodies . . .
Kapteyn’s Star Planetary System
Kapteyn’s Star I, Himinbjorg:
Planetary Type: Warm superterran
D: 0.168 au; e: 0.21; P: 48.62d; M: 4.9 Earth; R: 4.21 Earth; G: 3.1 Earth
Kapteyn’s Star II, Fornsigtuna:
Planetary Type: Cold superterran
D: 0.311 au; e: 0.16; P: 121.5d; M: 7 Earth; R: 6.16 Earth; G: 5.72 Earth
Kapteyn’s Star III, Bifrost:
Planetary Type: Superjovian gas giant
D: 5.1 au; e: 0.13; P: 22y; M: 2.3 Jupiter; R: 2.1 Jupiter; G: 3.73 Earth
Moons: 67; One, Heimdall, is Earthlike.
Kapteyn’s Star IV, Thrymheim:
Planetary Type: Neptunian ice giant
D: 8.9 au; e: 0.46; P: 50.71y; M: 0.65 Jupiter; R: 0.52 Jupiter; G: 1.73 Earth Orbital artifacts include captive black hole of planetary mass.
There was a lot more, but Taggart focused on the largest moon of Bifrost, the glacier-haunted location of the enigmatic Etched Cliffs.
Kapteyn’s Star III f; Bifrost f; Heimdall:
Planetary Type: Cold near-terrestrial gas giant satellite
D: 1,085,300 km; e: 0.001; P: 7.8d; M: 0.97 Earth; R: 1.12 Earth; G: 0.94 Earth; ATM: N2, CO2, NH3, CO, SO2 at 425.2 millibars; T: ~-50° to -5° C.
Notes: Kapteyn’s Star was discovered to be an extremely old [c. 11 billion years] star that entered the galaxy approximately 800 million years ago when a dwarf galaxy, the N’gai Cluster, was cannabalized by the Milky Way. The core of that galaxy exists today as the globular cluster Omega Centauri. The first expedition to Heimdall discovered “the etched cliffs,” natural rock formations covered by nano-etched circuitry forming the infrastructure of a powerful super-computer. Agletsch sources indicate that this planetary computer houses uncounted trillions of uploaded Sh’daar intellects, including members of the ancient ur-Sh’daar civilizations known as the Baondyeddi, the Adjugredudhra, and the Groth Hoj . . .
Taggart scanned through the cascade of downloading data, picking up the high points, skimming through the rest. She knew Heimdall by reputation, certainly; Sandy Gray had spoken of docuinteractives he’d experienced more than once, and told her about the Etched Cliffs. Here, the electronic ghosts of trillions of beings from the ur-Sh’daar resided in electronic slow motion, waiting out the eons. Xenosophontologists at the Heimdall orbital research facility believed that the planetary computer was ticking off time at the rate of something like a second per century . . . a kind of immortality in a way, at the cost of cutting themselves off from the rest of the cosmos.
She stared into the haze embracing Heimdall for a moment, wondering if the Rosette Aliens had come here because of the electronic ur-Sh’daar minds that existed within the planet-wide computer. Interesting thought. She filed it for later consideration. If it were true, then the cosmos had just come crashing in on the ur-Sh’daar afterlife.
Taggart heard the captain querying Lexington’s AI through the bridge links. The reply answered few questions. It raised more.
“The haze,” Lexington’s AI told them, whispering in their minds, “consists of trillions upon trillions of small components, ranging in size from a few centimeters down to about a millimeter. The objects are not in orbit, but appear to be anchored somehow in space itself. . . .”
“But what’s it for?” Bigelow demanded.
“That,” the AI replied, “remains unknown.”
“We can’t fly through it,” Taggart observed. “It would shred our hull . . . possibly vaporize us.”
“Ablation,” Bigelow said, nodding. “I know. But the two inner planets look clear.”
“What does that buy us, Captain?”
“Time. And maybe some allies.”
“What allies?”
“The Pan-Europeans had a major presence at Heimdall,” Bigelow told her. “If there were survivors, if they couldn’t flee the system, where would they go?”
“Ah . . .”
According to the Lex’s operational orders, the Confederation had dispatched a heavy monitor, the Himmelschloss, to Kapteyn’s Star, along with a cruiser squadron in support. The flotilla appeared to have vanished, but there might yet be survivors in-system—fighters, perhaps, or capital ships damaged and unable to engage their Alcubierre Drives.
“Himinbjorg—Planet One—is in the star’s habitable zone,” Taggart said. “It’s tidally locked, of course, but at least along the terminator there’s liquid water. Surface gravity of three Gs. That won’t be pleasant. . . .”
“The second planet out, Fornsigtuna, runs almost six Gs at the surface,” Commander Lee Yuan, the ship’s xenosophontologist, pointed out. “And it’s an icebox. Bad news all the way ’round.”
“How about Planet Four?” Taggart asked, calling down additional data. “An orbital black hole . . .”
“We think someone used that to generate power once,” Yuan said. “A lot of power, a very long time ago. But it’s been dead for hundreds of millions of years, at least.”
“Did they manufacture it?” Bigelow asked. “Or did they just find it somewhere and put it to use?”
“We don’t know, sir,” Yuan replied. “Thrymheim hasn’t been well studied. All the attention has been on Heimdall and the Etched Cliffs.”
“We’ll concentrate on the inner planets, then,” Bigelow said. “Comm . . . transmit to the other ships in the flotilla. Close with us and prepare for boost, low acceleration.”
“Captain?” Taggart said, speaking aloud rather than using the electronic telepathy of the shipboard links. “A suggestion?”
“What is it, XO?”
“Send a fighter squadron out to the fourth planet, just to be sure.”
“What makes you think the Confeds will have gone out there?”
“Camouflage, sir.”
“Beg pardon?”
She indicated the electronic records. “According to this, there are a bunch of artifacts out there in orbit around the planet. Big ones. If the Himmelschloss was looking for a place to hide, it could do a lot worse than slip in among a bunch of dead alien hulks.”
“Point. The Rosetters will probably know about those artifacts, though. They might be keeping an optical sensor on them.”
“Which is why fighters might be able to sneak in, take a look around, and sneak out again without causing a fuss.”
Bigelow considered this. “Okay, XO. Talk to Walt and set it up.”
“Yes, sir.” Captain Tom Walters was Lexington’s CAG, the CO of the star carrier’s complement of fighters and auxiliary craft.
“You have ten minutes before we boost.”
“Aye, aye, Captain.”
Taggart passed on the skipper’s orders, then turned her attention back to the enigmatic structures just visible in the haze.
So much of what they thought they knew so far was still guesswork. It wasn’t certain that the haze and mysterious shapes were the product of the Rosette Aliens. After all, the Black Rosette was sixteen thousand light years away. And yet, those sweeping, vast shapes and geometries were uncannily similar to what had been glimpsed at the heart of Omega Centauri, and it was simpler by far—an expression from Occam’s famous Razor—to assume that only one pack of godlike aliens was
running around creating structures out of empty vacuum.
Godlike. She felt the stirrings of wonder, of awe. . . .
Angry, she shoved the thought away.
Laurie Taggart was—or had been until recently—a staunch Ancient Alien Creationist. Born and brought up in the Chicago metroplex, Taggart had joined the AAC Church when she’d entered a poly tetrad that included a couple of devotees. She’d not thought much about religion before her marriage—the laws of Earth’s White Covenant blocked proselytism and kept all religion a more or less private affair. But one of her new husbands, Anton Brody, had been holding small meetings for years. The secrecy forced on all churches by the Covenant had allowed a group of formerly straitlaced Baptists to drift into new theological territory: God, they argued, had been aliens colonizing Earth hundreds of thousands of years ago, creating humans in their image and enlivening Earth’s prehistory with the wild mix of mythology and misunderstanding known as the ancient astronaut hypothesis.
The idea had been around for a long time. Le Matin des Magiciens had been published by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier in 1960, long before popular writers like Van Daniken and Sitchin had grabbed hold of the idea. Many critics argued that Pauwels and Bergier had in fact gotten the concept from some of the fiction of H. P. Lovecraft from thirty years earlier. There was a lot of At the Mountains of Madness hidden within The Dawn of the Magicians.
Taggart had read them all. Had fallen deeply into the ideas.
Now she wondered if she still believed.
The problem was that the alien “gods” espoused by Van Daniken, Tsoukalos, Sitchin, and the other prophet voices of the AAC had turned out to be entirely too human. The first nonhumans Earth had encountered among the stars had looked like meter-long spiders with sixteen legs, four eyes, and mouths opening directly into their stomachs . . . and most of the species encountered over the next decades couldn’t be described in terms of anything that had evolved on Earth. The most common habitat for alien life among the stars had turned out to be ice-covered oceans in the depths of gas giant moons, and among the species inhabiting Earthlike worlds in pleasant stellar habitable zones few were even remotely human in how they looked or, more important, in how they thought.
There were genuine mysteries among the myths and the archeological ruins on Earth, and in many cases alien intervention could not absolutely be ruled out, but neither could it be ruled in. There was no proof, and claims that early humans had been too stupid or too primitive or too unimaginative to dream or build big simply could not hold up.
Nowhere among the stars, at least so far, had there been a single suggestion that alien visitors had ever come to Earth, forged empires, built cities, or dumped their garbage.
None of that had bothered Taggart at the time, of course. Such beliefs, after all, were a matter of faith, not science. But Trevor Gray had kept asking questions and prodding the perimeters of her belief. He’d made her think.
And the more she’d thought, the more she’d questioned her church’s central doctrine.
The final blow had come from her own experiences as America’s weapons officer. Again and again, human naval personnel had encountered artifacts, structures, and technologies that were stunning in their scale, awe-inspiring in their sheer depth of wonder, and utterly alien in their scope and psychology. There had been beings, ancient civilizations, colossi bestriding the galaxy far vaster and more powerful than any paltry deity of terrestrial mythology. Time and again, Taggart had felt the old stirrings of awe and wonder . . . and yet time and again, the civilizations stirring those emotions had proven to be fallible, mortal, or otherwise limited in their manifestations across the stars.
The aliens of the Black Rosette appeared to be the most awesomely and spectacularly advanced beings Humankind had encountered so far, with powers more akin to magic than to human technology . . . and yet even they seemed to have one flaw, at the very least. They were so advanced, so highly evolved, so utterly beyond merely human existence that they didn’t even appear to notice human ships, technology, or attempts at communication. Xenosophontologists speculated that they were as far beyond humans as humans were beyond insects.
And yet, surely they must recognize starships and projected artificial singularities and quantum power taps as technology. Did they literally not notice human ships? Did they somehow assume that human ships were natural phenomenon? Or did they simply not care?
The thought that the Rosette Aliens were so advanced that they literally couldn’t notice human technology was more than a blow to human pride. It begged the question were they so blind they overlooked clear indications of star-faring technology? Or, rather, were they so arrogant they chose not to see it?
Either possibility represented a significant blind spot in the Rosette Alien mindset.
And for Laurie Taggart, either possibility led inescapably to a single hard realization. Even beings as powerful as the Rosette Aliens had weaknesses . . . and fell short of Laurie’s belief set regarding God.
The God of the Bible—the God of that original Chicagoan Baptist sect before they’d left their theological roots and wandered off in search of ancient aliens—was supposed to have been powerful enough to create the world, yet compassionate enough and observant enough to notice a sparrow’s fall.
The universe, in so far as Taggart had been able to determine, possessed no being that versatile, that infinite . . .
. . . or that loving.
Chapter Ten
5 December 2425
TC/USNA CVS America
Flag Bridge
2224 hours, TFT
“Didn’t take them long to make a decision, did it?” Gray murmured, half to himself.
“There was a lot riding on that decision,” Gutierrez replied. “Maybe the survival of the human species.”
Gray was feeling worse, his head pounding and a nasty vertigo that tended to sneak up on him, especially when he was in microgravity. He was watching from the flag bridge as America decelerated into orbit . . . not at the SupraQuito naval base facilities, but in orbit around Luna, some 400,000 kilometers away. Gutierrez was below him on the ship’s bridge, guiding the carrier in. They were carrying a second ship clinging to their spine, and maneuvering was awkward with the extra, off-balance mass.
Two hours after transmitting a message to Earth, including everything known so far about the possible alien infection, America had received new orders from Earth. She was to rendezvous with an escort now being assembled to bring her to quarantine . . . and to begin studying the mysterious and elusive microorganism.
That escort—three heavy cruisers and the medical support ship Andreas Vesalius—had matched course and speed with America and the ships with her an hour out from Earth.
The Vesalius was part hospital ship, part research vessel, and she carried some of the most powerful medicAI intellects outside of Earth itself. Five hundred meters long, she had come alongside America while the star carrier was still decelerating, clasped her spine with nanomophic grapples and snugged up beside her in a high-tech embrace. Multiple docking tubes connected the two ships, dissolving sections of America’s hull to form airtight seals rather than bothering with formal hatches and airlocks. Emergency techs were on board moments later, anonymous in full-coverage airtight suits indistinguishable from vacuum garb, and accompanied by humanoid medical robots. As America’s AIs took on the duties of human personnel, robots had the humans begin queueing up for nanomedical injection.
As one of the handful of infected personnel, Gray had been the first in line. The nano they were giving him, a human medic had told him, was more sophisticated than that available to America’s sick bay suite, highly flexible stuff that could take a wide variety of programs. It coursed through his circulatory system now, the ultra-tiny robots reproducing themselves from carbon and other elements extracted from his cells, their programming set to locate and identify invading microorganisms. Once they found the invader, they would begin eliminating it.
Hours later, the America had slipped into Lunar Orbit as techs and robots off the Vesalius continued to give out the injections.
“Admiral Gray?”
Gray turned to face Dr. William Hoffman, the human doctor in charge of the Vesalius medical team. Like the other new arrivals on board, he was wearing a hab suit to protect him from possible infection.
“Yes, Doctor. What’s the word?”
“We’ve completed the injections for the entire crew. We finished on the other ships in your squadron a little while ago.”
“How soon will we know something?”
“No way of telling, Admiral. You can’t rush stuff like this.”
“Whatever it is, it is spreading,” Gray said. “I’ve had reports of additional cases just in the past few hours. The total number of cases just on the America is now up to twenty.”
“I know, Admiral. There are more cases on the Bunker Hill, the Burke, and the Deutschland as well. Ninety-three total.”
The spread of the disease was accelerating, then. Not good. The worst part, though, was that it might take a long time to isolate and identify the bacteriological agent.
And the crew of America and the rest of the ships with her would be prisoners at least until that happened. . . .
“I have given strict orders for all crews to avoid fraternization,” Gray said. He was feeling . . . guilty, he decided. Not because of his tryst with McKennon, necessarily, but simply because everything that happened to and within the ships under his command were ultimately his responsibility. And somewhere along the line, he’d failed in that responsibility—failed . . . and raised the specter of introducing an alien plague to Earth.
Damn it, what else could he do? What else could he have done?
“Very wise, Admiral,” Hoffman told him. “However, the evidence seems to suggest that transmission can be carried out by other means, not just through sex. This organism is the one epidimiologists dread. It spreads by means of any bodily contact, or by means of droplets floating in the air—from a sneeze, say.”