Dark Mind

by Ian Douglas

  “America’s medicAI already told us that.”

  “It also has a fairly long incubation period . . . and symptoms so minor that a lot of people don’t report them. All of that means that once it gets a good foothold in the general population, it will spread like wildfire across Earth and every other human-inhabited planet. That’s why we need to enforce isolation for your crews.”

  Gray nodded. “I understand that. And we don’t yet know if it’s dangerous.”

  “Exactly,” Hoffman replied. “Which means we have to assume it’s dangerous. The onset and the way it spreads . . .” He hesitated, shook his head, then added, “Admiral, it’s suspiciously similar to the Blood Death.”

  That captured Gray’s attention, because it was exactly what he had thought a few days back.

  “It’s not Blood Death, is it?”

  “No. I wish it were, because we can identify and eradicate Staphylococcus hemoragia. Believe me, that was the first thing we checked.” He hesitated. “And . . . there’s something else.”

  “Wonderful . . .” Gray’s voice dripped bitterness. The ache in his head and in his joints was worse, he realized, a lot worse. How long before he had to relieve himself of duty?

  “Whatever it is, I think we can say with confidence that it is of alien origin. Almost certainly the Sh’daar, since you seem to have acquired this bug in the N’gai Cluster. That, and the fact that it’s so damned hard to find now, after your medicAI first picked it up in a routine scan, suggests that it’s not natural.”

  Gray’s eyes widened at that. “Not . . . natural . . .”

  “Admiral, the N’gai bug might be a deliberately bioengineered organism, or even a form of biological nanotechnology. In other words . . . a weapon.”

  Gray digested the implications of this. He almost said something more, but held back. Hoffman and his people were doing the best they could. Any useless exhortation he could make would be useless.

  He would need to set up a long-distance conference with President Koenig, he decided. If they were facing an alien bioweapon, then the government had seriously misjudged the political situation, seriously misjudged the Sh’daar and their overtures of peace.

  Seriously misjudged . . .

  Gray’s head was pounding, the pain a sudden flare of agony behind his eyes.

  He twisted forward, adrift in the microgravity of the ship’s flag bridge. Blood abruptly gushed from his nose, forming bright red spheres adrift in microgravity.

  He felt Hoffman’s gloved hand on his arm, heard Hoffman shouting, but couldn’t make out the words through the pain.

  Gods . . . he felt sick. . . .

  6 December 2425

  TC/USNA CVS Lexington

  Command Bridge

  0918 hours, TFT

  “The planet is tidally locked,” Lieutenant Carla Milton reported. She was Lexington’s chief navigation officer. “We expected that, of course. This close to the star, it would have to be.”

  “I’ve got the download data on the system here,” Taggart replied. “Tell me stuff I don’t know.”

  “Sorry, Commander.” Milton sounded chastened.

  Taggart started to say something sharp in response, then stifled it. She was in a foul mood. Being forced to re-examine her religion tended to do that to her. The White Covenant restrictions on talking to others about religious belief made it worse, and the sense of isolation left her angry and depressed.

  “No, I’m sorry, Lieutenant,” she said after a long moment. “You tell me whatever you think I need to know.”

  “Aye, aye, Commander.” But she sounded hurt. Damn . . .

  Strapped into the commander’s chair, Taggart watched the bridge viewall screens ahead and above. The planet listed on the astrogational charts as Himinbjorg loomed vast on the bridge visuals, an immense black sphere edged by an orange-gold crescent. Patches of angry red showed on the world’s night side, evidence of titanic lava flows and tidally induced volcanism. Beyond, Kapteyn’s Star spanned .09 degrees of sky, just a bit less than twice the size of Sol as seen from Earth, and close enough that swarms of mottled black sunspots were clearly visible across the star’s glowing red surface.

  The name Himinbjorg came from the ancient Norse and meant “Heaven’s Fortress” or possibly “Heaven’s Mountain.” According to myth, it was the home of Heimdall, the guardian of Bifrost, the Rainbow Bridge, which stretched between Earth and heaven. In the real world, it was a planet of extremes. It orbited within its star’s habitable zone, where water remained liquid and the climate theoretically remained temperate. That would probably be the case but for the fact that one side remained anchored in place facing its sun, which meant that it was a baking desert with temperatures just below boiling, while the dark side was locked in glaciers with temperatures well below zero. Tidal stresses caused the volcanism, and continent-sized lava flows glowed eerily against the eternal night, helping free the water locked up in ice.

  The twilight zone circled the planet, pole to pole, a narrow region where the sun seemed always to hover at the horizon, bobbing slowly up and down between dawn and sunrise with the planet’s nodding libration. Temperatures here remained livable, though the lava flows boiled the seas, and so native life hung on by a thread. The atmosphere was predominantly nitrogen and oxygen, as on Earth, but was made poisonous by choking clouds of hydrogen sulfide and sulfur dioxide.

  No human outpost or colony had been established on the hellish world, which wasn’t suprising. They actually were counting on this fact, knowing that the Rosette Aliens would certainly have investigated Himinbjorg had there been a human presence there. The Pan-European ships in the system would have known this too . . . and might well be hiding there, either in orbit or somewhere down on the surface.

  “Sensors,” Taggart said. “Any sign of the Confeds?”

  “Negative, Commander,” Lieutenant Jorge Chavez replied. “There’s nothing.”

  “How about the aliens? Have they noticed us?”

  “How are we supposed to tell?” Bigelow’s voice said behind her.

  “Captain on the bridge,” Taggart said, unsnapping her harness and floating clear of the command chair. “The ship is yours, sir.”

  “Thank you, Commander.” With practiced ease, Bigelow slipped into the seat, which adjusted itself to his slightly more massive bulk, and snapped on the harness. “No sign of anyone home, huh?”

  “No, sir. I’m beginning to wonder about the outer world. What’s the name? Thrymheim.”

  “A distinct possibility. The Headhunters will find them if that’s where they are.”

  “Yes, sir.” VFA-211, the Headhunters, was one of the fighter squadrons operating off the Lexington. The Lex had launched them hours ago with orders to investigate Thrymheim . . . but quietly. Bigelow was concerned about attracting the Rosette Aliens’ notice. The assumption was that they had such advanced technologies that they were aware of everything happening within the system. So far, at least, they’d not shown any sign that they knew the human flotilla was there.

  Bigelow—and Taggart—hoped to keep it that way.

  VFA-211

  Approaching Thrymheim

  1115 hours, TFT

  Like the vast majority of gas and ice giants discovered so far, Thrymheim was a ringed world, though the particles were mostly coal black and the ring system was difficult to see, especially in the wan light of the local star almost nine AUs distant.

  The name Thrymheim had been bestowed on the dark and icy world by the first human expedition to Kapteyn’s Star late in the twenty-second century. In keeping with the Norse mythological theme of the system, the name meant “Crash Home” or “Thunder Home,” or possibly “Power Home.”

  Power House worked too. . . .

  Lieutenant Jason Meier didn’t much care for the idea of a world called Crash Home, though the downloads he’d pulled off of Lexington’s computer before he’d launched suggested that the name referred to the crash of thunder rather than something—like an
SG-420 Starblade, for instance—falling out of the sky.

  Thunder was certainly in keeping with the idea of Thrymheim being located in Jotunheim, the world of the Norse ice giants. In fact, the members of the first Kapteyn’s Star expedition had named it Power House because of Thrymheim’s small and enigmatic companion.

  The first interstellar expeditions out from Earth a couple of centuries earlier had found plenty of proof that humans were not alone among the stars. Long before they encountered the first living extraterrestrials—the Agletsch—human explorers had found alien ruins, the fragments and detritus and crumbled dreams of civilizations long passed into the Night.

  And some of those fragments had been discovered here at Kapteyn’s Star. The Etched Cliffs of Heimdall had not immediately been recognized as the product of a technological civilization, but the mysterious satellite Thrymheim was clearly artificial.

  It was a black hole of roughly terrestrial mass, compressed into a knot of high-gravity strangeness a couple of centimeters wide. The accretion disk, the plane of dust orbiting the hole, was what tipped observers off as to its artificial nature. Spectroscopic scans of the accretion disk material showed a preponderance of the expected elements—iron, silicon, aluminum, carbon, and such—but there was also a surprisingly high percentage of rare earths and precious metals—gold, cobalt, neodymium, samarium, and holmium, especially.

  The expedition xenotechnologists had assumed that the cloud of debris orbiting the miniature black hole was what was left of a large artificial structure that originally had enclosed a singularity at its heart—most likely as part of a power-generating complex. Human technology utilized artificially generated microsingularities both for propulsion and for power generation; a pair of resonating black holes orbiting each other could be used to extract almost unlimited amounts of vacuum energy. Someone had clearly been doing the same thing in orbit around Thrymheim, though whether the debris represented a large orbital power-generating plant or a very large spacecraft destroyed in orbit was still an open question. Those rare earths—the samarium, neodymium, and holmium, especially, as well as significant amounts of compounds like SmCo5—samarium cobalt—suggested the use of ultra-powerful artificial magnets in the original structure. With all that background, an AI with an interest in Norse mythology had suggested the name for the planet: Power House.

  The Earth Confederation had pumped a lot of resources into the orbital complex around Bifrost. Most of that research colony’s attention, of course, had been directed at the moon Heimdall and its mysterious Etched Cliffs—in essence a planet-wide supercomputer housing trillions of uploaded minds—but their charter had also emphasized study of the high-tech wreckage out at Thrymheim.

  Power House . . .

  Lieutenant Jason Meier guided his SG-420 Starblade into a new vector, dropping toward the debris field. The bizarre object had been designated “AC-1”—AC for “Accretion Disk”—in his briefings, a term immediately morphed by the fighter pilots into “Ace.” The thing was still invisible to the naked eye, but he could see it on his long-range sensors. From 250,000 kilometers out, the Neptune-sized world of Thrymheim showed as a huge, blue-green sphere blocking out much of the starfield ahead. A red computer graphic showed the position of Ace off to one side.

  “So how come that accretion disk is still there?” Lieutenant Pamela Schaeffer asked, using a tightly confined directional comm channel. “It’s been here for . . . what? Almost eight hundred million years, they say? Shouldn’t the black hole have slurped all of that crap down by now?”

  “It probably did eat most of . . . whatever was there,” Meier replied. “But a lot of the stuff would have been far enough out to maintain stable orbits. Uh . . . we’d better maintain comm silence, Pam.”

  “Why? If the Rosetters are as advanced as everyone says, they know we’re here.”

  She had a point. The squadron had not been ordered to maintain communications silence, if only because they needed to coordinate their maneuvers out here in the outer darkness. Besides, there was a blanket of interference from the interacting magnetic and radiation fields surrounding both Thrymheim and Ace; it should keep them safe enough.

  Even so, it was impossible for Meier to escape the feeling that someone very large and very powerful was staring at him.

  Staring as though undecided as yet what it was going to do about these mayfly intruders flitting about in its backyard.

  “You’re right,” he said after a moment. “Hell, I think I’d feel better if the Rosetters did do something . . . just to let us know they care!”

  “I hear you, brother.” Schaeffer was silent for a moment, then added, “I’m starting to get a visual.”

  Meier checked his own optics, and found he could now make out the debris field—essentially a paper-thin ring twenty thousand kilometers across, but with a very wide, empty center.

  At least it looked empty. At the exact center of that huge structure, he knew, was a marble-sized singularity. The gravity field, however, was identical to that of a planet with the mass of Earth; the accretion disk gap ended over thirty thousand kilometers out from the center.

  “Look at the size of that thing!” he said. He could just make it out against the starfields beyond . . . a ring that looked like it was made of black powder with occasional glints of ice or diamonds or something more exotic mixed in. “The individual pieces of that disk have been grinding against each other for hundreds of millions of years and probably feeding the kitty all that time. But most of it stays stable now.”

  “We don’t know it’s that old,” Schaeffer said. “The Sh’daar came forward through time, remember. Maybe this was a colony built in their future . . . but just a few centuries in our past.”

  “No, it’s old,” Meier replied. “Kapteyn’s Star was a part of the N’gai dwarf galaxy, remember. The Milky Way slurped it down as a light snack . . . oh, what . . . half a billion years ago? We’re not sure . . . but something like that.”

  “I heard seven hundred million years,” Schaeffer said, “but what’s a couple of hundred million years among friends, right?”

  “Exactly. Anyway, Kapteyn’s Star went walkabout when most of the dwarf galaxy was torn apart. And the xeno people think the Etched Cliffs on Heimdall are seven or eight hundred million years old too . . . probably going back to the ur-Sh’daar, before their Technological Singularity.”

  “I wonder what the rings were, originally.”

  “Who knows? There’s enough mass in there for a small planet . . . not counting the black hole. Whatever it was, it was damned big.”

  “Cut the chatter, you two,” the voice of Commander Victor Leystrom interrupted. He was the CO of the Headhunters, call sign Hunter One. “We don’t want the Rosetters picking us up.”

  Meier looked at the squadron formation, and noticed that Leystrom’s ship had drifted in between Schaeffer’s fighter and his own, close enough that he’d intercepted part of the laser beam carrying their communications channel. He grinned.

  “Sorry, Skipper,” he replied. “I didn’t think they could hear us.”

  “We don’t fucking know what they can hear, okay? So no talk except for what’s absolutely necessary!”

  “Aye, aye, Skipper.”

  “Roger that, Hunter One,” Schaeffer added.

  A pity, really. The laser-comm chitchat had helped cut back on the loneliness out here. With silence, the loneliness descended once again, a black and brooding emptiness that soaked through to your bones.

  Strung out in a long line, the twelve fighters of VFA-211 fell toward the dimly visible ring in space. The Earth-sized gravity field was beginning to tug on their vector, pulling their fall into a gentle curve that would take them through the central opening of the ring but keep them well clear of the invisible singularity at the center.

  Meier checked his instruments; the whole point of this operation was to try to find Confederation ships that might be hiding out here, and the assumption was that they would be carefully hi
dden . . . again, to escape the notice of the Rosette Aliens. One good possibility was that they were sheltering somewhere in that accretion dust cloud. A searching ship would have to get pretty close—a few tens of thousands of kilometers at most—to spot them.

  “Hunter One, this is Hunter Five.” Lieutenant Judith Kelly cut in over the squadron tactical channel. “I think I’ve got something here. . . .”

  “Pass it to the rest of us, Five,” Leystrom ordered.

  “Transmitting.”

  Meier looked at the datastream coming in over the channel, and his eyes widened.

  Jackpot . . .

  TC/USNA CVS America

  Sick Bay

  1319 hours, TFT

  Gray opened his eyes . . . then shut them tight once more. The glare from overhead was so bright as to be painful. He was soaking in sweat, as though a high fever had just broken. Somewhere nearby, medical equipment was going peep . . . and he heard voices nearby. Intense, professional voices . . .

  A shadow blocked the light above. “Admiral Gray?”

  He chanced opening his eyes again. The helmeted head of Dr. Hoffman leaned over him. Nearby, a medical robot made adjustments to the beeping machine. “Admiral Gray is awake,” the robot said. “But I recommend keeping any conversation extremely short.”

  “How are you feeling, Admiral?” Hoffman said.

  “Like I got hit head-on by a fighter pushing c,” he replied. His voice cracked, and he felt terribly thirsty.

  “You had us all pretty worried.”

  “I gather the disease turned nasty?”

  “You could say that, Admiral. You’re in America’s sick bay, by the way.”

  “I figured.” Obviously he was on a hospital bed—the sort of high-tech foam support that encased his body and limbs and auto-inserted lines in various parts of his anatomy for nutrients and wastes. There was also gravity, about a half G, he guessed, which meant he’d been moved to the rotating hab section of the ship.