Dark Mind

by Ian Douglas

  “There was talk of moving you to a containment facility on Luna,” Hoffman told him, “but the orders from Earth are to keep everything isolated on the ships, at least for now.”

  “Makes sense . . .” He felt terribly tired, hovering on the thin, ragged edge of unconsciousness. “Anyone else?”

  “Four others,” Hoffman told him.

  “Damn.”

  “Doctor Hoffman . . . Admiral Gray should rest. I would like to put him into medical stasis while we complete the treatment.”

  Hoffman glanced at the robot, then nodded. “Right. But before I go . . . we’ve got some good news for you.”

  “It’s about fucking time. What?”

  “We’ve isolated the bug. Apparently, it went into an intense period of growth, reproducing so quickly your immune system triggered, big-time. But now we know what we’re dealing with . . . more or less. And we’re trying to decide how to take the next step.”

  “What do you mean, ‘more or less’?”

  Hoffman shook his head behind the visor. “I’m not sure how to tell you this, Admiral. The alien microorganism?”

  “Yeah . . .”

  “It’s intelligent.”

  Chapter Eleven

  6 December 2425

  VFA-211

  Thrymheim Orbit

  1325 hours, TFT

  The Himmelschloss was a flattened black spheroid spanning some five hundred meters—half the length of the America, as big across as the star carrier’s forward shield cap was wide, but far more massive. The monster was a heavy monitor, a highly specialized warship designed to serve as a semimobile base within a target star system. Heavy monitors stood guard close by several of the known TRGA cylinders, and on the outskirts of the Solar System back home. The monitor Ceres had been dispatched into the remote past to protect Deep Time One, and another, the Argus, was being prepared at the shipyards over Mars for deployment into the far future. They were slow, they were clumsy, but they were very heavily armed . . . and their sensors could watch—could monitor—activity across an entire star system.

  The Himmelschloss, Meier noted, had been terribly damaged. She looked, for all the world, as though something had taken a bite out of her. Fully a quarter of her hull was simply missing, and perhaps another third was twisted, crushed, and misshapen.

  God . . . what had happened to her?

  “Hunter Flight,” a voice called to the incoming fighters, “you are clear for trap.”

  “Copy that, Himmelschloss. We’re coming in.”

  Lieutenant Meier rolled his fighter fifty degrees and morphed the outer hull into its landing configuration. Computer graphics unfolded in his head, marking the monitor’s open landing bay and feeding him constantly updated numbers on his approach vector.

  A second fighter squadron had been launched half an hour earlier, the aging KRG-17 Raschadler fighters of the Pan-European Eagle Squadron. A Kapitanleutnant Martin Schmidt was the squadron’s CO—kapitanleutnant in the German rank system being equivalent to a USNA Navy lieutenant. The Pan-Euro squadron only had nine fighters; Meier wondered if they were flying with an abbreviated roster. He felt it more likely, though, that they’d taken some casualties earlier.

  As the monitor loomed huge up ahead and Meier cut back sharply on his velocity, he glanced at the structural damage visible in the ship’s hull. Fully half of the flattened sphere looked like it had been shredded, with gaping holes revealing deep internal structure, portions that appeared to have been melted, and twisted tails of wreckage dangling into space from massive impact scars. Most of the drive section, he noted, had been destroyed. These guys had been through the meat grinder, and no mistake.

  The monitor had been parked on the inner edge of the Ace ring system, balanced in orbit against the tug of the invisible central singularity. The hull was taking hits as he watched, tiny sparks and flashes marking high-velocity impacts from the orbital debris. Enough of that, and the monitor would deorbit, falling down through the last twenty thousand kilometers into tidal destruction and oblivion—

  Then there was no more time to think. The computer graphics opened around Meier’s viewpoint, a brightly lit rectangle expanding directly ahead as his Starblade drifted in for a trap. Carrier landings in the USNA Navy were usually carried out on rotating flight decks, and were carefully choreographed to bring incoming fighters to relative rest in spin gravity. Landing—the term “trap” was from the old wet navy, when fighters touched down on the pitching decks of aircraft carriers with tailhooks and arresting cables—was simplicity itself by comparison. He reduced his fighter’s speed to a handful of meters per second and a magnetic field inside the flight bay brought him to rest. Robot arms snagged his fighter and moved him forward, deeper into the bay, getting him out of the way of the next incoming fighter in line.

  A boarding tube unfolded from a nearby bulkhead, growing into the side of his fighter. He released the hull integrity locks, and his Starblade opened into the Himmelschloss’s pressurized interior.

  As he pulled himself hand over hand out of the boarding tube and into a large, open compartment, a young leutnant met him with a salute.

  “Permission to come aboard,” Meier said.

  “Granted, sir,” the leutnant replied, returning the salute. “We’re glad to have you here!”

  The compartment was a combination warehouse and dock facility, as large as a football field on Earth, but crowded with crates and containers of supplies, and a vast and intricate spiderweb of traverse lines designed to allow people to move freely through the space in microgravity. A number of other men and women in Pan-European uniforms were gathered there, floating in various up- and down-orientations, along with the other Headhunters who’d already trapped. A smattering of applause sounded from the Confederation personnel, and someone called out “Ja, welkommen!” Another yelled, “Bienvenidos!” over the applause, while still another shouted, “It’s about bloody time!”

  “We’ve been wondering if anyone would ever come find us, sir,” the young officer told him. “I’m Leutnant Harald Mueller, by the way. Bay One officer of the watch.”

  “So where do we go now, Herr Mueller?”

  “With me, sir . . . when the rest of your squadron is aboard. The captain wishes to speak with all of you.”

  Twenty minutes later, Meier and the other Headhunters found themselves in a lounge with gravity. The German-built monitor certainly didn’t lack for room. At least a hundred of the ship’s personnel were gathered there, and still the place did not feel particularly crowded. The dome overhead showed an electronic projection of the surrounding vista of space—the blue orb of Thrymheim on one side, the diamond-hard pinpoint of Kapteyn’s Star on the other. The Ace ring was invisible, Meier saw, as might be expected. It was turned edge-on relative to their vantage point so that they were looking out through its thinnest aspect.

  “You would like something to eat, sir?” the Leutnant asked as Meier took a seat at a round table with three other of his squadron mates.

  “If you have enough to spare, yes,” Meier replied. “I would have thought you guys were on rationing here, though.” It had been, after all, almost two months since the Himmelschloss had vanished.

  “The ring outside,” Mueller explained, gesturing at the overhead panorama, “has plenty of carbon, as well as various ices that provide the nitrogen, oxygen, and hydrogen for organics, and there are plenty of other raw elements available. We’ve been mining the ring with robotic harvesters.”

  “But you haven’t been able to repair your ship?” Lieutenant Karen Lobieski asked.

  “Unfortunately, no, ma’am,” Mueller replied. “The damage was too extensive, and there weren’t enough heavy metals available.”

  “What the hell happened to you?” Lieutenant Greg Malone asked.

  “I . . . should let the captain explain,” Mueller replied. “Ah! Here he is.”

  An older man in the dress-blue skintights of the Confederation Navy entered the lounge with a small con
tingent of aides and junior officers. “Bonjour, mes amis americains,” he said. “And welcome to the Himmelschloss. I am Kapitan zur Weltraum Jean-Ives Gilbert, and we are most grateful for your arrival here.”

  Though the Himmelschloss was German-built, her crew apparently had been drawn from across the Pan-European Union, and her skipper was French. Meier had thought the Pan-Europeans tried to segregate their crews by nation of origin, but obviously it didn’t always work out that way.

  “I must ask you, monsieurs,” Gilbert continued, “how large a fleet you have brought to this system. I have over twelve hundred men and women on board this vessel who must be evacuated.”

  “That might be a problem, sir. We’re here with a carrier battlegroup,” Commander Leystrom said. “The Lexington . . . and two other vessels.”

  Gilbert’s eyes widened. “And this is all?”

  “I’m afraid that’s all we have for now, sir, yes. The destroyers and other light escorts will be here in a day or two.” He shrugged. “They’re assembling a joint task force back home, but that will take time to put together.”

  “But you have had two months!”

  “Sir, we’re stretched so thin back home it’s a miracle we got here at all. I suggest that you begin making preparations to leave. It’ll be tight, but between them, the Lady Lex, the Marne, and the Valiant should be able to take all of your people on board.”

  “And when will these other two vessels arrive?”

  “They’re checking out the system’s inner planets at the moment,” Leystrom told him. “We need to tight-beam a message and let them know we’ve found you.”

  “In the meantime, sir,” Meier added, “how about filling us in on what happened to your ship?”

  Gilbert shook his head. “There is little to tell, Lieutenant. What happened is obvious. How it happened . . . we still have no idea.”

  Two months before, Gilbert explained, the small Confederation squadron had entered the Kapteyn’s Star system with orders from Geneva to observe the powerful entities there, to confirm that the Heimdall orbital station had been destroyed, and—if possible—to make peaceful contact with the aliens. The situation was still murky, he explained. The entities were probably the Rosette Aliens, though that still needed to be confirmed. “Peaceful contact” might seem to be surrender . . . and yet the Rosette Aliens were so unimaginably powerful, with technologies so utterly beyond the ken of Humankind, that Geneva was convinced that a conciliatory approach—even all-out surrender, if need be—was absolutely necessary if Humankind was to survive this encounter.

  Meier wondered if Geneva had consulted with Washington on that strategy . . . and what Washington thought of the idea. A large factor in the recent civil war between the USNA and the Confederation had been, in fact, the debate over conflicting strategies of dealing with the Sh’daar. The Confederation wanted to give in to the Sh’daar Ultimatum and accept their demands that humans limit their technologies. The USNA had insisted on fighting for sovereignty and for unfettered access to all technologies, including those forbidden by the Sh’daar.

  Washington’s stand-and-fight policy had worked, surprisingly enough, though there were still those who felt humans would have to cave in to the Sh’daar demands sooner or later. The question, Meier decided, was whether that strategy would work again . . . this time against an alien power far more advanced and technologically evolved than even the Sh’daar.

  At Gilbert’s electronic command, images began flowing into the Headhunters’ minds, downloaded from the Himmelschloss data banks. In their minds, they saw the Confederation squadron drop out of metaspace far, far out in the cold and dark at the periphery of the Kapteyn’s Star system. Eight ships—the Himmelschloss, the heavy cruiser La Gravière, the railgun cruiser Lutzow, two destroyers, and three frigates—had crept in toward Bifrost, spread out and moving slowly in hopes that they could manage to escape the notice of the aliens ahead. They heard orders flashing from ship to ship as the squadron organized itself and began a slow acceleration in toward the system’s heart.

  A five-ship fighter wing—the Eagles—had been dispatched as point. Meier watched as the entire squadron had approached the moon Heimdall while keeping Bifrost between them and the aliens. The Eagles had slipped past the gas giant, drifting along scant kilometers from the plane of the rings and shielded by the planet’s far-flung radiation belts.

  Ahead, in images transmitted by the squadron, lay impossible wonders constructed of liquid light.

  “We call them ‘ghosts,’” Gilbert told them. “They look like they’re made of light, though clearly something else is going on. Our best guess is that what we’re seeing are clouds—celestial oceans of tiny mechanisms that are somehow anchored in space.”

  “‘Anchored’?” Leystrom repeated. “How is such a thing possible?”

  “If we knew how to do it,” Gilbert replied, “perhaps the alien technology would not offer such a challenge. We suspect it has to do with manipulating the vacuum energy of the Quantum Sea. . . .”

  Meier gave a low whistle. Someone else in the room groaned. The Quantum Sea was the lowest base-state of the universe, so far as was currently known. Particles and antiparticles continually popped into and out of existence within the froth of the quantum foam, the vacuum energy that the tuned microsingularities of power taps could harvest, allowing them to extract the near-infinite energies necessary for star travel.

  Theory held that matter and energy alike were the products of standing waves within the foam—the reason the base state had been called a sea. A continually repeating spike of vacuum energy here, literally popping in and out of existence billions of times per second, translated into Reality as an electron or a photon or a quark, giving them the properties both of particles and of waves. Three quarks together formed a hadron—protons and neutrons were the most stable examples. Variations on the theme created all of the other possible particles in the zoo of modern physics. When a standing wave moved, the particle it generated moved; enough of them close together bent space, creating gravity.

  Gilbert was suggesting that the Rosette entities knew how to reach down into the quantum foam and manipulate the substrate directly.

  Meier was stunned. If they could do that, they truly did possess godlike abilities: able to create matter out of nothing—which meant violating the ancient law of conservation of mass—or to anchor such mass in the infrastructure of the cosmos. They would be able to edit matter, to transmute any element, to bring any matter or energy in any desired form into existence.

  Or to wipe it away as though it had never existed.

  A civilization that could do that . . .

  God, was there any limit, any limit at all to what they could accomplish?

  Meier could feel the fighter pilot’s sense of awe leaking through with the data, riding his own wonder. Trillions of dust motes, a haze of light, and within that haze . . .

  Dimly glimpsed, so faint that Meier thought at first they must be a trick of his eyes, there were . . . shapes. Huge shapes dwarfing Heimdall, dwarfing even massive Bifrost. From his vantage point skimming along beneath Bifrost’s rings with the fighters, it seemed as though Heimdall was suspended within a vast and far-flung web so insubstantial, so gossamer, it was difficult to tell if it was there at all.

  Yet it was filling all of space ahead. . . .

  And it was moving.

  Reacting to the fighter wing’s approach.

  “One of those sheets,” Gilbert explained, indicating a vast and rippling expanse of golden translucence looming ahead, “just folded over on itself . . . like a fishing net cast into the sea.”

  The five fighters in the lead seemed to dissolve as the sheet of light rolled over them. The squadron of capital ships, tens of thousands of kilometers away on the far side of Bifrost, saw what was happening on data feeds from the fighters and immediately began decelerating.

  They reacted quickly . . . but not quickly enough. The translucent film of light swept over and pas
t Bifrost, sliding past the planet and its ring system with no apparent effect, but it struck the Pan-European capital ships one after another, and with each strike a vessel flared in a dazzling burst of nova-hot radiance—flared . . . and vanished.

  Himmelschloss alone escaped the sweeping light . . . but only just. The leading edge of the radiance swept over the monitor a couple of seconds after she completed an end-for-end skew flip and began accelerating as quickly as she could for open space. Her stern quarter seemed to ripple and fold, collapsing in upon itself as clouds of debris expanded into emptiness.

  Tumbling helplessly, the Himmelschloss fell out-system. The aliens, as though they’d simply stretched out to brush away a worrisome insect, did not follow.

  “We had maneuvering control,” Gilbert explained. “And the power tap was still intact, thank God. We were able to change course enough to approach Thrymheim and to decelerate into orbit around the singularity. Almost eight hundred personnel were . . . gone. Folded out of existence by the sheet of light or spilled into hard vacuum. We still had nanufacturing capabilities. We could nanufacture food, water, air. Our large-scale repair functions were totally trashed, however. We’ve been programming our exterior nanomatrix to fill in and cover the openings torn open when part of the hull dissolved, but we can’t grow a new drive system, though, or grow new fighters, or do more than rough-patch the outer hull. We’re helpless, helpless in the face of that kind of technology!”

  And Jason Meier was forced to agree. Right now, the tiny USNA squadron was about as potent a military force against the Rosette entities as an obscene gesture.

  Which meant they would be very lucky to get the Lady Lex and her consorts out of the inner system, load up the Himmelschloss survivors, and, as her Marines might put it, get the hell out of Dodge.

  Judging by what he’d just seen, all of the combined military might of Earth brought together in a single fleet could no more than anger these beings.