by Ian Douglas
Gray had never heard Gutierrez revert to her native Spanish before, at least not while she was on America’s bridge. “I do understand,” he told her. “Thank you.”
“De nada. Now . . . what’s really going down?”
“I’ll tell you,” he said, “but after we complete the maneuver, okay?”
“Well . . . okay.” She did not sound completely convinced. “You promise not to face the bastards alone?”
“There are no bastards this time . . . but, yes, I promise.”
“There are always bastards, Admiral. And once we execute this order, there are going to be hundreds of them, screaming for your head. I don’t want you to face them alone.”
“We’re coming up on the transition, Captain. Please prepare to make the jump.”
“Aye, aye, Admiral.”
The transition from normal gravitic drive to the Alcubierre Drive required that the starship be within a flat metric—meaning far enough away from planetary bodies that local space was not bent by their gravitational fields—and traveling within a percent or so of c, the speed of light. At relativistic, near-c velocities, the ship’s mass soared to insane values, her fore-and-aft dimension contracted to near-zero, and time slowed to a crawl compared to its passage in the non-accelerated universe. At the speed of light, the ship’s mass would become infinite, her length would be zero, and time would come to a complete stop, which was why material objects like starships and fleet admirals could be accelerated up to within a hairsbreadth of c but could never actually reach that forbidden speed.
However, the Alcubierre Drive could use the ship’s vastly inflated mass to fold local space into interesting hyperdimensional configurations, essentially contracting the metric of space ahead of the ship, and inflating it astern. Einstein might forbid material objects to travel at c, but he had nothing whatsoever to say about empty space traveling at that velocity . . . or about that space carrying along material objects embedded within it.
“Initiating transition to metaspace,” Gutierrez announced, “in three . . . two . . . one . . . jump!”
Essentially, the tightly wrapped bubble of space inside the Alcubierre field was cut off from the rest of the universe and was, therefore, a universe in its own right. The region had been designated metaspace, reflecting its isolation. Ships under Alcubierre Drive could not communicate with others, or even see outside their pocket universe.
But, in relation to the vaster universe outside, they could move.
America hurtled through Darkness Absolute, though all instruments on board insisted that they were motionless. Indeed, they were, at least relative to their local and tightly constrained bubble of spacetime. Course was determined before the transition; the ship would move along the same directional vector it had been on before the jump.
Which was why five minutes after engaging the drive, Gray gave the mental command to America’s AI: disengage drive.
In a burst of light, America dropped out of metaspace.
At a pseudovelocity of fifteen light years per day, five minutes had carried the star carrier roughly half a trillion kilometers, or something like 3,300 astronomical units. They were far out in the Oort Cloud, with Sol a bright star in the remote distance. The rest of the ships in the flotilla had traveled on, oblivious to America’s desertion. They would not be aware that she was missing until they came out of Alcubierre Drive at Kapteyn’s Star.
Gray opened a transmission channel, linking in with every person on board the ship. “This is Admiral Gray,” he said. “Our mission has changed. We have been asked to investigate an unusual star system just over fourteen hundred light years from Sol. The others in our fleet have continued on with the original mission, but we are going to check out a system popularly known as Tabby’s Star. You can download the data from the ship’s Net.
“I can’t tell you much about what we expect to find out there, but I can say that this mission is of the very highest importance to Earth, and to the human species. It is our hope and our expectation to find technologies that will enable us to meet the Rosette Aliens on a somewhat more equal footing.
“I know that each and every one of you will do your usual superb best. That’s why we have been asked to carry out this mission.
“That is all.”
As he spoke, America was rotating slowly on her center of mass, the stars—the ancient constellations recognizable from Earth—pinwheeling about her as she turned. The ship’s AI had been given new programming by none other than Konstantin itself, programming that included their precise new course.
Tabby’s Star was located in Cygnus, a constellation also known as the Northern Cross, but America was seeking out a shortcut. In a different direction entirely, in the constellation of Scorpio off toward the Milky Way’s thick, bright heart, lay a different objective, a TRGA newly discovered and given the code name Penrose. Revealed by Agletsch traders only a few months ago, Penrose was relatively close—a mere 79 light years distant—less than half the distance of TRGA Tipler.
At top speed, it would take them five days and a few hours to reach it.
Aligned with the distant TRGA cylinder, America began accelerating. With no slower ships in her train, she could manage her top acceleration of ten thousand gravities, and was pushing near-c in fifty minutes.
Gray’s message, composed in his head and stored within his in-head RAM, was ready to go. “Captain? Do you have anything you want to say to the folks back home?”
“Negative, Admiral. I’m with you on this, okay?”
Gray thought about arguing, then decided against it. Gutierrez, he knew, could be stubborn.
Besides, his own report had stressed that Gutierrez had acceded to his order under protest, and bore no responsibility whatsoever for America’s change of mission. He didn’t know if that rider would be enough to protect her; he hoped it was.
For the next hour, America accelerated as the sky around her compressed itself into surreal, relativistic geometries. As the ship reached some 99.7 percent of the speed of light, the star carrier’s AI again focused the ship’s gravitational drive, wrapping local space around the ship like a blanket.
And America vanished from normal space.
Assault Lander Lucas
Heimdall Command
2212 hours, TFT
Carter tried to comprehend the deluge of images and thoughts flooding her mind. Tried . . . and failed. She thought—thought—that the Baondyeddi AI was trying to show her scenes taken from the virtual reality it had created within itself, a virtual reality tailored to the emotional and mental needs of a diverse number of different alien species. The minds of the Pan-European fighter pilots were there. She could sense them, moving through wavering vistas of light and distance and feeling, human, blessedly human sparks of thought and Mind against the inconceivably alien vistas around her.
She saw the aliens. . . .
The Baondyeddi predominated, of course. It was possible—though by no means certain, that the world humans called Heimdall was the Baondyeddi homeworld, the place where they’d first evolved eons before the N’gai Cluster had fallen through the intergalactic Void and been devoured by the Milky Way.
In her mind’s eye, she could see the Baondyeddi. It was difficult to judge how large the beings actually were; she had no easy frame of reference. She thought, though, that their flat bodies were about a meter and a half across, and supported by writhing hand-feet-mouths perhaps thirty or forty centimeters off the ground. Eyes—those startlingly blue orbs could be nothing else—lined the disk’s rim, interspersed by patches of hair-fine cilia. She wondered what the world looked like to a being that could see in all directions at once, and for which there was no front or back, left or right.
Around her, she could glimpse aspects of a city, one where low, flattened domes predominated and doors were designed to accommodate the Baondyeddi anatomy. There was nothing, however, to give a sense of the beings’ culture or worldview. She could feel . . . something, many things . .
. emotions, possibly . . . but they were feelings that didn’t quite resonate with human emotional responses.
Overall, though, she felt two emotions that she could easily define: an infinite, dragging sadness or sense of loss . . .
. . . and horror.
Carter was aware of other alien beings around her, beings not really a part of the Baondyeddi background, but superimposed upon it in some way impossible to discern. She recognized some of them: the Adjugredudhra. The F’heen F’haav.
She sensed that each of these species—and many others—had existed as digital lifeforms inhabiting a series of virtual worlds, whole universes emulated within the Etched Cliffs of Heimdall. If Carter could not fully understand what she was seeing and feeling, she could still wonder at the complexity and diversity of life and of Mind around her.
Without hearing words, she became aware of a kind of overriding theme to what she was experiencing. The Etched Cliffs were a haven, a refuge from some terrible threat. Exploring further, she saw images of alien beings dying by the millions, by the billions . . . the technological holocaust the Agletsch called Schjaa Hok, the Time of Change. Those who’d fled here to these virtual worlds were Refusers, a percentage of each species who had rejected the Transcendence of the original ur-Sh’daar.
Fair enough. It was completely unreasonable to expect that all members of a given culture would embrace change on that level, to that degree. There would always be refusers in any culture . . . mavericks and visionaries and set-in-their-way conservatives who simply wanted to be left alone, the technophobes and philosophers and those who liked life the way it was and didn’t want to change it. Within the many virtual worlds of Heimdall’s Etched Cliffs, they’d found safe havens. Carter couldn’t make out the details, but there was a sense that they’d actually tampered with their sun long, long before, using a technique called star mining or, more precisely, starlifting, to remove mass from a brighter, hotter, faster-burning sun to vastly extend its life span. Kapteyn’s Star once had been a sun much like Sol, with an expected life span of around 10 billion years. Now it was a red dwarf a quarter of Sol’s mass, a star already 10 billion years old, but with a projected life span of a thousand times that or more.
And yet, even as they shied from such tampering, they embraced the opportunity it afforded—a life of safety with a seemingly eternal sun that would shine down on their virtual haven.
She saw the source of the collective horror, the approach of . . . something, something immense and dark and implacable.
In her mind, Carter fell through curtains of golden, shifting light, saw stars reworked and reforged, saw mega-engineering on a galactic scale utterly incomprehensible to any merely mortal intellect . . .
She saw the Dark Mind.
And she knew that It had seen her.
She awoke screaming.
Chapter Nineteen
19 December 2425
TC/USNA CVS America
Flag Bridge
Approaching TRGA Penrose
0815 hours, TFT
“Okay, people,” Gray said. “Are we ready for this?”
He’d ordered the partial bulkhead between the flag bridge and the ship’s bridge to be opened, turning the space into a large, two-level compartment. Captain Gutierrez turned in her command seat in front of him and looked up—“up” being a relative term in zero-gravity—and grinned at him. “I’d like to know how we can get ready for something that is a complete unknown,” she told him. “But all decks report readiness for transit through the triggah.”
Gray nodded. Though the Penrose TRGA had been known for some years, this was the first time a manned ship had passed through any of its myriad pathways. They were now completely reliant on Konstantin’s information.
He shook off the queasy discomfort that thought generated. They were committed now.
“Weapons,” he said.
“All weapons armed, charged, and ready, Admiral,” Commander Jessie Parker announced.
“Fighters.”
“Four squadrons ready for launch,” America’s CAG, Captain Connie Fletcher replied in his mind. “On your command.”
“Scanners and recorders.”
“Go.”
“Navigation.”
“Course plotted and laid in, Admiral,” Commander Victor Blakeslee replied.
“Helm.”
“Under AI control, sir. Ready to initiate at your command.”
Gray scanned an array of green icons appearing on his in-head. Engineering . . . life support . . . power . . . all green.
He took a last look at the panorama of stars projected on the overhead and the bulkhead forward. Most of the constellations remained familiar, with only minor distortions. Seventy-nine light years was an insignificant step in a galaxy this vast, and only the nearest stars, a handful only, had shifted positions. Sol, however, lying directly astern, had been rendered invisible to the unaided eye by distance. Directly ahead, the Penrose Gate hung suspended in a dull haze of its own making, where light was subtly scattered by the envelope of twisted spacetime around it. Face-on, it was a perfect circle, the tube walls blurred to a featureless silver grey, the interior dark and hazy.
But from moment to moment, you could glimpse the stars beyond.
There was nothing more to do, but . . .
“Initiate TRGA approach routine.”
“Aye, aye, Admiral. We’re going through.”
America approached the fast-rotating tube. Penrose was larger than the Tipler TRGA, with a diameter of nearly five kilometers, a length of nearly thirty. Why this was so was unknown. But each of the TRGA cylinders discovered so far in the vicinity of Sol was unique, though each seemed to be paired in its mass and dimensions with the TRGA at the other end of the transit.
The TRGA’s maw received the ship. Gray felt the bump and nudge of maneuvering thrusters dropping America into the precisely calculated vector. Blurred, curving walls swept past to port and starboard, above and below . . .
. . . and America emerged in a new and different space.
VFA-96, Black Demons
TC/USNA CVS America
TRGA Penrose
0817 hours, TFT
Lieutenant Donald Gregory sat enfolded within the velvet darkness of his SG-420 Starblade, momentarily alone with dark thoughts. The depression, he thought, was getting worse. He rubbed his gloved hands across his thighs, feeling the nano-grown material of his e-suit. The new legs worked fine. Unfortunately, he had the unshakeable feeling that his brain did not.
When were they going to catch him? Ground him?
He didn’t much care. . . .
“Wake up, people.” The voice of the squadron’s skipper, Commander Luther Mackey, came over the command channel. “Emergence in thirty seconds.”
Sleep? You’ve got to be kidding me, he thought. Hell, even if he could, who the hell would be able to sleep now, with the star carrier about to emerge into strangeness?
“Demons, PriFly,” another voice said. “You’re number one in the queue. Prepare for drop, E plus ten.”
“Copy, PriFly,” Mackey replied. “We’re go for drop.”
An open in-head window showed an optical feed from the carrier’s shield cap forward as America plunged into the gaping mouth of the TRGA. Gregory made a final check of his Starblade’s systems, confirming readiness for drop. He was still getting used to the new fighter, the black teardrop of cutting-edge military technology that had replaced the older Starhawks, Velociraptors, and Stardragons only a few months ago. His original flight training had been with the Starhawks. Fortunately, the Starblade allowed a Starhawk emulation so that he’d not needed to retrain his autonomic reactions. And the ’Blade was a sweet machine, more alive than not, and exquisitely tuned to become an extension of his mind and body.
Gregory had found that the ever-encompassing depression tended to recede a bit when he was linked in to the controls and charged with the prospect of launch. Somehow, the mind-bending awe of deep space—or the deadly
flash and parry of space combat—held the darkness at bay.
And that was a good thing.
He just wished the thoughts of Meg would recede as well.
Blurred gray mist surrounded him for long seconds, in a free fall through an endless tunnel punctuated by brief thumps as the carrier shifted from vector to vector.
And then starlight exploded around him as America emerged from the cylinder.
Gregory sagged back in his cockpit seat. “My God in heaven . . .”
TC/USNA CVS America
Flag Bridge
Tabby’s Star
0818 hours, TFT
“What the hell is that?” Gray stared at the jumble of shapes ahead. “Give me plus magnification!”
The shapes enlarged, still blurred by distance.
But they were huge. Awesomely huge.
“Konstantin!” Gray snapped. “What are we looking at?”
The Konstantin clone didn’t answer for several seconds. Gray could practically feel the program swimming through cascades of incoming data.
“I believe, Admiral,” Konstantin said eventually, “that we are looking at a Dyson sphere. A very broken Dyson sphere.”
“Admiral?” Captain Fletcher said over the command channel. “Should we launch?”
“What? Oh, yes . . . yes, of course. Launch fighters.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
“But pass the word to them, please. Don’t get too close to those things, okay? Not until we know what they are.”
“Copy that, sir.”