Dark Mind

by Ian Douglas

  The sails out here were considerably larger than those on the inner shell, reflecting the difference in incident stellar radiation between two AUs and five.

  Each sail was separated from its neighbors by gulfs of at least ninety thousand kilometers, so coverage of the star was nowhere near complete. A classic Dyson swarm, Zhang knew, was supposed to trap all of the incident radiation from the surrounded star, but the designers of this mega-engineering project clearly had had something else in mind.

  No one yet knew what.

  But even with so much distance between one sail and the next, the overall effect was of an infinitely long, flat plain. At this radius from the star, the outer sphere’s surface showed no curvature at all that human eyes could detect. When you passed over the gulf between one sail and the next and looked down, you saw Tabby’s Star clearly, with just a bit of haze. Overall, the concentric shells were obscuring perhaps twenty percent of the star’s radiation output.

  An icon flashed in Zhang’s mind and she thoughtclicked it. Data streamed in from the America.

  The star carrier America had closed in on the edge of the hazy sphere surrounding Tabby’s Star, and was now about thirty light-minutes distant. Evidently, they’d received a report from another squadron—the Black Demons—and now were broadcasting an alert to all other fighters in the deployment. The Demons had encountered something large and mysterious at the edge of the debris belt three astronomical units below. Zhang scrolled through the information, absorbing it, and she felt incredulous.

  A giant space amoeba? “Listen up, Riders,” she called. “VFA-96 ran into something in the debris field. Have a look.”

  “What is that thing?” Lieutenant Carbonero asked.

  “Damfino, Carb. But it looks alive and it looks mean. Everyone keep your optics peeled.”

  “Hey, Skipper?” That was Lieutenant Thor Taylor. “I’ve got something here . . .”

  “What’ve you got?”

  “Outbound . . . bearing one-five-niner, plus seven-one. Is that one of those amoeba things?”

  Zhang pulled down the feed, watching through Taylor’s instrumentation. Whatever he was looking at was way, way out. He’d only spotted it because he’d told his fighter’s AI to examine the entire sky for something along the lines of the translucent mass encountered by the Black Demons.

  And well he did, because he’d spotted another translucent mass roughly between the brilliant gleam of Deneb and the pale glow of the North America Nebula. It was a long way out—a couple of hundred astronomical units. It was nearly invisible too, spread out thin and transparent against the black sky, though there was a hint of a tighter, denser core.

  But it was definitely out there.

  “Skipper! Rider Ten!” That was Lieutenant Stevens.

  “Go ahead, Ten.”

  “I’ve got a bogie, range nine hundred thousand and dead ahead!”

  “Let me see.”

  She shifted datastreams. Yes . . . there it was. The same sort of translucent creature or being, filmy and insubstantial and at least fifty thousand kilometers across. It appeared . . . yes, it was definitely attached to one of the light sails. In fact, it appeared to be feeding on it.

  “I’m getting RF from the sail,” Stevens told her. “I think it may be a call for help!”

  “Record it! Ghost Riders! Let’s boost closer and see what we’ve got!”

  In her head, in the view of what was unfolding in the distance, the teardrop structure suspended beneath the light sail suddenly cut loose from its tether and began falling, slowly but relentlessly, toward its sun.

  And the vast sail above crumpled as it was devoured by the titanic and gossamer leviathan out of space.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  19 December 2425

  TC/USNA CVS America

  CIC

  Tabby’s Star

  1435 hours, TFT

  “So what is it?” Gray asked.

  He floated in the ship’s Combat Information Center with his department heads, some present physically, most there virtually, but all of them staring at a three-D image of the translucent entity at the edge of the Tabby’s Star debris field. One of those present virtually was Dr. George Truitt, the head of America’s xenosophontology department. Truitt was . . . well, difficult was putting it mildly. In fact, he was often very difficult. At the moment, his image stood on the deck upright despite the zero-gravity, showing that he was linked in from his lab in one of the ship’s rotating hab modules.

  “Well . . . it’s alive,” Truitt said. “It’s aware of its surroundings, it reacts to external stimuli, and in these scans it appears to be metabolizing a chemical energy source—rock.”

  “Obviously,” Gray said, trying not to grit his teeth. “But is it intelligent?”

  “Impossible to be certain,” Truitt said. “I would say, however, that intelligence in an organism living in space would be most unlikely.”

  “Why unlikely, Doctor?” Gutierrez asked him.

  “No language in the vacuum of space. No organs of manipulation. No social or cultural infrastructure. No means of recording history. No tools . . . if they can’t demonstrate intelligence, how can you grant that they have it?”

  “I think, Dr. Truitt,” Commander Mallory, the ship’s tactical officer, said, carefully, “that you’re just not thinking weird enough.”

  Truitt huffed and turned to Gray. “I did not come here to be insulted, Admiral.”

  “I’m sure that that was not Commander Mallory’s intent, Doctor.” Truitt was brilliant, but he was also intolerant of what he perceived as the stupidity of others—hence difficult. As such, he required careful handling. Gray smiled and encouraged him to continue. “Please go on.”

  “Well . . . we have an interesting datum in the long-range images captured by the other fighter squadron.” The freeze-frame image of the translucent mass attached to a small asteroid vanished, replaced by one of the images from out-system. The object or creature or whatever it was spanned an enormous breadth of empty space, possibly as much as several hundred thousand kilometers. “This organism obviously has attenuated itself, unfolding to present an enormous surface as a kind of organic light sail.”

  “A living light sail?”

  “Precisely.” His projected figure pointed into the image of the light-sail creature. “I would suggest that these organisms have originated either at the star Deneb—which we can see in the background behind this particular specimen—or in the North America Nebula, which we see over here. By thinning itself out to a gossamer wisp, it can accelerate on the radiation pressure of a star, especially a bright, hot star like Deneb. It may reach considerable velocities; I estimate ten to fifteen percent c.”

  “Deneb is just one hundred seventy-three light years from here,” the ship’s chief navigator, Commander Victor Blakeslee, pointed out. “At that speed it would take it well over a thousand years to make the trip.”

  “Once it reaches cruising velocity, as it were,” Truitt said, “it probably collapses itself into a small kernel, like we saw in the one hiding in the debris belt. Small, dense, possibly streamlined to avoid being slowed by interstellar dust and gas. We see it expanded here in this image as it unfurls itself to catch the radiation from Tabby’s Star and decelerate.”

  “Doesn’t that suggest a certain innate intelligence, Dr. Truitt?” Gray asked. “Navigating across almost two hundred light years just to feed . . .”

  “I submit that we don’t know enough to ascribe motivations to these creatures just yet, Admiral. I expect they would need to feed after a thousand-year fast. In fact, I suspect that these beings get energy from starlight and from incidental radiation. The feeding behavior we see would be a prelude to reproduction.”

  “Reproduction?” Captain Fletcher, the ship’s CAG, said. “That doesn’t sound good.”

  “Of course,” Truitt said. “While we would need to sample one to be certain of its chemical makeup, we suspect that these creatures are essentially molecu
lar dust clouds, masses of dust or gas consisting mostly of iron, silicon, carbon, and simple compounds like methane and water ices, all under the influence of a locally intense magnetic field.”

  Gray caught Gutierrez’s eye and grinned. She rolled her eyes. Truitt was going into lecture mode, and there would be no stopping him.

  “That field is . . .” Truitt continued, “knotted. The knotting is extremely complex, something like the solar magnetic field in the vicinity of the heliopause, and we don’t yet understand how it works. I presume, however, that those fields let the organism keep and change its shape, and allow different volumes of the creature to communicate with one another, rather like nerve impulses in more traditional forms of life. When it, ah, consumes raw materials, like a small asteroid, or the carbon-silicon weave of one of those immense light sails, it’s creating a store of raw material either for its own growth, or to create a new individual.”

  “Which makes this system perfect for them,” Gray said. “A kind of smorgasbord.”

  “Seems a bit of a coincidence,” Mallory said, thoughtful, “that several of them just happened to chance upon the large-scale structures in the Tabby’s Star system. It’s almost like they knew the things were here.”

  “A bigger coincidence is that we arrive in-system just when they do,” Truitt pointed out. “They’ve probably been here for centuries, even millennia . . . and they might regularly travel back and forth between here and wherever they come from.”

  “Deneb?” Blakeslee asked.

  “Possibly Deneb,” Truitt said, nodding. “It’s an extremely bright star—over fifty-four thousand times brighter than Sol. Lots of energy to jump-start an unusual biology like this one. Or possibly the North American Nebula. Lots of dust and masses of ionized hydrogen where these creatures could evolve.”

  “America,” Gray said, smiling.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “It’s the North America Nebula, not American. Lots of people make that mistake.”

  Truitt grumbled something, but Gray couldn’t catch the words. “Commander Blakeslee?” Gray added, changing the focus of the conversation quickly. “Tell us about that nebula.”

  The chief navigator gestured, and a new image came up, a pale smear of red light against the dark. “Well . . . we’ve never been there, sir. Humans, I mean. It’s close—two hundred forty light years from here. About sixteen hundred light years from Sol. And it’s big, over one hundred light years across, which makes it five times bigger than the Orion Nebula. Its name comes from an odd coincidence. . . .” He gestured, and the smear of light rotated 90 degrees. As it did so, it took on a different but strikingly familiar outline. “It actually looks like North America . . . see the Gulf of Mexico there, and Florida? This over here to the right is the Penguin Nebula, but it’s actually a part of the same gas cloud. This dark band in between the two absorbs the light on its way toward Earth and makes it look like two separate nebulae.” The image rotated again, and became a single mass. “We don’t see that from this side, of course.”

  “So . . . almost three hundred light years away,” Gutierrez said. “If those blobs came from there, they would be traveling for three thousand years, near enough.” She looked at Gray. “Why is it important to know where they came from?”

  “I don’t know that it is, Captain. But the more we know about what’s happening—and what’s happened—in this system, the better off we’ll be. Did these giant amoeba-things destroy the Tabby’s Star civilization? Or are they just grazing on the leftovers? If they’re intelligent, can we talk to them? Would they be of help against the Rosetters?”

  “There is another consideration as well,” the voice of the Konstantin clone said.

  “What’s that?” Gray asked.

  “We did record a signal from the light sail when the organism attacked it. Apparently, each sail pod is connected with those nearby through tight-beam masers—microwave lasers. As it fell, one of its transmitters momentarily pointed at the nearest Starblade fighter, which was able to record it.”

  “Have you been able to translate it?”

  “Not as yet. However, we have been able to determine the aliens’ computer protocols. In time, we may be able to insert intelligent software and initiate a conversation.”

  “Excellent. What do you need from us?”

  “When we have an AI software penetrator ready I will need this ship moved alongside one of the sail pods,” Konstantin replied. “Until then, I suggest that you try to determine the role these translucent creatures play in the Tabby’s Star system.”

  “Well, we won’t be traveling to Deneb to check them out,” Gray said. “The trip there would take twelve days or so. The North America Nebula, eighteen. We just don’t have the time.”

  “Then we will have to focus our attention on the light-sail pods,” Konstantin said, “and on the giant life forms.”

  “What are we going to call those things, anyway?” Guttierez asked. “We can’t just keep calling them ‘giant life forms.’”

  Gray chuckled. “Giant space amoeba . . . space whales . . . hell, I don’t know.”

  “Feeders,” Fletcher said. “Light-sail feeders.”

  “Is that because they feed on light sails, CAG?” Mallory asked. “Or because they are light sails that feed?”

  “Yes,” Fletcher said. Several in the CIC chuckled at that.

  “Sounds better than ‘space amoeba,’” Gray added. He was aware of several entertainment vids and interactives featuring enormous, single-celled space-going animals, and he’d always thought the idea was silly. The universe, however, kept coming up with the new, the strange, and sometimes the downright ridiculous.

  “So what is our course of action, Admiral?” Gutierrez asked.

  “The ship will approach one of the pods,” he decided. “Not too close. A few thousand kilometers. I want to try to talk with whatever is inside there. A Starblade squadron will try to approach one of the feeders . . . the one that’s in the outer system, decelerating. No rocks for it to throw. But again, not too close. Let’s see if we can have a conversation.”

  “And if we can’t?” Blakeslee said.

  “Then we’ll have to send in the Marines.”

  One way or another, Gray was determined to make contact.

  TC/USNA CVS Lexington

  Command Bridge

  Kapteyn’s Star System

  1810 hours, TFT

  “Welcome aboard, Commander,” Captain Bigelow told her. “Enjoy your leave?”

  “I . . . yes, sir.” Taggart’s voice was dead, revealing her emotional state. There was no way she could find the emotional strength to respond in kind to Bigelow’s banter.

  “We missed you, Commander,” Bigelow told her. “Good to have you back.”

  Lexington’s bridge showed its usual buzz and bustle . . . almost as though nothing had happened. Life, it seemed, went on. . . .

  The massive Grand Unified Fleet had arrived in the Kapteyn’s Star system five days earlier. Taggart, still on the ground on Heimdall, had thrilled to the emergence of the kilometer-long star carriers some twelve AUs out—the Constitution, the massive flagship Declaration, the swarms of lesser ships taking up stations in extended orbit around the sun. She’d hung on every telemetry intercept, every ship emergence report, watching for the America.

  But her old ship never appeared, and excitement had turned first to dread . . . then to mourning. America, she learned from messages from the incoming ships, had jumped with them.

  But she’d not emerged.

  Ships were lost while under Alcubierre Drive sometimes. They folded their private universe about them, and then . . .

  No one knew what happened. Since by definition a ship under drive was not within the normal universe but occupying a separate and artificial continuum, metaspace, there was no way to investigate a ship that went missing. Theoretically, when the power was shut down, the folded space reverted to normal and the ship should simply drop back into the realm
of stars and planets and humans, but it was possible that the tightly knotted bubble of warped space just kept on going, traveling ultimately to the farthest reaches of the universe. And if only wreckage dropped back into normal space, well . . . in all the unholy emptiness of interstellar space, there was no way to find a pitiful few scraps of debris.

  All that was theory, though. No star carrier had ever vanished while under Alcubierre Drive.

  So Taggart mourned her old ship, mourned her former shipmates.

  Most of all, she mourned her former lover.

  Then Lexington had arrived at last from Thrymheim, taking up orbit around Heimdall, and Bigelow had requested that his first officer return to the ship.

  Somehow, she’d managed to convince herself that her fling with Sandy Gray had just been biology—two lonely people and all of that virtual vidcrap people liked to download for entertainment. When America failed to show up at Kapteyn’s Star, though, she realized that she’d been fooling herself, plain and simple. She’d had to force herself, step by step, to board the shuttle Bigelow sent down for her, force herself to navigate the zero-G passageways to the bridge, force herself to enter that high-tech arena and strap herself down in her old seat.

  How the hell was she supposed to get through this? . . .

  “You okay, Commander?” Carla Milton asked. She looked worried.

  Yeah, everyone on the ship knew about her relationship with Sandy, so they’d all be tiptoeing around her now. Shit . . .

  “I’m okay, Carla,” she replied. “Thank you.”

  And, somehow, saying so made it so.

  Well . . . after a fashion.

  Marine CAP-1

  Bifrost Space

  2036 hours, TFT

  Lieutenant Liam Davies let the gravity of giant Bifrost pull his Hornet fighter into a gentle curve, sweeping in above the glorious multihued gleam of the gas giant’s colorful rings. The rest of the Grim Ripper squadron was spread out through space around him, making the same turn, following the rainbowlike bridge that had given the planet its name.