by Ian Douglas
Davies appreciated the icy beauty of the rings as he skimmed above them, but he was more concerned with the odd vision he’d had a week before.
The colonel had given him a swat about hallucinating . . . but he’d known what he’d seen, damn it—a gently undulating landscape cloaked in trees. The trees had been odd-looking, alien, with feathery branches rather than terrestrial leafy canopies, but still a far cry from the rock and ice of modern Heimdall. He’d seen the report posted by that Navy xeno specialist, Carter, about the virtual existence of a bunch of Pan-European fighter jocks trapped inside the global computer on Heimdall, and wasn’t sure how to take that. Carter had seen stuff too, different stuff, and she’d talked with the electronic ghosts of those Confederation pilots.
He thought he’d been riding that same circuit, somehow, but maybe picking up a different channel. That was the only way he could figure it. The other Marines in his outfit had called him crazy, teasing him about his bucking for a section eight . . . or about how he needed some R&R with his alien buddies.
Fuck ’em. He knew what he’d seen. Or, rather, he didn’t know what he’d seen, but he knew that he’d seen it. Maybe the Beyonders had given him a flash-look at the way their world had been a few hundred million years ago.
“Listen up, Marines,” Captain Roberto Salinas called. He was the senior officer of Marine fighter attack squadron VMFA-46, the Grim Rippers. “We’re going to try to get in real close to the Rosie heart today. Nothing too threatening, but we want them to take notice.”
The AS-90 Hornets cleared the gas giant rings. Ahead, the eerie golden hues of the Rosetter constructs shifted and glowed. “Copy that, Skipper,” Lieutenant Jimenez said. “Just close enough to make the bastards pissed.”
They called the strategy “acclimation,” a drawn-out process in which Confederation fighters and small ships—vessels like frigates and corvettes—kept approaching the central area of Rosette activity, each time moving closer. They kept their velocity to a minimum—a few tens of kilometers per second—and were careful not to demonstrate accelerations or movements that might be interpreted as threats. Partly, the probes were intended to precisely map Rosette structures and facilities, but primarily the expedition leaders wanted to get the Rosette entities used to the Confederation presence.
In the week since the Grand Unified Fleet had arrived, the Earth forces had lost five fighters and one corvette, the Actaeon. All had apparently run into small objects somehow anchored in seemingly empty space, and were not the result of deliberate hostile action.
At least, that was what Gordon and his cronies were insisting.
Davies wasn’t so sure. If the Rosie bastards were as smart and as advanced and as all-seeing as people claimed they were, they would know exactly what the human ships were doing, where they were moving, and what they wanted.
The Rosies were simply ignoring the human ships, nothing more.
And the chances were good that they would continue ignoring them . . . at least until they became a nuisance.
“It’s getting thick in here,” Kim Reighley observed.
“Roger that,” Davies replied, nudging his fighter to port to miss an anchored artifact. What were those things, anyway? “At least the obstacles are easy to spot.”
They stood out on radar and lidar like beacons, each a little less than a meter across. Beacons—maybe that’s what they were. Moving through a cloud of them was eerily like traversing a minefield. The things wouldn’t explode . . . but they would not move, and a fighter could wrap itself around one of the things and be reduced to a spray of junk in an instant if a pilot wasn’t careful.
“Hey, Skipper?” Reg Laughlin called. “How ’bout we arm up?”
“Negative,” Salinas shot back. “This is an acclimation run, not combat.”
“Yeah, but—”
“That’s negative on the weapons, Laughlin!”
“Copy . . .”
He didn’t sound happy about it.
Davies didn’t blame him. He wondered who’d cooked up this misbegotten excuse for an op. Part of the problem was that it wasn’t even clear who was actually running the show. With so many politic entities contributing, things were—well, political.
So was the fleet Confed or was it American? Davies was damned if he knew. That bit of politics probably wouldn’t be worked out until it was time to hand out congratulations for a job well done . . . or blame for a royal screw-up.
And with these strategies, it was hard to think this wouldn’t end up leaning toward the latter.
The Hornets were now plunging through a golden haze that grew swiftly thicker. Tiny pings and snaps sounded through the fighter’s cockpit as Davies moved through a far-flung cloud of dust. His sensors were reading powerful magnetic fields, twisting and knotting out from some central, invisible source, and the dust seemed to be riding those fields like iron filings around a child’s magnet.
“Outer hull is abrading,” his fighter’s AI told him. “Hull temperature at three-five-five degrees Celsius. Self-repair under way.”
The Hornet wasn’t in the same technological wunderkind class as the Navy’s Starblades. Other than shifting its wing angle for atmospheric flight, it couldn’t morph into different shapes, and retained its blunt, delta-dart hull design no matter what it was doing. It was designed, after all, as a Marine low-altitude close-support fighter, and didn’t need the fancy bells and whistles of Navy deep-space fighters. It did have an outer hull nanomatrix, however, which could repair minor holes and pocks in a situation like this.
“I’m reading something up ahead,” Reighley said. “Something big.”
“That’s new,” Salinas said. “Okay, Rips. Come to three-two-seven by one-three. Nice and easy, now, all together . . .”
The haze grew thicker, the impact sounds thickening to what sounded like heavy rain on a tin roof. Davies could feel his ship shuddering under the barrage.
“Reduce velocity,” Salinas ordered. “Bring it down to five kps.”
“This crap is too thick,” Laughlin complained. “I can’t read through it.”
“I’m getting something on long IR,” Davies reported. “Looks like . . . maybe a planet?”
“There aren’t any planets out here,” Salinas said. “Just Bifrost, and that’s behind us.”
“No . . . take a look. It’s round . . . diameter about forty-eight hundred kilometers . . . it’s hot . . .”
“It can’t be!”
“Liam’s right,” Reighley said. “I’ve got it too. Range twenty-eight thousand and closing.”
And very, very slowly, the haze cleared, revealing the Rosette ship—a dark sphere the size of a small planet.
TC/USNA CVS Lexington
Command Bridge
2130 hours, TFT
“We believe that this is the center of Rosetter activity in this system,” the in-head image of Admiral Gordon said, addressing the virtual assembly of ship’s officers. “Our operation will focus on getting as close as possible to this object, with the goal of forcing them to talk with us.”
Suspended in the mind’s eye of each person there was a dull, dark gray sphere, obviously massive, obviously artificial. It floated embedded in golden aurorae, serene and utterly remote from the affairs of humans. Taggart watched the unfolding panorama with something like awe . . . and an undercurrent of fear.
“We have the Marine officers and crew of VMFA-46 to thank for these images,” Gordon added. “Off the Lucas. They’ve been operating off Heimdall for over a week, now, probing the alien presence in this system. But they picked up these images about an hour ago.”
“Does that mean this thing has just now moved into the system?” Captain Mitterlehner of the monitor Festung asked.
“Presumably,” Gordon replied. “That, or it has only now moved in close to Bifrost. The sphere is just over forty-eight hundred kilometers wide, which makes it roughly the same diameter as Mercury. It appears to be mobile—not a static or orbital installation, but a
ship. A very large ship. It also appears to be at the heart of these energy displays and intense magnetic fields. We believe that, at the very least, it may be serving as a command center for Rosette entity operations in the system.”
Taggart continued staring at the computer-generated image in her mind. A ship the size of a planet. Somehow, though, she felt vaguely disappointed. She’d been thinking of the Rosette entities as Stargods—her religion of younger days returning with superhuman force—but the thought of them traveling in a huge, blank sphere, a cosmic billiard ball, seemed . . . anticlimactic, somehow.
And the more she thought about it, really examining her beliefs, the more the religious awe she’d felt since first drifting into the AAC faded. If these were the Stargods, they were distant and impersonal beings, beings so far above and beyond the reach of Humankind that any kind of a genuine, personal relationship was utterly impossible.
They weren’t gods. Godlike, perhaps . . . but not gods.
Even so, the fear she felt remained . . . and grew. . . .
“Designate that thing ‘Romeo’ for ‘Rosetter,’” Captain Bigelow said. “Romeo One.”
“Aye, aye, Captain,” Taggart replied.
“I’m intrigued that the fighters got this close,” Bigelow added, “and didn’t generate a hostile response.”
“Indeed,” Gordon said. “On the other hand, they didn’t generate a friendly or communicative response, either. The fighters came to within five thousand kilometers of the sphere, but they were ignored.”
“As usual,” Captain Pemberton of the Constitution put in. “They just don’t find us interesting.”
“The important thing, my friend,” Captain Michel Hollande of the heavy cruiser Vulcain said, “is that they don’t find us tasty.”
“Pray that they don’t, ladies and gentlemen,” Gordon said. “Because tomorrow we’re going to begin shifting elements of the fleet toward this object, a little closer each time. We will force them to take an interest, whether they want to or not.”
“God help us all,” Bigelow said. “As one God to another, you understand.”
No one laughed.
Chapter Twenty-two
20 December 2425
TC/USNA CVS Lexington
Bridge
Kapteyn’s Star
1135 hours, TFT
“Captain! Romeo One is moving! Fast!”
“I see it, Tag,” Bigelow replied. “All stations to general quarters.”
The Grand Unified Fleet had been maneuvering within Bifrost space for more than twenty-four hours now, getting as close as they dared to the Rosetter structures and fields of shifting light, but without any reaction whatsoever from the enigmatic aliens. An hour earlier, the Chinese carriers Guangdong and Jiangsu, plus the North Indian light carrier Shiva and a number of escort vessels had accelerated sharply toward the alien object now code-named Romeo One.
Now, as they closed to within a thousand kilometers of the artificial world, that world at last responded, rapidly closing the gap between itself and the Earth forces. Had they crossed an unseen line in space? Or had the alien presence simply tired of the game? A beam of antiprotons had snapped out from Romeo and punched through the Jiangsu’s shield cap, lighting up the sky with a flash of hard radiation. The Chinese carrier, crippled, began a slow tumble in a widening spiral of ice crystals as water erupted from its shield-cap reservoir and froze as it hit hard vacuum.
An instant later, a giant, invisible hand seemed to grasp Shiva around her midsection, closing on her, crumpling her hull. Atmosphere exploded into space and froze as debris and wreckage and bodies spilled from the smashed vessel. The hull continued crumpling and compacting, collapsing into a gravitational singularity somewhere in the bowels of the vessel.
Guangdong had already swung around her own projected singularity and was reversing course . . . but you don’t stop a 100,000-ton starship in an instant. A North Indian destroyer exploded at the touch of the antiproton beam.
“C’mon . . .” Bigelow muttered out loud. “Order them the hell out of there!”
Gordon’s orders came over the Net a moment later. “All ships! All ships! Fall back to cis-Heimdall space!”
“It’s my duty to remind the Captain,” Taggart said quietly, “that we are currently operating under standard Rules of Engagement. Permission to target Romeo One.”
“Yes . . . yes,” Bigelow said. “Lock on with everything we have. CAG! Get the rest of our fighters out there!”
“Aye, aye, sir,” the voice of Lexington’s CAG, Captain Tom Walters, replied. “Launching the Ready-fives.”
Three squadrons were already outside on combat space patrol. It would take time for the remaining three squadrons—on “Ready five,” meaning they could launch on five minutes’ notice—to become spaceborne.
“Deploy the fighters on CSP to screen the other ships,” Bigelow ordered. “Weapons are free; repeat: weapons free!”
Lexington opened up with her main particle-beam batteries, sending bolts of charged particles slamming into the oncoming planet. The surface of that mobile world, Taggart saw, was manifestly artificial, a smooth, dark surface marked by straight lines and regular geometries.
And Lexington’s beams seemed to sink into that surface without effect.
Taggart watched the battle unfolding on the bridge screens. She could have streamed it through her in-head circuitry as a virtual display, but she needed to be aware of her surroundings, not lost in a completely immersive reality. She was concerned about the launch of fighters. If the fleet was forced to withdraw, there might not be time to retrieve the fighters beforehand. That meant a rendezvous out-system somewhere . . . if the Rosetters even gave them the luxury of time.
“Miles?” she called to Lexington’s weapons officer, Commander Miles Conrad. “Can you boost power to those beams at all?”
“We’re at max now, Commander,” Conrad replied. “I don’t think we’re even singeing them!”
A USNA destroyer, the Horace, crumpled and vanished. Somehow, the aliens were projecting gravitational point-sources across thousands of kilometers, creating massive black holes deep inside the target vessels. Taggart had never seen combat of that sort before. In space battles, the destruction of a starship often released the microsingularities they carried in their power plants or, more rarely, their drive singularities destabilized and went wild. In either case, ships could be torn to bits by minute black holes slamming through their interior structures, and the loose black holes could devour entire ships.
That seemed to be what was happening here, but far more quickly and on a bigger, more terrifying scale. Somehow, Romeo One was reaching out across thousands of kilometers of space, throwing a switch, and twisting the spacetime within the heart of the target vessel, as though squeezing it within an enormous, invisible fist. The ship’s internal structure crunched down into an ultra-dense core, which then winked out inside an artificially generated black hole of roughly jovian mass. They were manipulating the fabric of space directly, Taggart knew . . . but, then, that should not have been surprising, not with the way they manipulated space and time to create their enigmatic structures of dust motes and light.
Stargods. Or technologies that made it seem that way.
How the hell were mere humans supposed to face something like that?
The heavy cruiser Juneau crumpled, dwindled, and vanished.
“All fighters!” Admiral Gordon was yelling over the tactical net. “Use your missiles! Max meg! Max meg!”
Krait missiles had variable-yield warheads that could be dialed up to two hundred megatons. Against something the size of a planet those would count for exactly nothing.
Taggart increased the magnification of the optical scanners tracking Romeo One.
“I’m picking up oddly pulsed EM currents inside the structure,” she reported.
“Mass density readings suggest that it’s solid,” Lieutenant Ramos, the sensor officer of the watch, added. “It’s got nearly t
he mass of Earth packed into a sphere a third the size.”
“It may be pure computronium,” Lieutenant Commander Matchett added. He was Lexington’s chief IT officer, in charge of the ship’s computer network. “My God, it might be one big super-AI. . . .”
“Anyone see any weak spots?” Ramos asked.
“How does something the size of a planet have a weak spot?” Taggart demanded. How much energy, she wondered, would it take to destroy an entire planet? She ran some figures through her in-head processors, calculating the gravitational binding energy of an Earth-sized mass. The energy required, she saw, would be on the order of 1.25 × 1032 joules—125 million trillion trillion joules . . . roughly as much energy as Sol put out over the course of four days focused into a single second.
It would take a fleet of billions of ships all firing together to generate that kind of power, or a fusillade of 3 million billion 200-megaton warheads. There was, to state it with an elegant simplicity, no fucking way they were going to take this thing out.
“This is beginning to look like a really bad idea,” Taggart said aloud.
The fighters were loosing all of their Krait smart missiles now, and specks of light began to wink on and off across the alien planet’s surface like twinkling stars.
“All ships!” Admiral Gordon called over the command net. “All ships! Fall back and—”
But the final part of the order was never transmitted. On the tactical screens, the star carrier Declaration jerked suddenly to one side, twisted, then crumpled as unimaginable energies collapsed her internal structure into a pinpoint vortex of gravitational fury. The carrier’s forward section—the half-kilometer-wide shield cap and a small part of her spine, as far back as her bridge tower and hab modules—escaped, tumbling away from the collapsing mass of her supply, drive, and power modules.
“What ships are closest to the Declaration?” Bigelow snapped.
“Decatur, sir,” Commander Eric Gower, Lexington’s tactical officer, reported. “And the North Indian Vagsheer.”