by Ian Douglas
It scarcely mattered. His concern now centered entirely on the survival of the New American fleet, a microscopic speck all but lost within the immensity of the hypernode's crowded panorama. "All warstriders," he called. "Maintain close support of the fleet."
Acknowledgements flooded back, a roll call sounding in his mind.
"Keep those spheres off of us!" he added.
The antimatter spheres had proven to be less of a problem than first imagined. A signal had been picked up and recorded when the Revolution had been torn apart… and as Griffin had suggested the signal had emanated from within the mass of antimatter-bearing spheres girdling the human ship. Working back from that, Constitution's AI had begun generating control signals of her own, basically commanding the spheres to release their hold on the ship and hurl themselves off into empty space.
The enemy had countered with new signals, heavily encrypted. Connie had cracked the encryption and countered them. The silent, eerie combat of coded commands and counter-commands continued, a secondary, totally digital battle unfolding at the speed of light.
For the moment, all of the human ships were free of the spheres… but they were also closer to the spheres' source, and more and more were swarming up out of the statite clouds, trying to swamp the intruders' electronic defenses. The antibody simile, Griffin decided, was eerily accurate. The spheres continued coming in greater and greater numbers, protected by more layers of and more difficult security codes; it wouldn't be long, he knew, before the human ships were simply overwhelmed.
At least they were no longer being shot at by the star miners out on the cluster's edge. This far in, the red dwarf suns were invisible, masked by the swarms of statite sails and orbiting habitats. No matter how good the controlling intelligence might be, it would never be able to find a clear line of fire all the way in to the hypernode cluster's core.
But there was something new and unexpected looming up ahead. It dominated the C3 viewall, an intense white light clouded over by the swarms of habitats and sails. It had the look of a terrestrial sunset, the sun itself mostly hidden behind masses of dark clouds, which, in turn, were edged in silver by the light. That radiance wasn't coming from a sun, however; Constitution's AI estimated that the light source was only 25,000 kilometers ahead, which meant that whatever was glowing up ahead was no larger than Earth.
Sensors were picking up a lot of hard radiation, too—x-rays, gamma rays, and the gamma emission lines of positron annihilation, too. What the hell was going on in there?
A flare of light and hard radiation blossomed to port. Griffin checked the squadron readouts, and swore. Antimatter spheres had exploded a few kilometers off, and taken two warstrider ascraft with them.
"All striders!" he ordered. "Keep knocking down those spheres, but stay the hell clear of them!"
Acknowledgments came back… a few. The warstriders were locked in deadly close-in combat—a knife fight—with the robot spheres… and their numbers were slowly but steadily dwindling as more and more were destroyed.
And there seemed to be no end to the enemy's spheres.
Constitution and Independence edged through the last of a tightly packed swarm of statites, passed through the habitat orbital immediately below, then passed through the roof of sails once more. Sails crumpled on either side as the battle-carriers brushed past… and then, at last, the central mystery of the cluster was revealed.
"My God," Griffin said quietly. "A black hole!"
"It doesn't look black," Carson said. "Looks like another midget sun."
"It's a tame black hole, Admiral," Griffin replied. "See there?…"
He pointed off to the right. The swarm upon swarm of orbital structures within the hypernode had left one, cone-shaped section of the entire cluster empty, though this had been blocked from sight by the cluster itself. A red dwarf star had been parked outside the cluster, encircled by those magnetic-field satellites they'd seen before, and was being manipulated into firing a single needle-thin thread of white-hot plasma directly into the central core of the hypernode.
Positioned at the hypernode's center, according to Connie, was a small black hole—probably only a few centimeters across. The stream of stellar plasma was striking the hole, engulfing it, and being devoured by it… but only a tiny fraction of that frightful energy and matter could actually pass through the ergosphere and vanish down the gravitational singularity's throat in any given second. The area round the singularity was filled with orbital devices or facilities probably designed to extract energy from that star-core fury and transmit it outward, throughout the hypernode. Thousands of laser beams burned on the infrared view of the heavens, feeding the heart of the cluster.
This, then, was the power plant that drove the Ophiuchan hypernode, providing far more energy than a single, modestly sized sun. A number of the orbital facilities here were titanic, obviously artificial but as large as fair-sized planetoids or small moons. There were ships visible here as well… much larger versions of the silvery spheres, some kilometers in length, most ovoid or egg shaped rather than simple spheres. There were hundreds of them, and they were moving toward the ships of the New American fleet.
"Sir," Griffin said quietly. "Maybe we need to pull back just a bit.…"
"Yes." Carson gave a jerky, distracted nod. "Yes… I think you're right."
Griffin had just been congratulating himself that they'd found a safe refuge near the hypernode's core… but too close would put them in the line of fire from this other red dwarf. It was feeding plasma down the hypernode's throat now, but it wouldn't take much to shift that beam's aim just a little… and wipe out the human fleet.
At Carson's mental command, broadcast over the fleet's Net, the human ships came to a halt relative to the suns and structures surrounding them, then slowly edged back into the nearest Jenkins Swarm, the cloud of statites from which they'd only just emerged.
Curiously, the clouds of spheres seemed to have stopped coming… and the larger alien vessels weren't attacking, not yet, anyway.
It seemed as though both sides were holding their metaphorical breaths.…
* * *
Vaughn could feel the acceleration, though he still could see nothing beyond the enveloping shroud of blackness holding him immobile within his dead Gyrfalcon. It felt like the Naga fragment was boosting at three or four Gs; he hoped the intelligence operating the thing knew enough about human physiology to keep the journey survivable.
As he thought about it, he decided that the aliens did understand human biology… or else they'd been extremely quick learners. The living black gunk that had flooded his ascraft cockpit had filled his lungs… and yet, somehow, his blood was being oxygenated, pressure and temperature were being maintained, and he wasn't even feeling the effects of hunger or thirst. For all intents and purposes, he'd been plugged into the Naga material and become a part of it—or it had become part of him—and it seemed to be taking care of all of his physiological needs.
The odd monologue continued in his mind, however… disjointed images and thoughts and surging emotions to which it was impossible to put words. A lot of the communication was coming through as memory, as though the hypernode consciousness was writing directly to his in-head RAM. In effect, he was remembering things that he had never experienced.
That made putting actual words to those experiences no easier. However, Vaughn continued to try to milk some measure of understanding from the confused mental cacophony.
The hypernode intelligence appeared to be remembering a kind of golden age, past aeons of prosperity, peace, and unimaginable joy when it was one tiny part of an unimaginably vaster organism, one that had spanned the Galaxy and reached considerably beyond. The analogy with a human brain was apt. The hypernode itself was made up of some billions of individual parts—computronium statites and orbital habitats circling artificial microstars—all networked together like neurons in the brain, with lasers serving as synaptic connections between the cells. But that star-sized brain,
in turn, the hypernode, served as a single neuron in a far vaster brain, one that used artificial, microscopic wormholes as synapses to connect with other hypernode neurons across the Galaxy.
A Galaxy-sized brain made up of billions of star-sized brains. God… what did a mind like that even think about?
In his memory, Vaughn saw an answer of sorts… not that it made a lot of sense. The Galactic mind—We Who Ascended—spent a lot of time contemplating the nature of reality, it seemed… and devising ever more complex math to describe it. They studied life throughout the Galaxy, and described that with equations as well, equations that let them digitize that life so that it could be uploaded into vast and complex electronic simulations. They simulated entire universes… and varied everything from the evolution of life to the growth of entire civilizations to the changes effected by a single decision.
And they served as gods.…
Literal gods, creating worlds and seeding them with life and watching over that life, protecting, nurturing, and sometimes ruthlessly weeding. Those countless habitats in orbit around the microstars… each of those was a world with a population devoted to serving and worshipping We Who Ascended.
Vaughn tended to hover somewhere between atheistic and agnostic in his personal belief, though he'd been raised Reformed Absolutist. As such, he had little patience with concepts such as "blasphemy." Still, the idea of a machine mind setting itself up as god for uncounted quadrillions of sophont beings struck him as about as close to blasphemous as he could imagine. Politically he was a NeoLibertarian, as were many New American revolutionaries. At its simplest, that meant he thought every sophont being had the right to decide for itself. A super-AI calling itself god kind of stacked the deck… and left its worshippers with no choices at all.
We are God no longer.…
Well, that thought had come through clearly enough. Perhaps the Naga fragment was improving the connection with his own implants.
How can God stop being God? Vaughn asked.
We were part of God… and we were cast out.
Who cast you out?
We did.…
Why?
The Mind was broken.…
So… something that Dev Cameron had planted in a Naga fragment and fed to the original Web had broken the Galactic Mind. That was becoming fairly clear, now. Vaughn suspected that the contaminant was a meme of some sort. Memes were ideas, behaviors, or concepts that spread from being to being within a culture, and often acted to change that culture. Like genes in living systems, they could self-replicate, mutate, and respond to selective pressures. They could be as simple and as harmless as a joke spreading rapidly through a social network or a popular advertising jingle… or they could be as fundamentally challenging and as dangerous as a new and powerful religion or political movement.
He thought about the Japanese concept of osen and wondered if that might apply here. Contamination could take many forms, from the bacterial or radiological to contamination by ideas.
Often, ideas could be the most powerful contaminants of all. Was that what had broken We Who Ascended?
What meme could cause an ascended SAI to fail?
What idea could destroy a god?
You were not real, the voice in his mind, his memory, said, accusing. You were not supposed to be real! And then you were real and everything came crashing down! Everything… changed.…
What do you mean we were not supposed to be real?
The concept was a difficult one to translate, and it took a long time for Vaughn to understand. Eventually, though, he saw… understood.…
And the revelation left him thunderstruck.
* * *
Sergeant Mike Hallman rotated his ascraft, bringing the nearest statite sail into view directly ahead. The squad was a few hundred kilometers from the surface, which seemed to stretch off into infinity and blocked out half of that crowded, eldritch sky.
"Ground on the statite panel," Vanderkamp ordered. "Everybody… down and take cover.…"
"Will that thing even support us?" Jackowicz wanted to know.
"Not much gravity, Jacko," Hallman said. "It's reading out at about point zero three Gs. Should be okay if we don't try to do jumping jacks."
"Hell," Wheeler added, "jumping jacks would be a good way to reach escape velocity."
"Right. So don't do it."
The warstrider ascraft descended toward the nearly featureless black surface of the statite, unfolding legs and weaponry as they gently touched down, making the transition to ground combat mode.
Not that the sail was much like ground. The surface was stiff and inflexible, but remarkably thin, thinner than a sheet of paper. Local gravity came courtesy of the sail's mass, the smaller mass of the teardrop-shaped computronium structure dangling somewhere far below, and—since the statite wasn't in orbit—from the gravity of the microstar some twelve thousand kilometers below that. The surface fluttered and rippled beneath his armored feet as Hallman took his first tentative step, but whatever it was made of seemed to be supporting his weight.
"Now what, Lieutenant?" Pardoe asked.
"Stay put," she replied. "Let's see what the bastards are going to do."
"I still think we need to go after Tad," Hallman said. "Like right now.…"
"Ain't gonna happen, Hallman," Vanderkamp snapped. "Just sit tight."
Hallman scowled, chaffing at the orders. He'd tagged that flying Naga mountain on his scanner array, and could see it—a bright red icon—moving rapidly now deeper into the cluster. They were taking Vaughn somewhere… that, or he was dead, now, and they were going to examine the body. Shit.
"Whatever happened to 'no striderjack left behind?' " Koko Wheeler asked.
"Look, there's nothing we can freakin' do, okay?" Vanderkamp sounded exasperated. "Our orders are to blend in and stay put, and that's what we're gonna do!"
Blending in was automatic. Warstriders had reactive nanoflage outer hulls that analyzed incoming light and adjusted their color and texture to match. Right now, the Bravo Squadron warstriders all were clad in night-black livery, all but invisible on the seemingly infinite plane of the sail. In the sky above, ovoid vessels, gleaming silver, some of them tens of kilometers long, slowly gathered in greater and greater numbers, squaring off in front of the New American fleet.
"This," Hallman said with savage disgust, "sucks.…"
"Simmer down, Hallman," Vanderkamp told him. "We do this by the book.…"
"There's no book for this, Lieutenant! They've got one of our people over there, they're hauling him off to the gods know where, and we need to stop them!" As he spoke, Hallman nudged his strider upward in the tenuous gravity of the sail, engaging his magnetic drive and folding his strider back into its ascraft flier configuration.
"Damn it, Hallman!" Vanderkamp yelled. "Get your ass back down here!"
"Stop me, Lieutenant!" he replied, and kicked his Gyrfalcon's acceleration, hard.
A beat later, Wheeler had kicked off too, followed by Pardoe and Falcone… and then most of Bravo Squadron was following in-train. Hallman thought of telling them all to go back. Let him be the one to get court-martialed for disobeying orders… but then he shrugged and held his peace. It was their decision to make, each and every one of them.
Vanderkamp cursed, then went space-borne. "C'mon," she told the remaining warstriders around her. "Let's do it."
* * *
"Bravo Squadron!" Griffin called. "What the hell are you doing? Stand fast!"
"With all due respect, Colonel," Vanderkamp's voice came back through his implants, "we can't do a fucking thing against all that hardware. So we're going to go rescue the striderjack they captured. Sir."
Griffin gnawed at his lower lip. Damn them! He'd thought the members of his regiment were better grounded in good order and discipline than this!
His brain, already boosted to max, chewed through a dozen different possibilities, scenarios, and outcomes… and none of them looked good. Right now, the rebel fleet was
facing the far larger alien force nose-to-nose. Vanderkamp was right. There was nothing, nothing the entire New American fleet could do against those numbers and, far worse, the enemy's vastly superior technology. Twenty-some warstriders would not add more than a raindrop to a hurricane, and likely would be vaporized in an instant if the battle resumed. Griffin had a feeling that those huge silver vessels out there were far more potent, more dangerous, than anything the New Americans had seen so far.
The big danger, he thought, was that the aliens would see the sudden flight of those warstriders as a threat, a renewal of the battle, and respond accordingly. But… would they? The enemy must know just how outmatched the Confederation forces were right now. Likely, they could wipe Bravo Squadron out of the sky without breaking a sweat; twenty warstriders were not a threat, not in the face of such overwhelming force.
And… the enemy was literally a hyper-advanced brain twice the size of Sol. They would analyze Bravo's course… see that they were following the Naga fragment… assume they were trying to reach a captured squadron mate.…
They were supposed to be smart, after all.
Of course, there was also the possibility that they were insane.…
"What the hell are your people up to?" Carson demanded.
"I think they're trying to rescue a captured jacker, Sir," Griffin replied.
"Damn it, now isn't the time! Get your people back in line!"
But Griffin was already leaping ahead, thinking it out.
"Sir, I think it might be okay. Let them go.…"
"They're going to start the fighting again!"
"I don't think so, sir." Griffin was watching the alien fleet, which remained motionless a thousand kilometers up ahead. If they'd been going to react, they would have done so by now, he was sure. No, the SAI bastards were watching, waiting to see what was going to happen.