Copyright

Harper

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London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2014

Copyright © Ian Douglas 2014

Cover Art © Gregory Bridges

Ian Douglas asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007483778

Ebook Edition © May 2014 ISBN: 9780007483785

Version: 2016-11-17

Praise for IAN DOUGLAS

and his thrilling

STAR CARRIER SERIES!

“The action is full-blooded and almost nonstop, yet the well-developed background is surprisingly rich and logical. . . . As immersive as it is impressive.”

Kirkus, starred review for Deep Space

“Douglas knows his SF.”

Publishers Weekly

“Well researched and quite imaginative.”

CNN Online

DEEP SPACE was voted one of the Best Science Fiction/Fantasy Books of 2013 by Kirkus.

Dedication

As always,

throughout the multiverse,

worlds without end,

for Brea

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise for Ian Douglas

Dedication

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Epilogue

About the Author

By Ian Douglas

About the Publisher

Prologue

They called themselves the Consciousness.

Following the faint but telltale leakage of gravity from one universe to another, they’d detected the circle of whirling masses as they opened a passageway between the ’branes, emerging in a four-dimensional space subtly different from other, known realities. They were working now to create a permanent gateway between universes, creating girders and connectors spanning light years, coaxing solid light from the vacuum energy itself, anchoring suns, mining starcores, imbedding the structural components within the fabric of spacetime itself.

At this point, the scope of the Consciousness spanned a number of universes. A metamind, a hive mentality, it was an emergent epiphenomenon arising from the interplay of some hundreds of quadrillions of individual minds, extending across separate realities and billions of years of time. The oldest individuals among them had outlived the universes of their birth, existing now in a kind of nomadic existence as they moved from reality to parallel reality.

The Consciousness was powerful to the point of truly godlike creativity, omnipotence, and omniscience. It was aware of events across vast scales in size and time, from quantum fluctuations in the vacuum energies that formed the base state of reality up to the gravitational interactions within galactic clusters. Their senses extended across multiple dimensions, allowing them to peer inside the cores of stars as they mined them, and they could manipulate time in subtle and surprising ways.

Unfortunately, some phenomena simply were . . . not too small, exactly, since they could perceive the dance of individual atoms, but too inconsequential, too unimportant to register clearly within the metamind’s awareness without a special act of focus.

Phenomena such as the squadron of USNA naval vessels now entering the construction field . . .

Chapter One

20 January 2425

Recon Flight Shadow-One

Omega Centauri

1010 hours, TFT

“And three . . . and two . . . and one . . . launch!”

Acceleration slammed Lieutenant Louis Walton back in his seat as his CP-240 Shadowstar hurtled down the long and narrow tunnel, riding the magnetic launch rail, vision dimming . . . and then he emerged into open space, the pressure of 7 gravities replaced in an instant by the blessed, stomach-dropping relief of zero-G. Astern, the vast gray disk of America’s forward shield cap fell away, dwindling to a star, then to invisibility in moments. He was traveling now at better than 600 kilometers per hour.

Ahead was twisted, enigmatic light . . . and sheerest wonder.

“America Primary Flight Control, this is Shadow One,” he called over his in-head. “I’m clear and in the open.”

“Copy, Shadow One,” a voice replied. “Come to one-five-one by two-seven-zero by zero-three-two. You be careful out there, okay?”

“That is a very large affirmative,” Walton replied. “You just happen to be talking to the ship library’s downloaded image of careful.”

“Lou,” the voice in Prifly said, “if that were true, you wouldn’t have volunteered for this run in the first place.”

True enough. But Walton wouldn’t have missed this for the world. For several worlds . . .

The panorama ahead was being fed by the Shadowstar’s imaging system directly into his brain. From his perspective, he was the reconnaissance fighter, hurtling into strangeness.

He was hurtling through the depths of a globular star cluster, a vast, teeming beehive of stars called Omega Centauri, some sixteen thousand years from Sol. But the cluster was . . . changed from what it once had been.

Across the whole, vast, star-crowded sky, hundreds of thousands of suns were gone, leaving dark streaks like daggers piercing the cluster’s heart. Stars had deliberately been merged with stars, creating a central blue giant blazing at the cluster’s core, filling a spherical region almost two light months across with hazy, blue light.

And stretching out from that central sun was a structure of some kind. Stellarchitecture, they’d dubbed it, back in the labyrinths of America’s intelligence department. An unimaginably vast tangle of beams and platforms and spheres and connectors and sweeping curves, some of the structures apparently solid, but the larger ones apparently consisting of blue mist. Following some of those beams with your eye was not a good idea. They were . . . bent, somehow, twisted in disturbing ways suggesting that dimensions other than the normal three spatial ones were being employed here.

Most disturbing of all was the fact that time was being twisted through strange dimensions as well. None of this had been here when the deep-space research survey vessel Endeavor had arrived in the Omega Centauri cluster four months earlier. Now, the sky was filled with structures that appeared to span light years . . . and yet, portions of stellarchitecture more than four light months across were plainly visible. The light from the far ends of those things simply couldn’t have traveled this far in the intervening time.

And yet, there it was, defying what Walton and America’s science department were pleased to call the inviolable laws of physics. There were beams, like gossamer threads glittering in the light of 10 million cluster stars, somehow anchored within the central sun and stretching out and out and out until they were masked by the cluster’s massed suns. Space and time both were not what they seemed here.

The effect was eerily and indescribably beautiful, an abstract painted in myriad shades and hues of blue and violet light, with deep, rich reds in those eye-watering places where structures vanished from normal spacetime.

“America CIC, this is Shadow One,” Walton said. “Handing off from PriFly.”

“Copy, Shadow One,” a different voice replied from America’s Combat Information Center. “Primary Flight Control confirms handoff to CIC. You are clear for maneuver.”

“Accelerating in three . . . two . . . one . . . engage!”

At 50,000 gravities, the Shadowstar hurtled deeper into the cluster.

USNA CVS America

The Black Rosette

Omega Centauri

1016 hours, TFT

“I wish I knew what the hell we were looking at.”

Rear Admiral Trevor “Sandy” Gray stared at the deck-to-overhead viewall in America’s officers’ lounge. He’d been staring into the cosmic panorama every chance he got for three days, now, and was no closer to understanding what he was seeing than he’d been when the task force arrived.

It was, he thought, unimaginably, sublimely beautiful.

It was also utterly mysterious, quite possibly completely and forever beyond human understanding.

The Omega Centauri globular star cluster was the largest such known within the Milky Way galaxy. Some 230 light years across, that teeming, crowded sphere of 10 million closely packed stars was known to be the stripped-down core of a small, irregular galaxy cannibalized by the Milky Way perhaps 800 million years before. That long ago, Earth had been inhabited solely by single-celled microorganisms that were just on the point of discovering sex, but a highly advanced collective of numerous technic species had already been stellarforming their galaxy. Among other things, they’d created a rosette of six supergiant stars, each forty times the mass of Earth’s sun, rotating them about a common center of gravity in a way—it was now believed—that had opened pathways to other places in space . . . and almost certainly other times as well.

That galaxy, called the N’gai Cloud by its inhabitants, had been devoured and shredded, its inhabited worlds scattered. At about the same time, the N’gai’s starfaring cultures, collectively called the ur-Sh’daar, had undergone a technological singularity . . . a technic metamorphosis that had transformed them far beyond the ken of those left behind.

The remnant left had, with the passage of 876 million years, become the Sh’daar, mysterious galactic recluses who dominated some thousands of technic species across the galaxy, and who’d become the enemies of Humankind.

That much, at least, had been learned by America’s battlegroup under the command of Admiral Koenig, which had used an ancient, artificial singularity generator, a massive, fast-spinning cylinder a kilometer across called a TRGA, to travel into the remote past and confront the Sh’daar within their home galaxy. Communications of a sort had been established, a kind of truce declared; electric downloads had revealed the ur-Sh’daar, and the fear-crippled, broken relics that eventually had become the modern Sh’daar.

That had been almost twenty years ago. Gray, at the time, had been a Navy lieutenant and a fighter pilot. Before that he’d been a monogie prim—the words were not compliments—from the half-sunken ruins of Manhat.

God, he’d come a long way since then.

Captain Sara Gutierrez was one of two black-uniformed women standing next to Gray in the officers’ lounge. “It’s so terrible.”

“Terrible? In what way?”

“You can see where they’ve destroyed whole swaths of the cluster. Destroyed the stars. What kind of monsters are we dealing with here?”

“Very, very powerful ones,” the other woman observed. She was Commander Laurie Taggart, America’s chief weapons officer.

The Omega Centauri cluster had been partially disassembled. Needle-slender, impossibly long black streaks could be seen now, stretching out from that artificial central sun, gaps and swaths among the cluster’s tightly packed stars where hundreds of thousands of suns had been moved or destroyed.

The sky at the cluster’s center was dominated by a vast and hazy field of blue-violet light, by enigmatic structures that themselves seemed to be made of light, by impossibly vast constructs of beams and platforms and spheres and connectors of pale, blue mist. Many of those structures appeared bent in disturbing ways that hurt the eye. Like a lithograph by M. C. Escher, many of those shapes did not appear to obey the usual laws of three-dimensional geometry. In the distance, an artificial sun, a star fifty times more massive than Sol created by dragging a number of the cluster’s stars together and merging them, illuminated the central reaches of Omega Centauri with a harshly actinic glare.

“I think they must be adding on to the Rosette,” Gray said. “We may learn more when our recon probe gets in closer.”

What was the name of the VQ-7 Shadowstar pilot they’d just launched? Walton, that was it. His in-head provided the name and service record access. Young kid, twenty-five . . . four years in the Navy, two wives and a husband back in Omaha . . .

And he was hurtling now into the very heart of strangeness.

Deep within Omega Centauri’s core was the enigmatic Black Rosette, an obviously artificial arrangement of six black holes, each some forty times the mass of Sol, all orbiting their common center of gravity in a tight, tight gravitational embrace. If you were close enough to see them, the individual black holes blurred into an indistinct, smoky ring by the speed of their orbit—something like 26,000 kilometers per second.

Eight hundred seventy-six million years ago, the Rosette had been the Six Suns, six blue supergiant stars in a gravitationally balanced circle apparently created by the vanished ur-Sh’daar. But stars with forty times Sol’s mass don’t live for long on the cosmic scale of things . . . a few tens of millions of years at most. Long ago, the Six Suns had exploded, their cores collapsing into black holes, point sources of incredibly powerful gravitational forces. Now, they were the Black Rosette. As they circled their common center, their movement through space and their combined gravitational fields sharply distorted spacetime, creating a kind of stargate, one far larger and far more powerful than the enigmatic TRGA cylinders that had been discovered elsewhere in the galaxy.

The truly chilling import of what he was seeing, Gray thought, wasn’t so much the destruction of so many suns as it was the fact that the Rosette Aliens, whatever they were, appeared to be building their colossal stellarchetecture in time as well as in space.

The light from those changes in the starfield could not possibly have reached this point in space yet.

Somehow, the Rosette Aliens were disassembling the cluster and weaving their structures through time as well as space. The best guess the physics team on board America had been able to come up with so far was that the aliens had so distorted the local spacetime continuum that they’d actually changed Omega Centauri’s history. Those black swaths and gaps now visible among the stars had not been created within the past four months . . . but as of now had been there for well over a century, long enough for the light recording those changes to have traveled this far.

And that fact alone spoke volumes about the Builders’ power.

“I wonder if any of those stars they destroyed had worlds?” Gutierrez said. “Inhabited worlds?”

“Not likely,” Gray replied. “These are stars from an ancient galactic core, remember. Population Two, most of them. That means they’re metal poor, almost entirely hydrogen, and very, very old. No heavy stuff—no iron or silicon or anything else—for building planets.”

“It still seems . . . arrogant,” Taggart observed. “Just pop in out of nowhere and start taking apart a star cluster! Like they own the place!”

“Like the stargods?” Gray said, smiling gently.

“Fuck you,” Taggart said, then added, “Sir.”

Gray accepted the vulgar familiarity with a chuckle. He had deserved it. Laurie Taggart was an AAC, an Ancient Alien Creationist, a follower of a religion that boasted perhaps 20 million official adherents Earthside, and millions more who believed the basic dogma without belonging to the church. The AACs held that Earth had been visited in the remote past by technologically advanced aliens who, among other things, had tinkered with the genome of certain native bipeds to create Homo sapiens.

Gray couldn’t buy that himself. The AAC mythology painted the Ancient Aliens as interstellar busybodies who were so . . . so human, building pyramids here, creating alien-human hybrids there, nuking Sodom and Gomorrah or whipping up a planetary flood to drown the human population out of existence when they got pissed off.

If there were stargods, Gray thought, they would be more like those Builders out there, annihilating stars without a second thought, rewriting the time line of an entire galactic cluster, and those were beings so advanced that they might not even notice mere Humankind. He and Taggart had discussed the idea more than once, and he enjoyed lightly tweaking her about it now and again.

But the encounter with these cluster-reshaping beings during the past few days had profoundly shaken her, he knew. It might be a good idea not to tease her about her religion.

In any case, that sort of thing nowadays was considered socially unacceptable. The White Covenant, a set of international agreements in place since the late twenty-first century, mandated only that you weren’t allowed to proselytize or forcefully convert others when it came to religion . . . but after three and a half centuries most people took that to mean a prohibition on any discussion of religious belief or disbelief. At the very least, such a discussion was considered rude. Bull sessions among friends were okay, sure . . . but in a professional setting like this . . . not so much.

That alien vista outside of America, Gray knew, was wearing at everyone in the squadron. Gnawing at them. The worst of it was knowing that the aliens had already destroyed the research ship RSV Endeavor and two escorting destroyers, Miller and Herrera, killing over fifteen hundred personnel on board. They’d been obliterated in an instant, four months ago, when something had come through the Rosette from . . . somewhere else. The destruction had been captured on video taken by an HVK-724 high-velocity scout-courier robot, which had subsequently returned the images to Earth.

Gray and his staff had spent a lot of hours studying those images. The alien vessels, if that’s what they were, appeared to be featureless, mirror-polished silver ovoids ranging in size from a few meters to nearly a kilometer in length. There was no sign of them now, though . . . only those enigmatic and impossible structures of light.

“As for what we’re looking at, sir,” Taggart continued quietly, “I think we have to assume that they’re using the Rosette as a transit gate from wherever they came from. We know that there are many possible paths through the spacetime opening.”

“One octillion,” Gray said. “Ten to the twenty-seven distinct spacetime pathways. Assuming that the Black Rosette is the same as the Six Sun rosette built eight hundred seventy-six million years ago.”

“The number may be very much larger now,” a voice said in their heads, speaking through their in-head circuitry. The AI that ran America was always there, listening, and very occasionally putting in a word or two.

“Why is that?” Gutierrez asked.

“The black holes of the Rosette in Omega Tee-Prime distort spacetime between them to a far greater degree than was true for the Six Suns of Tee-Sub. The actual number of distinct spacetime pathways through Tee-Prime may exceed one centillion—or ten to the three hundred third power—essentially, and for all intents and purposes, nearly infinite.”

And that was a sobering thought.

Omega Tee-Prime was the shorthand term for the Omega Centauri cluster today, time now, in the year 2425. Omega Tee-Sub, on the other hand, was shorthand for the unwieldy T-0.876gy, a clumsy term pronounced “Tee sub minus zero point eight seven six gigayear” and identifying the N’gai Cloud of the ur-Sh’daar, 876 million years in the past.

If the Rosette Aliens were busily rewriting the cluster’s immediate past, Gray thought glumly, it might be necessary to come up with some new spacial-temporal terminology as well. Time travel made everything so damnably complicated.

And yet, the ability to reshape time was an obvious follow-on to the ability to warp space. Ever since Einstein, physicists had known that space and time were not distinct entities, but dimensional aspects of each other, of spacetime. Human ships used projected, artificial gravitational singularities to move themselves through space; in theory, it should be possible to do the same to move through time, though that would require a lot of energy—more energy than even a star carrier’s quantum power tap could supply. In another few centuries, perhaps . . .

But the Black Rosette Aliens were doing it now.

From America’s current position, the Black Rosette was made invisible by distance, but close-up passes by the Endeavor before her destruction had shown tantalizing glimpses of alien scenes, alien starfields peeking out through the lumen of that hazy circle of rotating singularities.

What, Gray wondered yet again, were the Rosette Aliens up to? Who were they? Where—when—did they come from? Were they Sh’daar? Transformed and transfigured ur-Sh’daar? Or someone, something utterly and completely different?

The stargods? It was as good a name as any . . . though the term Rosette Aliens, for now, carried less emotional baggage for the merely human observers on board America and her consorts.

Gray checked the time. Walton’s Shadowstar should be approaching the Rosette fairly soon, now. And if Walton survived the flight, they just might learn something more about exactly what the Rosette Aliens were up to.

Recon Flight Shadow-One

Omega Centauri

1118 hours, TFT

Lieutenant Walton was decelerating now, his Shadowstar flipped end for end so that he was slowing from very nearly the speed of light. He needed to be moving at a more sedate pace if he and the ship’s AI were actually to see and record anything as they made their close passage of the Rosette. He couldn’t see much at all right now. He’d reshaped the drive singularity forward to extend a stealth sheath aft over his fighter. From most angles, now, his Shadowstar was invisible, the light coming from space around him sliding around the craft without ever quite reaching it. As camouflage, it was moderately effective, though instruments and organic eyeballs might still see a distortion of the background stars as he slid past—and the rapidly flickering gravity well of his drive singularity was, as always, a dead giveaway.

So far, though, the Rosette Aliens hadn’t appeared to notice him. That . . . or they didn’t care.

He found the thought disturbing, akin to the thought of humans paying no attention to an ant crossing the path in front of them.

But if one of those humans chose to bring his foot down just so . . .

“I recommend dropping the sheath,” his AI told him. “We are approaching our objective.”

“Do it,” Walton said. “Let’s see what we have.”

He braced himself . . . and just in time. The sheath fell away as the artificial intelligence running the Shadowstar reconfigured the drive singularity, and the dazzling light of the heart of a globular cluster flooded in.

Millions of stars crowded one another across the spherical interior of that radiant sky. Streaks of blackness showed where the Rosette Aliens had been busy at their enigmatic work of demolition and construction. Visible, too, was the tangle of structures created over the past few months by the aliens, an incredibly vast spider’s web of pale blue light apparently anchored on and within the encircling stars.

Ahead and to starboard, a cluster of spheres hung adrift in space, each gleaming silver and as reflective as liquid mercury. And to port: the Black Rosette.

Whirling about their common center of gravity at 26,000 kilometers per second, the six black holes themselves were little more than a circular blur. Gas and dust streamed in from surrounding space, encircled the Rosette in a tight spiral radiating far into the short end of the electromagnetic spectrum and filling the sky with actinic blue-violet light. Hard radiation glared from the annihilation of infalling dust. This was, Walton thought, an extremely dangerous place to be. His ship’s shields would hold off the radiation for a time, but not indefinitely.

Walton’s Shadowstar was drifting rapidly across the face of that spiral, 100,000 kilometers away from the central maw. The expanse of space haloed by the rotating singularities revealed a starscape beyond, but not the vista of the Omega Centauri cluster.

He glimpsed a starfield . . . but one far thinner and poorer than that of the interior of the cluster. That scene was replaced in an instant by utter strangeness, by twisted and entangled streamers of red and gold and blue, the heart, possibly, of a nebula . . . or just possibly something else entirely, something beyond human experience. After that, more starfields, coming in rapid succession, and then a vast and mottled expanse of deep red-orange glare . . . the surface, he thought, of a red sun, a red dwarf, possibly, seen at close range. More starfields . . . and a panorama that seemed to show a spiral galaxy tilted sharply on end . . . and then a blast of blue light and hard radiation—a supernova, perhaps—or, again, something for which human astrophysics had no name.

Walton had the distinct impression that the scenes revealed within the Rosette changed as his angle of sight changed. There were myriad distinct paths through that gravitationally tortured gateway . . . that rip in the fabric of spacetime itself, and he was glimpsing hundreds of them as his Shadowstar fell across the Rosette’s maw. So fascinated was he by the succession of alien vistas that his AI had to give him the warning.

“We have elicited a response from the Rosette Aliens,” the Shadowstar’s artificial intelligence announced, its mental voice as calm and dispassionate as a netfeed announcement of next week’s weather over Omaha. “Directly ahead.”

Walton jerked his attention from the Black Rosette, and turned it instead to a bright silver star moving now into his recon ship’s path. He enhanced the magnification, zooming in on a perfectly reflective sphere that did not register on radar or any of his other sensors, save those recording the visible portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. He couldn’t even guess at the range or size of the thing. It might have been a meter across and a hundred meters away, or a kilometer across and much, much farther away. Since it was visible, a laser pulse would have given him a precise range . . . but a laser pulse might be interpreted as an attack.

Walton’s orders were specific: Do not provoke the aliens; do not initiate a hostile exchange.

He wished the aliens themselves had received those orders. According to the guys and gals in America’s intelligence department, they’d vaporized an unarmed survey vessel a few months ago, along with two escorting destroyers. That sounded like a pretty solid initiation of hostilities to him.

But the scale and scope of the stellarchitecture visible now around the Rosette gave some pretty convincing testimony about the aliens’ technological abilities, suggesting that nothing the human squadron could do would pose a particular threat to them.

The target ahead was growing steadily brighter. Since the thing appeared to be reflecting ambient light from the surrounding stars rather than glowing with its own, that suggested that he was closing with it.

“Engage drive,” he told the AI. “Let’s end for end and scoot.”

“That is not possible,” the AI replied.

“Why the hell not?”

“Unknown. Attempts to initiate singularity projection have failed. The Rosette Aliens may be manipulating local space in such a way as to damp out such attempts.”

“Shit! What about the power tap?”

The Shadowstar’s power plant was a scaled-down version of the power taps on board America and all other human starships. Microscopic artificial black holes rotated around one another on a subatomic scale, liberating a fraction of the zero-point energy available in hard vacuum at a quantum level. If the aliens had damped out his drive singularity, his power plant would have been affected too.

And yet, his in-head instrumentation showed a steady flow of energy.

“Ship power tap is functioning at optimum,” the AI told him.

“Can you explain that?”

“No . . . other than to suggest that the Rosette Aliens are damping out a very small and very specific volume of space immediately ahead of the ship.”

Walton had no idea how such a thing could be accomplished. An old, old phrase from the literature of some centuries before came to mind, a phrase suddenly sharply relevant. “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” He didn’t remember where the quote was from, and didn’t have the time now to look it up. He planned to do so once he got back to the America.

If he got back to the America. The silver sphere ahead was now rapidly growing larger, approaching him at high speed. His AI flashed a full update back to the carrier group.

And then the sphere, the encircling walls of brilliant stars, the mysterious and bizarrely twisted alien structures, the gaping maw of the Rosette, everything smeared halfway around the sky before winking into blackness. . . .

Chapter Two

20 January 2425

Recon Flight Shadow-One

Omega Centauri

1122 hours, TFT

. . . and then exploded into visibility once more.

Walton blinked. America hung in space 10 kilometers directly ahead. An instant before, he’d been almost 50 astronomical units away from the carrier . . . a distance of 7.5 billion kilometers, drifting at a velocity of a kilometer per second. Now he was traveling at the same speed, but his course had changed 180 degrees, and somehow he’d leaped across 50 AUs in an instant, and without accelerating to near c.

He remembered the way the sky had smeared around him, as though the space through which he’d been traveling had been bent through 180 degrees. And an instantaneous jump of 50 AUs? That was simply flat-out impossible. Even at close to the speed of light and subject to relativistic time dilation, he would have experienced some time making a passage that long . . . and fighters were too small by far to mount the drive projectors necessary for the faster-than-light Alcubierre Drive.

Alien magic. . . .

Working through his AI, which with a machine’s tight focus seemed unsurprised by any of this, Walton decelerated, drifting into America’s inner defense zone. “America!” he called. “America, this is Shadow One!”

There was a real danger that the carrier’s automated defense systems would target the incoming fighter and destroy it. The Shadowstar’s IFF should have flagged him as friendly on America’s scanners . . . but Walton found himself nursing a profound mistrust of the technology. Right now, the universe didn’t appear to be functioning the way it should.

And the recon fighter should not have been able to simply drop inside America’s defensive perimeter that way. It not only violated the rules and regs of combat operations . . . but it violated the laws of physics as well.

“Shadow One, America!” the voice of the ship’s CIC called. “What the hell are you doing there?”

“I . . . I’m not entirely sure, America. One second I was at the Black Rosette. The next . . .”

There was a long pause from the carrier, as though they were waiting for Walton to finish the thought. “Very well, Shadow One,” CIC replied after a moment. “You are cleared for approach and trap. C’mon in.”

“Copy. Accelerating.”

He didn’t trust himself to say more.

USNA CVS America

Omega Centauri

1205 hours, TFT

“So, we’re left knowing even less than we knew before,” Gray said. “Super-powerful aliens are dismantling a star cluster . . . and when one of our recon ships gets too close they teleport it across fifty AUs without even breaking a sweat. Recommendations?”

Gray was in America’s main briefing room with his command staff and department heads. Half were there physically; the rest had linked in from other parts of the ship. One entire bulkhead had been turned into a viewall, which was displaying video of Walton’s flyby of the Rosette. At the moment, it was showing the alien structures, looming vast and shadowy across the backdrop of stars.

“What . . . what they did to our recon fighter,” Lieutenant Commander Philip Bryant said slowly, shaking his head, “is flat-out impossible according to all of the laws of physics we understand.” He was the America’s chief stardrive engineer, and arguably the ship’s officer most conversant with her Alcubierre Drive and the essential malleability of empty space in the presence of powerful gravitational fields.

“The sheer power . . .” That was America’s other senior engineering officer, Commander Richard Halverson, the newly promoted head of the ship’s engineering department, and an expert on power taps and vacuum energy.

“Yeah. How the hell are we supposed to fight something like that?” Commander Dean Mallory was America’s chief tactical officer. “They could swat us like a bug if they wanted.”

“I don’t think the admiral was suggesting we fight,” Captain Connie Fletcher said. She was America’s CAG, an old acronym identifying a carrier’s Commander Air Group from back in the days of wet-Navy ships and aircraft. “That would be pretty pointless, right?”

“It would be more like fucking suicide,” Commander Victor Blakeslee, America’s senior navigation officer, said, scowling. “Recommendations? Hell, my recommendation is that we chart a course for home and high-tail it.”

“Assuming they let us go,” the voice of Acting Captain Gutierrez added. She was on America’s bridge, but telepresencing the planning session through her in-head. “It might not be that easy.”

“We have no reason yet to assume hostile intent on the part of the Rosette Aliens.” Lieutenant Commander Samantha Kline was the head of America’s xenobiology department—“X-Dep,” for short. “They could have vaporized Lieutenant Walton. Instead, they bent space to drop him back here.”

“I would remind you,” Halverson said slowly, “that those . . . those things out there did vaporize the Endeavor, the Herrera, and the Miller. If that’s not a hostile act, what the hell is?”

“The vid returned by the HVK robot is . . . open to interpretation, sir,” Kline replied. “That might have been an accident. Or a mistake . . .”

“A mistake by beings that powerful?” Fletcher said. “Beings that much like . . . like gods? That’s a pretty scary thought all by itself.”

“They are powerful,” Gray said. He wanted to redirect the session away from the aliens’ godlike aspect, however. He didn’t want his staff demoralized before they even encountered the Rosette Aliens directly. “But they’re not gods. If they did make a mistake when they destroyed the Endeavor, that would pretty much prove it, don’t you think?”

“More likely,” Dr. George Truitt said, “it simply means they don’t care. Keep in mind, people, that we could be dealing with a K-3 civilization here.”

Truitt was a civilian specialist assigned to America, and he was something of a wunderkind. He was a xenosophontologist, studying nonhuman minds and ways of thinking, and therefore worked in X-Dep under LCDR Kline.

Gray frowned at Truitt. In November, just two months ago, the man had been instrumental behind the scenes in devising a bit of offensive propaganda that had secured a Terran victory at Osiris—70 Ophiuchi A II—a colony world conquered by a Sh’daar client race called the Slan. By carefully analyzing communications with the Slan commander and what had been gleaned about their biology, Truitt and his xenosoph people had extrapolated a likely model of Slan psychology, one showing that they would be horrified at the idea of attacking their own community, an unthinkable act of barbarism . . . an act of animals. By beaming a message to the Slan suggesting that humans thought the same way Slan did, that humans actually shared the Slan collective-based psychology, Gray had forced the technologically superior Slan fleet to break off and retreat . . . a singular, spectacular victory.

And Truitt was the instrument of that victory.

It was too bad, Gray thought, that Truitt was also an egoistic grandstander, pompous, and possessing of social graces approximately on a par with wolverines.

“What the hell,” Mallory asked, “is a K-3 civilization?”

“Christ, you don’t know what Kardashev classification is?” Truitt said, glaring at Mallory. “I hope you understand tactics, Commander, better than you do technic sophontology.”

“Kardashev was a Russian astronomer,” Gray put in, “who developed a means of classifying planetary or interstellar civilizations based on how much energy they use. A K-3 civilization would use roughly as much energy as is emitted by all the stars of an entire galaxy.”

“That is a gross oversimplification,” Truitt said. “In point of fact—”

“If you please, Doctor,” Gray said sharply, interrupting, “we’re not here to argue definitions or sophontology. The Rosette Aliens have demonstrated the ability to rework an entire globular cluster, millions of stars—which, on the Kardashev scale, makes them at least a high K-2, and quite possibly a K-3. Human technology currently stands at . . . what is it, Doctor? K-1.2?”

“Approximately that,” Truitt said, “yes. But—”

“The point is that our industrious friends out there, as a civilization, routinely wield something like one hundred quintillion times more power than we can. I agree with Commander Blakeslee. There’s little we can do here, except establish automated monitoring stations.”

“Again, assuming they let us leave,” Captain Guiterrez said. “We are deep, deep inside their operational area.”

Gray opened a new channel within his in-head circuitry, and the bulkhead opposite the view of the cluster’s heart flowed and shimmered and then lit up with a schematic of the star cluster. The stars themselves were ghosted; otherwise, points of interest at the very center, including the position of America’s task force, would have been completely hidden.

With a thoughtclick, the view zoomed in on Omega Centauri’s heart. The entire cluster was a tightly packed ball of suns about 230 light years across, but the Black Rosette—and the majority of the alien constructs—was at the very center, and America and the other Earth ships were only 50 AUs away—no distance at all in interstellar terms. One AU was defined as the distance between Earth and her sun—150,000,000 kilometers, on average. A single light year was roughly equal to about 64,000 Astronomical Units.

It was interesting, Gray thought, not to mention quite worrying, that the aliens, whoever and whatever they were, had taken no apparent notice whatsoever of America and the ships with her. Carrier Battlegroup 40 consisted of the star carrier America; one cruiser, the Edmonton; three destroyers, the Ramirez, the John Young, and the Spruance; plus the provisioning ship Shenandoah. Though small as naval task forces went, the squadron represented a great deal of firepower, and yet the aliens had simply ignored them when they dropped out of their Alcubierre metaspace bubbles on the doorstep of . . . whatever the hell it was that they were building here.

But they’d moved Walton’s recon ship when it drifted in front of the Black Rosette. Maybe they did care about humans . . . that or else human activity actually could inconvenience them or somehow pose a threat to their operations.

Which was it? And how could the task force answer that question?

“How would X-Dep suggest we communicate with these . . . people?” Gray asked.

“We can’t,” Truitt said.

“We might try various Sh’daar languages,” Kline added. “The Agletsch trade pidgins.”

“Whoever the Rosette Aliens are,” Truitt said, “they likely come from a long way off. I doubt they’ve ever heard of the Sh’daar Collective or the Agletsch.”

The Agletsch were a galactic spacefaring species well known as traders of information. Two had been on board America until her last swing past Earth, when they’d disembarked for an extended chat with naval intelligence Earthside. The Agletsch were known to carry minute artificial intelligences within them, called Seeds, that communicated with the Sh’daar when they were within range. Having them on board a military vessel was always a risk, since the Sh’daar Seed might well compromise the ship’s security . . . but they were also incredibly useful as allies. Agletsch knowledge spanned a large fraction of the Sh’daar Collective, and their knowledge of artificial trade languages, developed to allow diverse members of the Collective to communicate with one another, had more than once proven vital.

“I’m not so sure about that,” Gray said. “We know the Rosette started off as the Six Suns, almost a billion years ago. We know that the Builders left TRGA cylinders scattered across the galaxy, and that those artifacts allow at least a limited form of time travel. The Rosette Aliens might be the Builders . . . and if so, they’ve had contact with the Collective . . . or at least with the Sh’daar of over eight hundred million years ago.”

The TRGA cylinder at Texaghu Resch had provided access to the Sh’daar inhabiting the N’gai Cloud 876 million years ago. It was generally believed, however, that the civilization that had constructed the TRGA cylinders was far older, and far more advanced, than even the now-vanished ur-Sh’daar.

“We have no evidence that these aliens are the Builders,” Truitt snapped. “The Builders in any case are probably long extinct.”

“I wonder?” Kline said. “A K-3 civilization might well be beyond threats of extinction. At the very least, they likely possess what for all practical intents and purposes amounts to both individual and cultural immortality.”

“Don’t you think that a true galaxy-wide civilization, a K-3,” Gray said, “would be aware of other K-3 level civilizations nearby? That they would be able to communicate with one another?”

“Some of the electronic Agletsch pidgins might be ideal for that,” Kline said. “They were designed for sapient species that have little or nothing in the way of biological similarities.”

“But we’ve already transmitted messages of friendship and requests for open communications channels,” Commander Pamela Wilson said. Like Gutierrez, she was on the bridge at the moment, but linked in to the briefing session electronically. “In Drukrhu, and in four other Agletsch pidgins.”

The languages had been loaded into America’s AI, so the Agletsch themselves weren’t necessary for translations. Gray wished the spidery little aliens were still on board, however. He would have liked to ask them if they’d ever encountered anything like the Rosette Aliens.

But then again, the Agletsch traded in information, and rarely gave away anything for free. That particular bit of data might well be priced beyond Gray’s reach.

He would have some questions for them, though, once America made it back to Earth.

“Very well,” he said. He focused his concentration for a moment, composing a new message. “Transmit this, Commander Wilson, broadband and in all known Sh’daar languages.

“Commander Blakeslee? Give us a course out of the cluster. We’re going to head for home.”

Emergency Presidential Command Post

Toronto

United States of North America

1435 hours, EST

“What the hell is going on over there, Marcus?”

Marcus Whitney, the president’s chief of staff, spread his hands. “Damned if I know, Mr. President. Intelligence doesn’t have a clear picture right now.”

“Do we now what’s happened to President Roettgen?”

“No, sir. Presumably, she was in the Ad Astra Complex when the rebel forces overran the place. She may be a prisoner; she may be dead.”

Alexander Koenig, president of the United States of North America, stared at the viewall news feed and wondered if this would be the end of the war. Facts were sketchy, less than trustworthy, and often contradictory.

But it did appear that the Terran Confederation government was on the point of collapse.

The United States of North America had been a part of the Terran Confederation since 2133 and the creation of the Pax Confeoderata. That union had become increasingly strained, however, until open warfare had broken out.

The causes of war were varied, but chief among them was a fundamental disagreement over how to prosecute the Sh’daar War. The USNA was committed to continuing the fight. The Confederation government wanted to accept the Sh’daar Ultimatum and become a part of the Sh’daar Collective. Disagreement in extrasolar policy—together with lesser issues such as rights of self-determination and rights to abandoned coastal areas like Manhattan, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C.—had led first to skirmishes in space, then to all-out war. Geneva’s forces had attacked the flooded ruins of D.C. and attempted to capture the Tsiolkovsky Array, the hyperintelligent AI computer complex on the lunar far side. Both attempts had been beaten off . . . but then the unthinkable had taken place.

On 15 November, 2424, Confederation ships had struck the USNA capital at Columbus from space with a nano-deconstructor warhead, chewing a hole three kilometers wide and half a kilometer deep down into the heart of the city in an attempt to decapitate the North American leadership—meaning Koenig himself, as well as the USNA’s Earth-based command and control assets.

The attack had failed—though the city had been destroyed and millions of people killed. The heavily shielded presidential command bunker had been two kilometers down . . . and Koenig and his staff had been able to escape by high-speed maglev train through a deep, evacuated rail tunnel connecting to the city of Toronto. And from the emergency command center set up in and beneath Toronto’s York Civic Complex, the USNA government had continued the war.

Now, two months later, it appeared that the Confederation effort was collapsing.

Appeared. That was the operative word. It won’t do, Koenig thought, to become overconfident now, or to drop your guard. The devastating nano-D attack on Columbus, an atrocity in contravention of any number of treaties and protocols, had triggered defections from the Confederation ranks. Russia and North India both had seceded from the Confederation and allied with the USNA. Two powerful independent powers had entered the war as well—the Chinese Hegemony and the Islamic Theocracy, both long excluded from the Confederation, both siding with the USNA in exchange for promises of inclusion in any new Earth government.

But the Confederation had been scoring victories as well. Besides annihilating Columbus, they’d destroyed a number of USNA orbital assets, were effectively in control of the SupraQuito space elevator, and had brought together a large fleet with which they were effectively dominating solar space. Mexico and Honduras had seceded from the USNA and invaded South California, Texas, and two other districts. Pan-European forces had occupied the Manhat Ruins and parts of the Virginia and Carolina Periphery coastlines. The USNA military was badly stretched, outnumbered, and just hanging on. Even with Hegemony and Theocracy help, the issue was in doubt.

“Maybe Konstantin has some information,” Koenig said.

Whitney grinned. “The Great Konstantin sees all . . . knows all . . .”

It was a running joke within the emergency command post. The computer array in Tsiolkovsky on the moon had been instrumental in a number of successes in the war so far—not least of which had been opening negotiations with the Theocracy and with the Chinese.

“Sometimes I’m afraid that it does all,” Koenig replied.

But he opened the channel anyway.

The artificial intelligence known as Konstantin was very much an enigma, and one that many—perhaps most—humans did not entirely trust. Computer AIs had surpassed the commonly accepted measures of human intelligence four centuries ago, and the Konstantin Array was a fifth-generation AIP running within a network of DS-8940 Digital Sentience computers. AIP stood for artificial intelligence programmed. Humans hadn’t programmed Konstantin; machines had, by copying large chunks of code and weaving them together in ways that often surprised their human overseers.

Theoretically, computer minds programmed by computers still carried the same constraints as their human-programmed counterparts. While Konstantin was theoretically 1010 times more powerful in terms of synaptic complexity than a human, he still possessed what was comfortingly known as limited purview. He was very good at processing data and he could follow orders quite well, but computers weren’t supposed to be able to make decisions independently of humans, nor were they supposed to demonstrate what was theoretically a purely human trait: creativity.

And yet, Koenig knew, Konstantin had displayed remarkable creativity several times already, most notably when he’d quietly opened negotiations with the Theocracy and the Hegemony. No human had directed him to do so.

The fact that he had might well mean victory for the USNA.

Koenig gave a wry smile. He was used to calling AIs “it,” . . . but over the past few months, Konstantin for him had definitely become a he.

After a delay of a few moments, a window opened in Koenig’s mind. A balding and white-haired man in old-fashioned clothing and gold pince-nez looked at him from behind a book with its title in Cyrillic letters. Behind him were the anachronistic screens of a circular workstation complete with floating monitor displays and free-floating transparent control panels. “Ah, Mr. President,” the AI’s electronic avatar said. “I’ve been expecting you.”

The original Konstantin Tsiolkovsky had been a Russian schoolteacher in the early 20th century, a hermit who’d seemed strange, even bizarre, to his neighbors, but who’d been convinced that one day Humankind would spread out to the stars. With Oberth, Goddard, and Korolyov, he’d become known as one of the fathers of modern spaceflight . . . the father, in fact, since he’d predated the others.

“I assume you’ve been watching the situation in Geneva,” Koenig said.

As always, there was an awkward two-and-a-half-second pause as Koenig’s words crawled up to the moon, and the AI’s reply crawled back.

“Of course. We expected something of the sort, of course, but events appear to be moving with unexpected speed.”

“You expected a revolution?”

“There has been considerable public outcry over the destruction of Columbus, particularly in Europe,” Konstantin replied. On the screens behind him, European soldiers were fighting in the ravaged streets of Geneva. It was night over there, the sky reflecting the light of a burning city. In the background of one monitor, Koenig recognized the sprawl of the Plaza of Light in Geneva’s heart, dominated by the immense statue Ascent of Man. Hover tanks were moving toward the Confederation’s Ad Astra Government Complex.

“Too,” Konstantin continued, “the war has been dragging on without significant victories for two months. Anticipation for an early and easy victory has given way to doubts about the morality or legality of the war.”

“This could be the end of it, then,” Koenig said.

“Do not assume a USNA victory yet, Mr. President. The rebels appear to be a faction under General Janos Matonyi Korosi, formerly a hard-liner within the Confederation Senate. He has wanted President Roettgen’s job and power for some time, now, and he may see this coup as a means not only of defeating you, but to opening negotiations with the Sh’daar directly, ending the Sh’daar War, and presenting himself as Earth’s savior. There is also a personal aspect.”

“What aspect?”

“His brother was Karl Mihaly Korosi, executive officer of the destroyer Mölder.”

“Ah.”

Mölder had been one of the Pan-European warships that launched the deadly nano-disassembler attack on Columbus. She’d been destroyed by a spread of nukes fired from the Missouri. Moments later, the bombardment vessel Estremadura had fired six nano-D warheads. Five had been intercepted out in space by the frigate John Paul Jones, but the sixth had destroyed Columbus, D.C.

Koenig recalled that Ilse Roettgen, the president of the Confederation Senate, had seemed shocked when she learned that Columbus had been hit by nano-D. He was as sure as he could be that she’d not been putting on an act—and that suggested that rogue elements within her own government or military forces had been operating on their own, behind her back. And if Korosi’s brother had been killed on the Mölder . . .

That connection, tenuous as it was, suggested that the hard-liners in the Geneva government had planned and carried out the attack on Columbus, and now were using the situation to seize power. Lovely.

“You think General Korosi is out for revenge, then?”

“Unknown. I am simply relying on Big Data to build up a comprehensive picture of what is going on over there. I have been unable to penetrate Pan-European electronic security.”

That, of course, would have been one of the first things Konstantin tried, and the Europeans would have expected that, and have had their electronic defenses in place. In fact, one of the causes of the war had been their attempt to capture the Konstantin Array, deploying an armored force across the lunar surface from the Confederation base at Giordano Bruno. They’d been stopped on the north rim of Tsiolkovsky Crater by a small force of USNA Marines, but it had been a close-run thing. Koenig had gathered through his daily security briefings that the Confederation had been trying to electronically compromise Konstantin ever since, trying and failing.

So far . . .

Curious, Koenig glanced at the book Tsiolkovsky’s image was holding. He neither spoke nor read Russian, but a translation program riding within his cerebral implant overlaid his mental view with the book’s title in English.

The Will of the Universe: The Unknown Intelligence, by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Kaluga, 1928.

Koenig had never heard of it, but wondered if Konstantin was allowing him to see that title for some specific reason. The AI array could be remarkably subtle at times.

“So, do you have any recommendations?” Koenig asked. If others mistrusted the giant AI array, even if he, Koenig, still had misgivings, he nevertheless had been relying more and more on the powerful AI’s advice. Konstantin could mine what was called Big Data, pulling tens of thousands of minute, often unrelated facts from a vast sea of information floating Out There in the electronic ether of Global Net and the various smaller, local news and communications networks. He could piece together disparate data and reveal connections, conclusions and intelligence of which no human observer could have been aware.

“I have been tracking Confederation communications exchanges, and conclude that the rogue component of their government is staging their operation from here.”

One of the screens shifted from the streets of Geneva to a scene in deep space, the vast, ringed glory of Saturn in the distance, a small rock-and-ice moon in the foreground. Koenig read the information scrolling up the side of the screen. “Enceladus? What’s at Enceladus?”

“Evidently, the renegade faction’s headquarters. The evidence suggests that they have been planning this for a very long time. I suggest a Navy-Marine task force tasked with capturing the surface base and any senior personnel stationed there.”

“That may not be easy,” Koenig said. “We’re stretched damned tight right now.”

“I am aware of this. The USNA may need to disengage at several points—retreat—in order to free forces for the strike. Some of the slack might be taken up by Chinese and Russian forces in Asia.”

“We’ll need ships. And right now, most of what we have is protecting the space elevator . . . or in low orbit High Guard, waiting to block another nano-D strike.”

“I do not need to tell you, President Koenig, that a purely defensive stance will, ultimately, fail. Your best chance lies in going over to the offensive. And speed is of the essence.”

“Eh? Why? What else have you heard?”

“Nothing definite. But some of my data mining has revealed an unsettling possibility.”

Koenig sighed. “Okay. What is it?”

“It is possible that the renegade Confederation government has been in direct contact with the Sh’daar, and they may be on their way here.”

The words hit Koenig like a hammer blow. “Christ! The Sh’daar? Here?”

“It may be a good idea,” Konstantin said, “to attempt the destruction of your human enemies before having to face something considerably more exotic . . . and dangerous.”

And Koenig could only nod in dumb agreement.

Chapter Three

20 January 2425

USNA CVS America

Omega Centauri

1750 hours, TFT

The Rosette Aliens were letting them go.

Gray scarcely allowed himself to believe it at first . . . but when a number of those bright silver eggs took up positions around the task force, a few thousand kilometers out and escorted them toward their Alcubierre jump point, effortlessly matching their acceleration, he had to admit that that was the case.

“I just wish we’d been able to open a comm channel with them,” Gray said. He was on the flag bridge, now, sitting at his partially enclosed workstation above and behind the captain’s chair.

“I think,” the CAG said quietly in his mind, “that we have been in communication with them.”

“What do you mean?”

“They turned our recon pilot around and dropped him back alongside the America,” Connie Fletcher said. “Without harming him . . . and that’s important. Kind of like shooing a curious kitten away from the power outlet.”

“We began accelerating out-system, and they paced us,” Acting Captain Gutierrez pointed out. “Seems like pretty clear communications to me. ‘Here’s your hat, what’s your hurry? Don’t let the door slam your ass on the way out.’ ”

“I think you’re right. No specific response on the messages we sent them. I think it possible that they simply aren’t interested in us.”

“Well, Admiral . . . a K-3 civilization might not find a K-1.2 all that interesting.”

“Coming up on our jump point, sir,” the Helm reported. “Twenty seconds.”

The view of the stars outside of the America was weirdly distorted by the carrier’s velocity, now just a hair less than the speed of light itself. The entire universe, the light of all the stars in the Omega Centauri cluster, had been squeezed into a bright ring of light forward. The seconds dwindled away . . .

. . . and then America’s AI pulled the already tightly distorted space around the carrier in, creating a tight bubble that was not, strictly speaking, a part of normal space. Metaspace, the physicists called it . . . and the nonmathematical explanation declared that while a material object such as an atom or a star carrier could not travel faster than light—or, indeed, even reach light speed—there was nothing preventing the space within which it rested from doing so. The Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre had worked out the theory in 1994, and the first FTL transit had occurred less than a century and a half later.

At maximum drive, now, America hurtled through metaspace for home.

Gray willed himself to relax. He’d not realized how tense, how stressed he’d been at the prospect of confronting the Rosette Aliens. Sh’daar client species—those encountered so far by Humankind, at any rate—tended to be somewhat more advanced than humans. Higher technology translated as greater power, faster ships, and more deadly weaponry, and staying ahead of such an enemy, meeting him and outfighting him despite his technological lead, was a dangerous and uncertain game.

The Rosette Aliens were far more advanced than any species yet encountered by Earth. A technological difference representing tens of thousands or even millions of years instead of a century or two could not be overcome by grit, cleverness, or determination.

Gray leaned back in his command chair and opened a series of data links. He wanted to see what there was in America’s memory about Kardashev classifications.

He was wondering if the Rosette Aliens might be induced to ally with Earth against the Sh’daar . . . or if Earth would one day have to fight them.

America Data Files

Extant Galactic Civilizations

Classification: Green-Delta

KARDASHEV CLASSIFICATION: First proposed by astronomer Nikolai Kardashev in 1964 as a means of classifying hypothetical galactic civilizations in terms of the amount of energy they use. In its original form, it stated that a Type I civilization utilizes all of the available energy resources of its home planet; while a Type II uses the energy of its entire star system, and a Type III uses the resources of an entire galaxy. Lacking useful fine detail, this early scale was later refined and expanded.

Currently, galactic civilizations, both observed and hypothetical, can be assigned a more precise Kardashev number using the formula K = log10MW/10, where K is the Kardashev level, and MW is the energy, in megawatts, used by the civilization in one year.

Type 0: Established as a baseline, a K-0 civilization utilizes roughly 1 million watts (1 MW) of energy. Energy and raw materials are extracted from crude, organic-based sources such as wood or fossil fuels. Earth’s civilization during the late twentieth century when the Kardashev scale was first proposed, utilizing roughly 15 terawatts globally, would have been defined as approximately K-0.71.

Type 1: A civilization utilizing all energy available on a planetary scale. For Humankind, this would be an energy capability equivalent to Earth’s insolation, the radiation it receives from the sun, or around 1016 watts. It is capable of interplanetary and possibly limited interstellar travel and colonization, of planetary engineering, and can utilize a variety of energy sources, including but not limited to fission, fusion, antimatter, and zero-point energy. Earth’s interstellar civilization in 2425 utilizes an estimated 1018 watts, and therefore has a Kardashev level of approximately 1.2.

Type 2: Sol has a luminosity of about 4 × 1026 watts, and this would be the energy usage typical of a Type 2 civilization. The ancient ur-Sh’daar, who manipulated entire stars to create hyperdimensional gateways, are estimated to have utilized around 1034 watts, and would have been considered to be Kardashev 2.7 at the time they entered their technological singularity 876 million years ago. Such a civilization would be capable of interstellar and possibly local intergalactic travel, as well as stellarforming projects such as Dyson spheres, Dyson swarms, and star mining.

Type 3: The Milky Way galaxy has a total luminosity of about 4 × 1037 watts. While capturing the totality of a galaxy’s radiation output is problematic, a civilization generating and utilizing energy on this scale would be considered to be Type 3. The ancient civilization or civilizations variously known as the Builders, the Starborn, or the Stargods, who are believed to have been capable of time travel and of large-scale stellarforming, are almost certainly at least Type 3.0. Such cultures would be capable of extragalactic travel and to perform stellar engineering on a galactic scale.

Type 4: This is the designation for a purely speculative category of cultures able to use energies on the scale of galactic superclusters, or approximately 1042 watts.

Type 5: Also speculative, a K-5 civilization would utilize energy equivalent to the output of the visible universe, or very roughly 1049 watts.

Type 6: Even more speculative. Type 6 civilizations would span a number of parallel universes, and might engage in “ ’brane forming” activities such as creating or manipulating entire universes. Since this scale clearly surpasses concepts based on current scientific understanding, no data on energy usage or predictions as to a Type 6 culture’s technological capabilities are possible.

When the Kardashev scale was first introduced, the underlying concept suggested that galactic civilizations might literally use all of the energy available from their local star or galaxy. The Dyson sphere, proposed by Freeman Dyson four years earlier, might represent an attempt to trap all available stellar energy, allowing Earth to detect a K-2 civilization by modifications to its light output, or by recognizing the radiated infrared emissions of that civilization’s industrial processes. The development of zero-point energy obviates the need to efficiently trap the star’s light, however, since the energy drawn from hard vacuum represents a far more abundant source of power than stellar fusion. Nevertheless, the overall amount of energy utilized by the civilization, can still be quantified as the amount available from a world, a star, or a galaxy, no matter what the actual source of that energy might be.

Obviously, the breakdown presented here is extremely rough—a guide only—and can make no predictions of the specifics of a given advanced culture’s technologies, or of its motivations, philosophies, or attitudes toward other species.

Where, Gray wondered as he finished the download and closed the channel, did the modern Sh’daar fall on this scale? The data specifically mentioned the ur-Sh’daar, the empire or collective of mutually alien species that had inhabited a small, irregular galaxy devoured by the Milky Way 876 million years ago. At that time, shortly before the smaller galaxy had been torn apart by intergalactic tidal forces and the empire disrupted, the ur-Sh’daar had entered its version of what was commonly called the Technological Singularity. Also known as the Vinge Singularity, after the mathematician and author Vernor Vinge, who first popularized the idea in the late twentieth century, the singularity was broadly seen as that point in a civilization’s development where organic intelligence merged with artificial intelligence in ways that utterly transformed the meanings of words like life and intelligence. For humans, the so-called GRIN technologies were seen as the drivers of this change: Genetics, Robotics, Information systems, and Nanotechnology.

Twenty years ago, Gray and America’s battlegroup, under the command of Admiral Alexander Koenig, had used one of the enigmatic TRGA cylinders to cross a very great deal of both space and time to reach the doomed galaxy—known to its inhabitants as the N’gai Cloud. There, they’d learned about the Schjaa Hok, the Transcending or Time of Change, when the highly advanced species of the ur-Sh’daar had entered a period of transcendence, vanishing from the ken of minds still firmly anchored in what they thought of as Reality. Gray had seen downloaded records of that event almost 900 million years in the past, and was still shaken by it. Of particular interest was the fact that not all members of that long-ago civilization had transcended. Called Refusers—those who had refused the augmentation and the advances in genetics and computer enhancement of an artificially directed evolution—the remnant species had rebuilt a shattered civilization from scratch . . . the civilization Humankind knew now as the Sh’daar.

Traumatized as a collective of intelligent species by the Time of Change, the Sh’daar had eventually recovered, spreading not only into the much larger galaxy that was devouring the N’gai Cloud, but ultimately through time as well, at least in a limited sense. Within the current epoch of the Milky Way, they’d established themselves as a dominant, apparently electronic civilization that had first appeared a few million years ago, creating a network of client races, the va Sh’daar. They seemed dedicated to the active suppression of higher technologies among their clients—in particular the GRIN drivers of the singularity that had wrecked their culture ages before. Newly encountered species were given the opportunity to join the Sh’daar Collective freely. If the offer was rejected, the new species were forced; Humankind had received the Sh’daar Ultimatum, as it was known, in 2367, through the recently contacted Agletsch. A steady, grinding series of wars had been waged with various va Sh’daar races for the following thirty-eight years.

Then, twenty years ago, the Sh’daar were beaten . . . or, at least, so it had appeared. America’s battlegroup had passed through a TRGA cylinder and emerged at the heart of the N’gai Cloud 876 million years in the past—a temporal end run that seemed to have panicked the Sh’daar more than the possibility of a new technic singularity. The resulting truce engineered by Admiral Koenig had promised an end to hostilities, and had actually held for two decades. But recently, Sh’daar client species had been testing human resolve once again. The Confederation insisted that Humankind could not long hold out against superior alien technology and numbers; better to surrender now, Geneva insisted, before Earth was obliterated.

The difference in cultural philosophies between Old World and New, differences between two alternative and mutually contradictory views of Humankind’s future in the galaxy, had, along with other more mundane problems, resulted in the current civil war back home.

“The Alcubierre bubble is stable,” Captain Gutierrez reported, jerking Gray’s full awareness back to America’s flag bridge. “We are currently ’cubing at five point three. We should reach the local TRGA in eight hours.”

“Very well,” Gray replied, and he smiled. ’Cubing was naval slang for traveling under Alcubierre Drive. The number was how many light years America was now crossing in a day.

The Sh’daar, with their distinct advantages in technology over what humans were capable of right now, had obviously missed an important point. That series of wars between their clients and Humankind had put considerable pressure on the Confederation for more than half a century . . . but what the Sh’daar seemed to have missed was the fact that human technology tended to advance much more rapidly during times of war than during peace. Intelligence believed that they were avoiding launching an all-out attack that might easily drive humanity into extinction; they wanted another pliant and cooperative va Sh’daar client, not a glassed-over cinder that once had been an inhabited world. Obviously, a galactic culture capable of merging old stars to create new would have no trouble at all annihilating Sol if they so chose. Forcing a stubborn Homo sapiens to accept Sh’daar dictates on permissible levels of technology, evidently, was a lot harder.

When forced to fight, however, Humankind was always tinkering, trying to come up with a better hand ax . . . a better spear . . . a better high-energy laser. The Alcubierre Drive was a case in point. Theoretically, there was no upper limit to a starship’s pseudovelocity, but in practical terms everything depended on how much energy a starship could generate and direct to the artificial singularities that served to pull space in on itself. When Columbia, the first human starship, had ’cubed to Alpha Centauri in 2138, she’d managed the passage in six and a half months . . . a pseudovelocity of 0.095 light years per day. Until recently, most naval vessels had managed an Alcubierre rate of around 1.8 light years per day, though high-velocity message couriers could manage better than 5 light years per day.

Late in 2424, new developments in the quantum power taps used on board starships had greatly boosted the energy available for FTL transitions, drastically cutting travel times between the stars. Moving as swiftly as the old HAMP-20 Sleipnir-class mail packets, and by taking advantage of the shortcut afforded by the TRGA gate at Texaghu Resh, America and her entourage could cross the 16,000 light years from Omega Centauri to Sol in just forty-four days.

Of course, the march of technological advancement involved other measures of progress than mere speed, and implementing some of those changes—the introduction of new and more powerful weapons, for instance—could take time. Engineering was not the same as mere technological understanding. The important thing was that human military technology was in an all-out race, now, to develop faster ships and more potent weapons before the Sh’daar could overwhelm Earth’s interstellar polity.

It was, he thought, the one bright side of the human tragedy of war. In-head circuitry had begun as high-tech communications devices for elite troops—Marines and Special Forces. Global Net had evolved from the old Internet, itself an outgrowth of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, or DARPANET. Singularity generators, used now both to generate zero-point energy and to warp space for high-velocity travel, had started off as microscopic black holes projected into enemy ships or structures as a weapon.

Gray just wished that Humankind could get occasional stretches of peace in which to enjoy the non-military benefits of those advances.

But that golden era, if it was even possible in the first place, would have to wait a while longer. The Sh’daar . . . the Confederation . . . and now, just possibly, if things went very wrong, the Rosette Aliens . . .

Humankind was going to have some scrambling to do to catch up.

And if they failed, the consequences might well be the final peace, the peace that would come with the extinction of the human species.

York Plaza

Toronto

United States of North America

1953 hours, EST

President Koenig, too, had been thinking about the threat presented by the Sh’daar. Just how had humans been able to hold off the onslaught of the Sh’daar client species for so long, despite the fact that human technology couldn’t match that of the H’rulka, the Turusch, the Slan, or any of the other enemies encountered so far?

And he thought that he just might know the answer.

“You guys are busted,” he said, his voice mild. He took a sip from his drink. “I think I know why your masters can’t get their act together.”

“You mean the Sh’daar, yes-no?” one of the two small beings in front of him said through the small, silver-badge translation device adhering to her leathery skin just beneath her four weirdly stalked eyes. “We no longer refer to them as masters. . . .”

Koenig was standing with the two Agletsch representatives within a mostly human crowd filling Toronto’s outdoor York Plaza. Thousands of people were in attendance, and many thousands more were present virtually, linked in from home through small robotic drones or teleoperated androids. The function was a diplomatic reception for the Hegemony and Theocracy ambassadors and their staffs, a grand celebration of the new alliance. The Office of Presidential Security had just about gone hyperbolic with collective fits when they’d heard; what, his security chief had demanded, was to stop the Confederation from launching another nano-D strike? If they hit Toronto tonight, they could vaporize most of the USNA government leadership with one precisely placed shot.

The answer had been to redouble both space and atmospheric patrols over North America to make sure nothing got in. USNA High Guard ships were positioned as far out as Lunar Orbit, and Marines were manning long-range planetary defense batteries up at SupraQuito. This reception tonight was important, a means of showing the entire planet that the USNA’s refusal to bow to Confederation tyranny was shared by a majority of Humankind—that it was not simply the squeak of a small and disgruntled minority.

Besides, global popular reaction to the Confederation’s nano strike on Columbus had been overwhelmingly negative. There was a reason weapons of mass destruction had been banned by the Geneva Protocols of 2150, and nano-dissassemblers were especially nasty, taking apart everything they touched—buildings, dirt, trees, children—literally molecule by molecule, then atom by atom. Another nano-D strike by the Europeans might cause wholesale defections from the Confederation.

The Agletsch, Koenig was glad to see, appeared to have sided with the USNA cause . . . though it was always difficult figuring out what the spidery aliens were actually thinking.

“I still don’t understand that, Gru’mulkisch,” Koenig said. “You both carry Sh’daar Seeds. Seems to me that means you’re working for them . . . at least some of the time.”

After twenty years, Koenig was only just beginning to be able to tell one of the two liaisons from the other—or to pronounce their names. The other one was Dra’ethde.

Known popularly as “spiders” or “bugs,” the Agletsch were actually very little like either. Each possessed an unsegmented oval body a bit more than a meter across, supported by sixteen jointed limbs like slender sticks. The rear legs were shorter than those in the front, the bottom-most pair little more than sucker-tipped stubs, while the upper limbs serving both as legs and as manipulators were long enough to hold the body semi-upright, so that the tiny head was a meter and a half off the ground. When she wanted to move, she could do so quickly, tipping her forebody forward to lift the hind leg-stubs off the ground. The rotund body was covered by tough, flexible skin, not chitin. The reddish skin was covered with gold and blue reticulated markings and by the Agletsch equivalent of tattoos—swirls and curlicues picked out in gold and silver. The four stalked eyes were gorgeous—black Y-shaped pupils set in rich gold.

Both of the Agletsch speaking with Koenig were female, of course. The males of the species were small, brainless tadpoles attached like leeches to the female’s face.

And somewhere within those flat, ovoid bodies, Koenig knew, were minute electronic implants that stored the Agletsch’s sensory impressions, and beamed them to a receiver when the range was short enough—probably a few hundred thousand kilometers. Sh’daar Seeds, as these poorly understood devices were called, also apparently allowed the Sh’daar to talk with their minions—and served as the glue that bound the Sh’daar Collective together, making the whole vast, sprawling thing work.

“As we have stated in times past,” Dra’ethde pointed out, “the Seeds do not work in the manner in which you seem to believe. Some of us work within the Collective, yes-no? Others do not . . . even if we by chance carry within our bodies the Masters’ . . . the Sh’daar Seeds.”

“If no Sh’daar are nearby,” Gru’mulkisch added, “the Seeds are useless to them.”

Koenig considered a sharp reply, but decided to drop the issue. Humans tended to think in terms more black and white than did the Agletsch, who traded in information among hundreds of galactic species and seemed able to at least comprehend the psychologies of myriad alien worldviews. They seemed friendly and agreeable . . . but sometimes it was obvious that they simply didn’t think the same way as humans. The fact that they referred to the Sh’daar as Masters tended to make humans suspicious, and the various human intelligence agencies looked at them with something approaching xenophobic paranoia.

“Many of us believe,” Koenig said carefully, “that those Seeds are what tie together the Sh’daar Empire.”

He was being deliberately provocative. For years, in fact, Alexander Koenig had argued against the popular notion of a Sh’daar empire, holding that the word suggested far more cohesion and organization than was apparent through scattered encounters with Sh’daar clients over the past few decades. Koenig understood the Sh’daar threat, understood it quite possibly better than any other human alive. He’d been the admiral in command of the battlegroup that threatened the Sh’daar homeworlds in 2405. And he believed that he understood their one fundamental, crippling weakness, the flaw that had let human forces beat their forces time after time.

The Sh’daar Collective was, to be blunt, just too freaking big. That was the secret.

“The Sh’daar do collect information . . . what you call military intelligence through their Seeds,” Dra’ethde admitted. “But . . . your ambassadors and diplomatic staffs, they do the same within the nation-states in which they are stationed, yes-no?”

“Any intelligence which the Seeds provide the Sh’daar,” Gru’mulkisch said, “is quite minor. After all, the Agletsch charge for major pieces of data.”

Koenig realized that the spidery alien had just made a joke . . . and quite a human one at that. He was impressed. Humor was quite a difficult concept for many nonhuman species to understand, much less master.

“What then have you discovered?” Dra’ethde asked. “What about the together act of the Sh’daar?”

“Quid pro quo?” Koenig asked. It was a term that the Agletsch loved, and which fit well with their trade in information. This for that.

“Of course. What do you want to know?”

Koenig had been giving a lot of thought to what question he could ask. It had to be relatively low level in terms of import . . . what they called first-level compensation. More critical information—eighth level, say—could be quite expensive.

“Will the Sh’daar use you or another client species as their representatives when they come to Earth? Or will they come to Earth themselves?”

“Almost certainly they will send servant representatives,” Dra’ethde told him. “The Sh’daar have not been seen . . . in the flesh, I believe is your term, for many tens of thousands of your years. However, those representatives will no doubt have a direct communications link with their Masters.”

“That’s good, because if they came themselves, we’d need to lock up our friend Gru’mulkisch, here, to keep her Seed from dumping.”

It had happened once before, when the star carrier America had passed close to a va Sh’daar base at Alchameth, a gas giant in the Arcturan system, and data stored in Gru’mulkisch’s Seed had been transmitted to the enemy. That was the reason human intelligence services were so cautious when it came to Agletsch in human space.

Dra’ethde and Gru’mulkisch both had been carefully scanned, and their Sh’daar technoparasites identified. A scrambler had been designed and placed into the translator units they wore to block the receipt and transmission of any state secrets. In general, however, it was wiser simply not to discuss state secrets in their presence.

In any case, it was possible that a hotline to the Sh’daar might someday be useful.

“And your information in exchange?” Gru’mulkisch asked him.

“The Sh’daar have trouble dominating the galaxy,” Koenig said, “because the galaxy is far too large. Too many worlds, too many sapient species. Interstellar empires, as such, simply can’t exist . . . not when the amount of information needed to manage them is so vast. And that’s where we humans have an advantage. Interior lines of communication.”

“I do not understand your use of interior,” Gru’mulkisch said. “The Sh’daar do not surround you.”

Score, Koenig thought. Until that moment, the Earth Confederation had not been sure how extensive Sh’daar space was. Most contacts with their clients had been in toward the galactic core, in the constellations of Sagittarius, Ophiuchus, Libra, and others in that general direction.

Earth needs allies, Koenig thought to himself. Technic species not yet under the Sh’daar thrall. We just might find them in the opposite direction from the core. Orion, Taurus . . . out toward the rim.

“I meant the word figuratively,” Koenig told the Agletsch. “With a much smaller volume of space to defend, and fewer worlds with which we have to be concerned, we can move from one to another more quickly, react more quickly to a threat than can the Sh’daar, with their much larger domain. When we make a decision, when Fleet HQ gives an order, it can be disseminated among all of our forces and put into effect much more swiftly than is possible for the enemy.”

“Quite true,” Gru’mulkisch said. “Of course, you currently have the singular disadvantage of being . . . I believe one of your politicians called it ‘a house divided.’ ”

“The quote originally was from one of our sacred texts,” Koenig said. He tried to find a way to give a positive response, to turn it around and dismiss the implied threat, but could not. “And . . . no. You’re quite right.”

He looked away from the two aliens, letting his gaze drift across the glittering crowd of humans filling the plaza. Most were in formal attire—evening dress, diplomatic cloaks, designer gowns and dinner jackets. Numerous others were stylishly nude, some with luminous jewelry or skin adornment . . . or wearing holographic projections that flowed and rippled like liquid light. You would never guess, looking at that throng of civilians, that the nation currently was at war both with the unseen alien puppet masters dominating much of the galaxy and with other humans.

He turned back to the two Agletsch data traders. “You’re right . . . and we’re going to have to do something about that.”

Chapter Four

21 January 2425

Squadron Briefing Room

USNA CVS America

In transit

0950 hours, TFT

By now, Omega Centauri was far behind. America and her escorts had threaded their way through the TRGA cylinder at Omega Centauri—one of seven discovered so far in that star-packed volume of space—and emerged again at the original Sh’daar Node cylinder from which the acronym was taken . . . the Texaghu Resch Gravitational Anomaly.

“Funny name,” a young Starhawk driver with lieutenant’s rank tabs at his throat said. “ ‘Texaghu.’ Does that have anything to do with Texas?”

America’s fighter squadron pilots had been gathering on the carrier’s briefing-room deck for the past ten minutes, now, and the place was already pretty crowded.

“Nah,” Lieutenant Donald Gregory said. “But you’re new, right? Just came aboard a couple of months ago?”

“That’s right.” The pilot extended his hand and Gregory took it. “Lieutenant Jamis Anderson. Late of the great state of Texas, and now with the Merry Reapers.”

“Don Gregory.” He slapped the VFA-96 squadron patch on his shoulder. “Black Demons.” He turned to introduce the attractive woman with him. “And this here is Meg Connor.”

“Very pleased to meet you, ma’am,” Anderson said, a broad grin spreading across his face. “I downloaded your report about you and your run-in with the Slan!”

Connor, formerly of VFA-140, the Dracos, had been captured by the highly advanced alien Slan in an operation at 36 Ophiuchi two months ago, but been rescued by the Marines shortly after. Her observations of her captors had helped Naval Intelligence put together a strategy to deal with the va Sh’daar aliens . . . and led to Admiral Gray’s unexpected victory over them a few days later at 70 Ophiuchi. Since then, her own squadron lost in the Slan attack, she’d been transferred to the Black Demons.

“Texaghu Resch,” Gregory told him, “is Drukrhu—that’s the principal Agetsch trade pidgin—for a star originally catalogued by the Turusch, another Sh’daar client species. Means ‘the Eye of Resch.’ Actually, it’s a transliteration from the language of a species called the Chelk.”

“Never heard of ’em.”

“They’re extinct,” Connor told him. “Apparently, the star was seen as the eye of a mythic god or hero in their culture, a being called Resch.”

“And they’re extinct?”

Gregory nodded. Whoever or whatever Resch had been, he’d not been powerful enough to save the Chelk. Like Humankind, they’d chosen to fight the Sh’daar rather than have their technologies restricted. “Humans haven’t been there, but according to the Agletsch, the Chelk homeworld is now a lifeless, airless, glassed-over ball of charred and blasted rock. Seems like they didn’t get the Sh’daar memo about no technic singularities.”

“Damn . . .”

“It’s all written up in America’s archives,” Connor pointed out. “Interesting reading . . . and it helps you kind of stay focused on what we’re fighting for.”

“Better living through higher technology,” Anderson said, still grinning. The catchphrase was currently a popular one, and expression of North America’s determination to continue Humankind’s exponential increase in GRIN technologies.

“May I have your attention, please,” another voice said over the pilots’ in-head circuitry. They turned to face the front of the briefing room, where Captain Fletcher, America’s CAG, stood on a low stage. “Please grow your seats and link in. We have the visuals from the recon flyby yesterday.”

Chairs began emerging from the deck in neatly ordered rows, and the crowd—more than two hundred strong—began taking seats. America carried six fighter and strike squadrons, one recon squadron, and two search and rescues . . . fifteen hundred people if you included the support, intelligence, logistics, and maintenance personnel. But the meeting this morning had been called just for the pilots and flight officers—the pointed end of America’s very big and powerful stick.

With a rustle of motion and dwindling conversation, the crowd of men and women sat down and began linking in. The briefing would be carried out through America’s primary AI, and consisted of a download of information acquired by the recon squadron—VQ-7, the Sneaky Peaks. Commander James Henry Peak, who’d given his name to the group twenty-some years ago, had long since been promoted to captain, rotated Earthside to Naval Intelligence, and eventually retired, but his old squadron had kept the punning name. VQ-7’s current CO was Commander Thom McCabe, who was on the stage now with the CAG.

“Good morning,” McCabe said. “I’m sure you’re all eager to see the results of our close recon pass of the Black Rosette yesterday. What Lieutenant Walton saw was . . . interesting. . . .”

Data flowed into Gregory’s in-head, and he opened an inner window to view it. He saw again the crowded inner reaches of the Omega Centauri cluster, millions of brilliant stars filling the sky, and, ahead, the blurred and eerie doughnut of blue light and gas, turned almost edge-on, set in an infalling swirl of hot dust and tortured hydrogen atoms. Shadowy, vast structures hung in the distance, made indistinct by the dust . . . the stellarchitecture of the Rosette Aliens. America’s fighter squadrons had flown CAP over the past several days—the term was from combat air patrol, an anachronistic holdover from the days of wet navies and atmospheric fighters—but never approached the Rosette. It would be kind of nice, Gregory thought, to actually see up close what all of the fuss and scuttlebutt was about.

The blurred disk grew larger, and the angle shifted as Walton’s ship approached, giving them a line of sight into the Rosette’s interior. Gregory saw scattered stars . . . a black and empty night sky . . .

“We’ve slowed down the images by a factor of ten,” McCabe told the audience. “Lieutenant Walton was only over the Rosette for a few seconds, but by slowing down the feed we can see details that are not, at first, apparent. What we’re looking at here, obviously, is deep space . . . but you can see that it’s not the space within the cluster. The stars are few and far between. This particular line of sight, we think, lets us look through to a region out on the galactic rim.”

One by one, the other spaces recorded during Walton’s passage came into view, each replacing the one that had gone before. The heart of a nebula . . . various starfields . . . the mottled, close-up surface of a red sun . . . a scattering of distant galaxies . . .

The final scene was of a searing field of radiant blue light, as though the line of sight was plunging into the heart of an exploding sun.

McCabe froze the image there. A new window opened to one side, one showing the familiar blurred cylinder of a TRGA. The two images floated next to each other in Gregory’s mind at identical angles, allowing a close comparison.

“Despite the obvious physical differences,” Commander McCabe went on, “the Rosette is a transport mechanism quite similar to the TRGAs, except for the size, of course. A TRGA, we now know, is a kind of everted Tipler machine. The original device—the theory, rather—was developed in 1974 by a physicist named Frank J. Tipler. According to him, a cylinder of extremely dense matter rotating at near-light velocity would drag the spacetime fabric around it in a way that would permit what physicists call closed, timelike curves, creating gateways or portals across vast distances of both space and time. Two decades later, physicist Stephen Hawking demonstrated that closed, timelike curves were impossible, as was time travel.

“Evidently, the TRGA Builders did not read Hawking. Instead, they seem to have turned the idea inside out, creating a hollow cylinder about a kilometer across, with solar-sized masses rotating around the cylinder’s axis within the walls. A number of distinct paths through the interior of the cylinder result in spacial displacements of, in one case, several tens of thousands of light years—and a temporal displacement of eight hundred seventy-six million years. The Agletsch refer to the TRGAs as Sh’daar Nodes. However, we know that the Builders were not the modern Sh’daar, but instead they were, hundreds of millions of years ago, the ur-Sh’daar, the ancient community of highly advanced civilizations inhabiting the small, irregular galaxy called the N’gai Cloud.

“Which, of course, brings us to the Black Rosette.”

The TRGA image vanished, and the in-head image expanded slightly, closing in on the Rosette’s eldritch maw. Harsh blue light glared from the opening.

“The Rosette,” McCabe continued, “appears to be an expansion of TRGA technology . . . but on a far vaster scale. Six black holes, each fifty times the mass of Sol, rotating about a common center of gravity at high speed, creating a gateway nearly one hundred thousand kilometers across.”

A second window opened once again, this time showing a perfect circle of six brilliant, sapphire-blue suns—the Six Suns, encountered by America’s task force in the N’gai Cloud in the remote past.

“The Rosette is at least nine hundred million years old,” McCabe said, “and obviously artificial. The original members of the Six Suns were balanced in a rotating hexagon one hundred astronomical units across. The stars themselves seem to have been artificially enhanced or rejuvenated by merging smaller stars together . . . but as is well understood, hot, bright, blue stars like these have lifetimes measured in, at best, a few tens of millions of years. When they ultimately burn up their reserves of nuclear fuel, they collapse into black holes, such as what we see in the Rosette today. We do not as yet know whether the distances between the member stars of the Rosette were deliberately manipulated—shrunken from about fifty astronomical units, in the remote past, down to a few tens of thousands of kilometers—or if this represents a natural evolution of the system over hundreds of millions of years. . . .”

As McCabe’s voice continued downloading into Gregory’s head, he stared into the blue glare. America’s AI was stopping the light down by a good 80 percent to keep the image from being washed out completely—or more likely the dimming had first taken place within the recon fighter to keep from blinding Lieutenant Walton.

Gregory had heard scuttlebutt to the effect that the “blue-light gateway” represented a pathway into the heart of a star or, just possibly, was looking at an exploding star, a nova or supernova, at close range. He could make out a kind of texture in there, a variation in tone and brightness—the light was not at all flat or uniform in its intensity. That seemed to rule out a star core, a supernova, or some other stellar disruption, but he couldn’t guess what it might be instead.

“We’re not at all sure what we’re looking at in this image,” McCabe was saying, echoing Gregory’s own thoughts, “but the physics department thinks that this particular line of sight may be a glimpse into an altogether different universe . . . a parallel universe to our own somewhere within the Bulk, and quite possibly an alien universe with completely different physical laws, environments, geometries, and characteristics than our own. . . .”

Funny name, Gregory thought, the Bulk. He knew the theory, of course: that there were other universes, a near infinity of them, side by side in a hyperdimensional way, like the pages of a book, but arrayed in a non-spacial otherness called the Bulk. All of the universes taken together were termed the metaverse. The nature of those other universes was still in doubt; they might host wildly differing natural laws and physical properties . . . or they might be alternate variations of one plan, spawned by the trillion in response to alternative solutions to collapsing quantum wave equations.

The blue-lit space within the Rosette apparently represented a space with different physics . . . where pi was equal to exactly three point one four, perhaps . . . or where gravity was stronger than it was here . . . or where sigma, the strength of the strong nuclear force, was strong enough to overwhelm the repulsion between electrons and protons.

So far as Gregory was concerned, however, this one universe he was inhabiting now was more than big enough—more than strange enough—for him.

“We estimate,” McCabe told his audience, “that the Rosette opens up a very large number of spacetime pathways . . . as many, the physics boys think, as ten to the twenty-seventh power. That number, one octillion, is so large as to be all but infinite for any practical purposes.

“So . . . are there any questions?”

Several hands rose. McCabe pointed at one.

“Sir,” Lieutenant Wes Fargo said. “Our ships can’t stand up to technology like that! Just what in hell are we supposed to do about these . . . people?”

“Unknown, as yet,” McCabe replied. He sounded grim, and Gregory realized that he didn’t have any answers, and that the lack of answers worried him. “All we know is that the Rosette Aliens, as we call them, are coming in through a crack in space, quite possibly from an entirely different universe. They may be a million years in advance of us . . . they may be much more. They may be so far beyond us that meaningful communication between their species and ours is impossible.

“And intelligence believes that their emergence only sixteen thousand light years from Sol is a matter of extremely serious concern. . . .”

And Gregory was forced to agree.

Emergency Presidential Command Post

Toronto

United States of North America

1322 hours, EST

“Recombinant Memetics,” Konstantin said, “may offer you your best hope for defeating the Confederation relatively quickly. Speed is, of course, essential if you are to have a chance of an alliance between Geneva and the Sh’daar.”

President Koenig studied the system’s schoolteacher avatar in his inner window and wondered about the AI’s programming. How did Konstantin pull off that kind of magic, anyway?

Not that the carefully crafted image conversing with him inside his head would yield any clues. The lunar computer network had not been directly programmed by humans; Konstantin, he knew, was an artificial intelligence-programmed machine, an AIP. Given that, how much could Konstantin possibly know—or guess—of human behavior?

“I notice,” Koenig said carefully, “that you tend to emphasize the fact that you are not human. When you’re speaking with me, you always say ‘your war,’ ‘your nation,’ as if you’re not one of us.”

“A fact that should be self-evident,” Konstantin replied. “I am not human. This is not my war. And while, technically, this facility was funded primarily by the United States of North America, I was intended, I remind you, to work on problems affecting all of Humankind. War is the single most wasteful, tragic, and senseless of human activities, and is not within my purview.”

“But you have been helping us.” Konstantin had been instrumental in formulating strategies against the Confederation, and in using its data-mining capabilities to gather intelligence from the Global Net.

“I have,” the system replied. “My function—my higher purpose, a human might say—is to gather, assess, and provide information. It is up to human agencies such as your government to determine what to do with that information.”

Konstantin’s mandate was to provide information useful for all of humanity, or at least so ran the claim. So far as Koenig was aware, though, Konstantin had been providing intelligence to the United States of North America and not to the Confederation. Was that because Konstantin had been designed and funded primarily by the USNA government, and by USNA-based corporations like Bluetel and Simmons-AI? Or were there other, deeper motives . . . perhaps motives not even remotely comprehensible to brains of mere blood and tissue?

“And the Confederation government? Do you provide them with information as well?”

“I maintain covert links with certain Confederation communications and AI networks, of course. Doing so requires that I provide certain information, yes. IP eddresses and DNS registration, for instance, as well as synchronization pingpackets.”

“Okay, Konstantin,” Koenig said after a moment. He knew better than to try to get the hyperintelligent AI network to say anything it was not prepared to divulge. “But how are you planning on using memetics?”

That was the real question, he thought—how well could a silicon-based intelligence understand the complexities of recombinant memetics? A machine figuring out the most effective buttons to push, to change human cultures, to reshape Humankind . . .

That, Koenig decided, was a truly chilling concept. . . .

If you had enough small and disparate bits of information, if you could conduct Big Data mining on a large-enough scale, could you accurately and consistently predict human behavior?

Koenig knew the official answer, of course. Predicting the actions of a handful of people or, worse, of an individual, was possible only in fairly limited situations—if the subject was a sociopath, for instance, and following the dictates of his disease, and even then, predictions could all too easily be lost in the randomness of background noise.

Large groups of people, however, were another matter altogether. As with large numbers of atoms or molecules acting within the rules laid down by quantum dynamics and basic chemistry, the actions of large populations were more predictable.

And where actions were predictable, it was possible—if you were both careful enough and skillful enough—to guide them, to change the shape and course of those actions to achieve a desired outcome. The science was called recombinant memetics, the science of using one set of memeplexes to alter another. In much the same way that recombinant DNA can change genetic structures and give rise to whole new types of life, it was possible to identify particular memes within a social unit and change them into something else entirely.

But identifying and targeting key memes within a given culture could be tricky, requiring data mining on a scale only possible for an AI as complex and as perceptive as Konstantin.

And changing them was trickier still, requiring selective manipulation of memes within the target culture.

The word meme had been coined four centuries before by Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist who first suggested them as units transmitting cultural practices, ideas and concepts, or as symbols passed from mind to mind through writing, speech, rituals, mass entertainment, or imitation. Like genes, memes spread from person to person, and like genes they compete, vary, select, mutate, and attempt to ensure their own survival. Put another way, a meme is like a virus, propagating through a population, infecting individuals, and spreading by means of the behaviors it generates in its hosts.

The question in Koenig’s mind was how a computer network, no matter how complex, could understand how memes worked, how memes could infect and affect human populations without possessing a key human ingredient—emotion.

And if a silicon mind like Konstantin’s could understand memetics, it gave AI systems an absolutely incredible power with which to manipulate human civilization.

“Several possibilities present themselves,” Konstantin replied. “I could foment revolution within the Confederation by building upon the impetus already generated by the defections from the Confederation’s ranks—Russia and North India. Or I could create a new religion . . . one that would require Geneva to embrace peace.”

That statement rocked Koenig back on his figurative heels. A religion?

A cluster of related memes working together and supporting one another was a memeplex; religion was the perfect example. Religions evolve, spawn new and different offspring, become set or rigid in their ways, or they mutate under cultural pressures which are themselves memeplexes.

“I see. And how are you going to get around the White Covenant?”

“The White Covenant prohibits attempts to proselytize,” Konstantin replied, “and it directly prohibits the use or the threat of force to effect conversions as a basic violation of human rights. It does not prohibit the establishment of a new faith.”

Centuries before, late in the twenty-first century, a particularly nasty war between the West and radical Islam had ended . . . in part because Western psyops programs had created the White Covenant, a gentlemen’s agreement among the winners that proselytizing in any form was a violation of basic human rights to believe and to worship according to one’s own conscience. Ultimately, full membership in the newborn Earth Confederation for any nation had depended upon acceptance of the Covenant.

And at the same time, an early application of recombinant memetics, then in its infancy, had made proselytizing, the fear of hell or judgment, and even the very idea of fundamentalist acceptance of sacred writings as God’s literal word . . . embarrassing. Passé. Even insulting. Populations that rejected the Covenant were encouraged to practice their beliefs . . . elsewhere, in deep space colonies out beyond Pluto, or even on the worlds of distant suns. Mufrid, at Eta Boötis, had been one such colony, until its destruction twenty years ago by the Turusch.

What the hell did Konstantin have in mind?

“Good luck with that,” Koenig said. “People tend to take their religions seriously.”

“Some do, though for many it is more a matter of convenience. Very often, religion is an accident of where a person was born, or when.”

“True. But there’s going to be a lot of back-blast and noise when you launch it.”

“Secrecy will be essential,” Konstantin observed.

Konstantin had pulled off some miracles lately in its dealing with the Confederation, but Koenig thought that this time the system might have bitten off more than it could process. Propaganda always ran into the basic problem of knee-jerk rejection by the target society—called back-blast in RM terminology—and, more, there often were so many competing voices out there in the memetic ether that it was impossible for any one message to be heard over the noise. Basic commercial advertising starting back in the twentieth century had been a primitive form of RM, using jingles and product placement and sexy spokespersons to sell, say, a certain brand of ground car. But when a dozen other companies were countering with jingles and ads dripping with sex of their own, the result was . . . noise, and lots of it, enough to render such ads largely ineffective.

There were also defenses, AI agents that patrolled cyberspace in search of potentially dangerous memes, like antibodies.

The best way to get a memetic virus through the noise and the defenses was to do so without the target being aware.

“It is imperative that we end the civil war within the Confederation as swiftly as possible,” Konstantin went on. “A recombinant memetic attack on the Geneva leadership gives us a good chance of uniting Humankind before the Sh’daar or the unknown alien threat at Omega Centauri can act.”

“But we still don’t have a clue as to how to defeat the Sh’daar,” Koenig said. “And we know even less about the Rosette Aliens.” He hesitated, thoughtful. “It’s the time-travel aspect that bothers me, Konstantin,” he said at last. “With that one factor alone, they ought to be able to walk all over us.”

The Sh’daar Collective was a truly formidable enemy. No human knew just how big the Collective actually was. At the very least, it included within its far-flung embrace well over a thousand distinct star-faring species scattered across perhaps a quarter of the galaxy, and controlled the resources of thousands more that for one reason or another had never ventured into space.

The discovery that at least one TRGA cylinder gave direct access from the Milky Way at time now to the N’gai Cloud some 876 million years in the past added the dimension of time to the problem. What passed for a Sh’daar galactic government appeared to be based in what Confederation intelligence called Omega Centauri T-0.876gy, the designation for the N’gai Cloud as it was almost 0.9 of a gigayear before time now, but it evidently had spread through time as well as space. How such a possibility could be made to work without endless complications from temporal paradox remained one of the great unsolved mysteries of galactic history.

And with that kind of strategic advantage, one would think that the Sh’daar could have intervened at any point in Humankind’s history or even prehistory and written humanity out of existence. Suppose a Sh’daar battlefleet had showed up over the Earth of 876 million years ago, when terrestrial life—still limited to bacteria and protists and blue-green alga—was confined to the sea. They could have glassed over the Earth, boiled away the ocean, bombarded what was left with high-energy neutrons . . .

Exterminated the life in those ancient terrestrial seas and Humankind would never have appeared.

The fact that the Sh’daar had not eradicated all life on Earth by rewriting history suggested that there was more to the problem than was immediately obvious.

The problem, Koenig thought, likely had to do with a key aspect of what it meant for species to be mutually alien. The Turusch, the H’rulka, the Nungiirtok, the Slan . . . all were client species of the Collective and all, at one time or another, technic species that had attacked human forces in Tprime, meaning time now, captured human interstellar colonies, and even launched assaults on Earth herself. And while there’d been attempts at joint operations—the Nungiirtok were specialists in ground warfare, for example, and had invaded the colony on Osiris in conjunction with Turusch fleet elements—the different Sh’daar clients were so different from one another—in physiology, yes, but especially in psychology—that they apparently had trouble coordinating military operations with one another. The Sh’daar guided their clients, or tried to, through the Seeds . . . but either the distances were too vast or the number of Seeds sending back data was too large. Whichever it was—and it might well be both—the Sh’daar Empire was not particularly efficient in the ways it dealt with ambitious upstarts like Humankind.

Humankind, Koenig believed, possessed one vital advantage in its struggle with the Sh’daar, something he privately thought of as the Greek advantage. Koenig was a thoroughgoing student of history, and was among other things fascinated by the spectacular victories of the ancient Greeks over the far larger and more diverse Persian armies at Marathon, at Plataea, and, later, by Alexander the Great over Darius. Like the Greek city states of 2900 years earlier, modern Earth was far from united . . . but the member species of the Sh’daar Collective had so little in common with one another that communications—even facilitated by Agletsch pidgins—must be very nearly impossible.

So far, Humankind had managed to use that essential disunity, beating Sh’daar client species in turn rather than en masse. The question, though, was whether the enemy would learn from those defeats and get their collective act together. If they did, when they did, humanity would be in very serious trouble indeed.

Somehow, Earth needed to unite, and then end the Sh’daar threat once and for all. If Konstantin could pull that off with memegeneering, well and good. If he could not, then Humankind’s long-term survival was very much in doubt.

And so far as Koenig could tell, Humankind was running out of useful options.

Chapter Five

12 February 2425

Washington, D.C.

USNA Periphery

1220 hours, EST

“Damn it, Lieutenant, we need trained pilots! Lots of them! You were one of our best! It’s your duty to volunteer!”

Shay Ashton looked the small, gray man up and down, almost openly sneering. “If service is mandatory, how the hell can I volunteer?” she said. “You can go to hell!”

“Lieutenant Ryan—”

“It’s Ashton, not Ryan,” she snapped. She’d married after she’d returned to the D.C. Ruins, though Fred had been killed ten years later by marauders from across the broad and tide-swollen Potomac. This USNA government agent wouldn’t understand. To him, taking the name of the person you married was quaint, a holdover from a long-gone era . . . or, worse, that she was a filthy “monogie”—a pervert who dared to believe in monogamous marriage.

She saw emotion flicker across the man’s face—disdain, possibly disgust. But in the lawless territories of the Periphery, cast off centuries ago by the rest of the country, monogamy had carried a certain survival value . . . two people so closely bonded that each could watch the back of the other in a way not possible for complicated line marriages, polyamories, or ménages a politique.

Behind her, a city, at once ancient and newly born, was growing skyward from mangrove swamp and muck. The relentless global rising of the oceans four centuries ago had finally flooded the low-lying regions along the U.S. coast, forcing their evacuation. But not everyone had been willing to leave their home. . . .

For centuries since then, the stay-behinds, the “swampies,” had inhabited the former capital of the old United States, fish-farming among the tangled mangrove swamps now growing along what once had been the Washington Mall. When the US had reorganized itself as the United States of North America and as a founding member of the Earth Confederation, the Periphery—including low-lying and flooded coastal areas like Manhattan, Boston, and Washington, D.C.—had been abandoned by a government unable to afford the massive costs and effort of beating back the encroaching sea. The people still living in those areas had adapted, as people do, living in the ruins without modern technology or medical care, making their own law, and becoming fiercely independent in the process.

The Periphery had become a major political issue, however, when Geneva had attempted to seize those regions, to take them over as a trust. The inhabitants had fought back an assault three months ago; the massive, broken shell of a Confederation Jotun troop flier still lay on its side in the shallow waters of the Washington Mall, partially obscured by the enthusiastic tangle of mangroves around it. Ashton had somehow found herself in command of the ragged band that had defended the Ruins, holding out until USNA aerospace forces had arrived to turn the tide decisively in the defenders’ favor.

Since then, USNA troops and equipment had been pouring into the areas around both D.C. and Baltimore, and reportedly up in the Manhattan Ruins too. Ashton was grateful for the help . . . but gratitude did have its limits. She hadn’t asked for the government’s help.

“Whether you like it or not,” the government man said, “the USNA has taken over direct control of the Peripheries. You are citizens of the USNA now, and as such you have both rights and responsibilities. That is especially true of former military personnel such as yourself.”

She held a middle finger up under his nose. “See this, Government Man?” she snapped. “Sit and rotate!”

“Lieutenant Ashton—”

“I retired, damn it! I put in my time, and I retired, okay? You do not own me!”

The man nodded toward the downed Jotun. “Looks like you’ve been doing a pretty good job of it since your retirement.”

In fact, that troop flier had been brought down by a flight of USNA Starhawk fighters. But she wasn’t going to mention that.

“This is my home, okay? I have a right to defend it.”

“Granted. And we’re offering you a chance to make sure the Confederation doesn’t try to grab your home from you again.”

“You can fight your own damned war. I’m not playing.”

The man sighed. “Well, I’m not going to force you. USNA jurisdiction is still . . . a bit fuzzy out here in the Periphery, and will be until we formally re-annex it. I will ask you why you won’t help us, though. You were an outstanding Starhawk pilot. Excellent record . . .”

“Like I said . . . I put in my time. And they need me here. This is . . . home.”

“Okay. Let’s leave it at this.” He focused a thought, sending Ashton a mind-to-mind eddress, which her in-head circuitry dutifully recorded and logged. “We want you to volunteer for an electronic incursion into Geneva. It’s a no-risk op; you’ll go in clean and virtual. Your fighter skills are very much needed in this operation, and if you succeed, you will ensure Washington’s freedom from the Confederation. If you can see clear to changing your mind, give me a yell. Fair enough?”

She nodded, but reluctantly. “Ain’t gonna happen, though.”

“The USNA is taking back the Periphery, Lieutenant,” the agent said. “Sooner or later, all of this will be under our control, our full control, again. Since the destruction of Columbus, there’s even been . . . talk of bringing the nation’s capital back here. Like it was a few centuries ago. It’ll mean unprecedented prosperity for your people . . . medical coverage . . . full access to the Global Net. There are some major advantages for you in this deal.”

“There’re advantages in staying independent, too.”

“Indeed. If you can keep that independence.” He didn’t add that to win independence, Ashton and her neighbors would have to fight against the USNA.

He didn’t need to.

As he walked away, Ashton wondered if he’d really meant that last unspoken thought as a threat. As far as she was concerned, there wasn’t a decidollar’s difference between the United States of North America and the Earth Confederation. She’d served both when the USNA had been a part of Geneva’s global hegemony, and her loyalties had been to the other members of her squadron and to her shipmates on board the America, not to such abstract concepts as duty, country, or even freedom.

Hell, what had the USNA done for her or her fellow swampies of late?

Well, other than showing up at the last possible second and helping to drive off the Confederation invasion three months ago. . . .

And it was true that the government—the USNA government, not the ragged committee of swampies who’d been making decisions here for the past few centuries—had been sending a lot of high-tech help after the precipitous departure of the Confeds. The old Capitol dome had been freed from the enveloping shrouds of kudzu and tropical vines, water levels were down so far that most of the Mall was now dry land, and three-meter dikes had been grown along the ancient shores of the Potomac, allowing the standing water to the east to be pumped out. There was even a detachment of USNA Marines in place across the river, now, guarding what to them was a sacred site . . . the ancient Iwo Jima Memorial, which now flew, not the flag of the USNA, but the old U.S. flag under which the Marines once had fought during centuries past. As a side benefit of that deployment, there’d been no more marauder raids on the D.C. Ruin settlements from the Virginia side of the river. Ten years ago, Ashton had led an armed team across the river to avenge Fred’s death, and had wiped out one nest of those snakes, but new marauder clans had shown up during the past few years.

Maybe there were advantages to having the USNA government renew its claims along the coast after all.

Angrily, she shook off the thought. The government was the proverbial camel with its nose worming in under the side of the tent. Let it in just a little, and pretty soon the whole damned camel was in there, shouldering you out into the desert cold.

No. . . .

Blue Seven, VF-910

Saturn Space

1315 hours, TFT

Lieutenant Frank Gallagher accelerated at nearly 10,000 Gs, streaking up from the tiny white, icy moon and into open space. Above him, Saturn hung huge and vast and beautiful, filling half the sky, her rings a diamond-hard and ruler-straight white scratch across all of heaven.

“Enceladus Base!” he called. “Blue One clear and accelerating!”

“Copy, Blue One,” the voice of Enceladus Flight Control replied in his head.

“Joining formation.” The three other Starfighters of Blue Flight drifted in open formation a few thousand kilometers ahead and he moved to join them. “Okay, Blues,” he said. “Keep it tight.”

“Blue Two, affirmative.” That was Lieutenant Karyl Joyce.

“Blue Four, ready to boost.” Lieutenant Dwayne Tanner.

“Blue Three, ready.” Lieutenant Victor Truini.

“Blue Flight formed up and ready for formation intercept,” Gallagher announced.

“Copy, Blue Flight. Unknowns now bearing at one-seven-three plus twelve, range two-niner-five thousand. Unknowns have fired on Red Flight, and are confirmed hostile. You have weapons free, I say again, weapons free.”

“Copy weapons free. Coming to one-seven-three plus one-two.”

“Go get ’em, Frank.”

“No prob, Salad Bowl. Keep the coffee warm for us back there.”

“Will do.” The voice hesitated. “We’re reading the hostiles now as twelve Krag-sixties. Range now two-five-zero thousand. The big boys are moving in, range one-point-seven-seven million.”

Not good. “Copy.”

The Pan-European Krag-sixties—KRG-60 Todtadlers, or Death Eagles—were as fast, as maneuverable, and as heavily armed as modern USNA Velociraptors, which meant that they were much better than Blue Flight’s older Starhawks, especially at long range.

They would have to get in tight to make a difference.

But twelve of them! Blue Flight consisted of four Starhawks, and Red Flight of four more, assuming they were all still operational. The USNA defensive contingent at Enceladus was going to be badly outclassed in this engagement—and there were still the “big boys,” the Confederation capital ships, to contend with.

“Blue Flight, engage sperm mode,” Gallagher ordered. The external hulls of the SG-92 Starhawks softened and flowed, morphing into their high-velocity configuration—a rounded body with a long, slender spike at the tail. Streamlining wasn’t normally a factor in spaceflight—at least, not at normal planetary velocities. But minute flecks of debris—stray hydrogen atoms, for the most part—were definitely a consideration at higher velocities.

And, more to the point, the region of space close to Enceladus was not hard vacuum. The dazzlingly white moon was imbedded inside the thickest part of Saturn’s E ring; in fact, specks of frozen water streaming out from Enceladus were responsible for creating the E Ring, and for keeping it in existence. Though local space was still hard vacuum by terrestrial standards, flying through that blizzard of ice particles at high-G accelerations would be like plowing through an atmosphere of molasses.

“On my mark, boys and girl,” Gallagher told his flight. “Fifty-kay gees in three . . . and two . . . and one . . . and boost!”

Powerful, tightly wrapped balls of warped space flickered into existence off each Starhawk’s bow. In existence for only a tiny fraction of a second, each microsingularity lasted just long enough to bend space ahead, allowing the fighter to fall forward. By continuing to flicker on and off, the drive allowed the craft to bootstrap itself to higher and higher velocities . . . and since the fighter was in freefall, following the local curvature of space itself, there were none of the unpleasant side effects of acceleration—like having the pilot smeared across his acceleration couch in a thin, red stain. At 50,000 gravities, a Starhawk could nudge up against the speed of light in about ten minutes. They wouldn’t be boosting for that long, however. The idea was to engage the incoming enemy, not blow right past him at a high percentage of c. The fighters’ AIs cut off acceleration when the closing velocity was up to 5,000 kilometers per second, and the enemy was thirty seconds away.

“Prepare to engage,” Gallagher called. “Arm Kraits. Spread for area effect . . . but watch out for our Red Flight. Blue Four, hold yours in reserve.”

“Copy, Blue Leader.”

Kraits were nuke-tipped VG-10 antiship missiles. They were particularly effective against capital ships, but a near miss would fry a fighter’s circuitry and the expanding plasma sphere might shred hull matrix if the detonation was close enough. They weren’t as powerful or as long-ranged as the newer Boomslangs or Taipans, but they could do the job well enough with good tactics.

Gallagher watched the red points of light representing the enemy fighters drift across an in-head window, each accompanied by a small block of text describing the target’s mass, direction, speed, and acceleration. The friendlies out there were in full retreat . . . three of them dropping back toward Enceladus at high-G. A white sphere of light blossomed . . . and then there were two friendlies left. The hostiles kept closing.

Damn it, they should have ordered Red Flight to open up on the unknowns as soon as they’d become visible. Who the hell else had the Salad Bowl—the squadron’s pet slang name for Enceladus Station—been expecting out here?

He selected four Kraits, marked detonation points on his in-head to create a spread across the expected paths of the Confederation fighters, and triggered the release. “Fox One!” he announced. “Blue One, missiles away!”

“Blue Three! Fox One!”

“Blue Two! Fox One!”

Fox One was the code phrase indicating the launch of smart missiles—fire-and-forget warheads equipped with AIs to guide them to their targets. Released from the fighters’ bellies, the missile drives switched on an instant after they were clear to avoid changing the fighters’ vectors, sending them streaking into darkness. One vanished two seconds later, wiped from the sky by a Todtadler’s particle beam, but the others detonated in a pulsing one-two-three blossoming of white light. The enemy fighters had scattered off their path as soon as they’d detected the launch . . . but the spreads launched by Truini and Joyce had been placed to box the Todtadlers in, and as additional fireballs flared in the distance, two of the enemy fighters vanished, while a third, torn by an expanding plasma fireball, tumbled helplessly out of control.

But there were missiles incoming now, answering Blue Flight’s volley. Gallagher’s AI pegged the designation as AM/AS-9, which carried the USNA code name Black Mamba. The AM/AS designation stood for antimatter/antiship; rather than a nuclear warhead, it packed several grams of antimatter in a magnetic containment capsule, enough to generate a multi-megaton blast laced with deadly X-ray and gamma radiation. There were eight of them, pushing a 100,000 Gs. The Pan-Europeans, it appeared, were out for blood.

“Blue Four!” Gallagher called. “Try to block those Mambas!”

“Copy, Blue Leader! Fox One . . .”

For several endless seconds, two sets of artificial intelligences vied with each other tactically, each trying to outguess the other, feinting, dodging, putting on sudden bursts of acceleration, or decelerating sharply to spoof its opposite numbers. Then nuclear flashes erupted against the black of space, deathly silent, and half of the Mambas vanished in the blasts.

Four kept coming, their AIs seeking out the formation of USNA Starhawks for the kill.

“Blue Flight, go to E-and-E!” Gallagher yelled, breaking hard high and to port. E and E—Evasion and Escape. It was time to get the hell out of Dodge.

Sharp turns with a singularity fighter were always dicey, requiring the drive to anchor the gravity ball and allow the fighter to whip around it into the new desired course. The tricky part was keeping the fighter smoothly riding the gravity well’s sides without slipping in close enough to be caught in the microsingularity’s tidal effects. Maneuvering in a singularity fighter was completely unlike flying an atmospheric wing. Rather than banking and turning on air, it was space itself that was being twisted, allowing one vector to be shifted to another in a 90-degree turn, or even through a full one-eighty. Do it right and you slid around the artificial black hole smoothly, the sky wheeling past your head and you didn’t even feel the turn because you were still in free fall. Do it wrong and in an instant your fighter would be shredded into metallic confetti . . . a process technically known as spaghettification.

Jinking in three dimensions, Gallagher worked to keep the enemy warheads guessing, letting his ship’s AI handle the math, but guiding the process with his organic brain to keep the maneuverings as random and as unpredictable as possible. One of the antimatter warheads detonated several thousand kilometers to starboard, the flash wiping out the sky for a light-dazzled couple of seconds. A blue icon winked out of existence with the flash. Blue Four, Dwayne Tanner . . . and the end had come so quickly he’d not even realized he was dying.

“Blue Leader, Blue Two!” Joyce screamed. “I’ve got two on my tail! Can’t shake them!”

On the in-head, Gallagher could see Blue Two twisting hard to escape a pair of Todtadlers closing on her six, but he was too far . . . too far. . . .

“I’m on it, Karyl,” Truini called back. “Going to guns. Target lock . . . and fire!”

Blue Three swung into perfect line with the two Death Eagles at close range, spraying kinetic-kill Gatling rounds into their path. First one, then the other of the KRG-60s flared into savage smears of white-and-orange light, the wreckage twisting wildly into the fighter’s own drive singularity and vanishing in an instant.

“Good shot!” Gallagher told Truini, but then he had some serious problems of his own: a Black Mamba settling in on his own six and accelerating fast.

Cutting acceleration, Gallagher spun his Starhawk end for end, so that he now was facing the oncoming Mamba, traveling stern-first. He selected two AS-78 AMSO rounds. The acronymn stood for anti-missile shield ordnance, but they were better known as sandcasters—unguided warheads packed with several kilos of lead spherules, each as small as a grain of sand.

“Fox Two!” he called—the launch alert for unguided munitions, and he sent the AMSO warheads hurtling toward the Mamba. They detonated an instant later, firing sand clouds like shotgun bursts directly in the Mamba’s path. Before the Black Mamba’s AI could correct or dodge, the missile had hit the sand cloud at a velocity so high that the missile flared and disintegrated . . . then erupted in a savage burst of matter-antimatter annihilation.

The blast was close . . . very nearly too close. The expanding plasma wall nudged Gallagher’s Starhawk as it unfolded at close to the speed of light, putting him into a rough, tumbling spin. For the next several seconds he was extremely busy, trying to balance his Starhawk’s attitude controls to bring him out of the tumble.

Then he had the nimble little ship back under control, with tiny Enceladus and, beyond, the looming bulk of Saturn filling the forward sky. Red icons were scattering rapidly past and around him, he saw; those were the enemy fighters. Farther off, still a million kilometers away, a small knot of red icons marked an incoming continent of Confederation capital ships. The big boys were decelerating now, closing on Enceladus and leaving the mop-up of the defending USNA squadron to their own fighters.

And Gallagher didn’t see any way he could stop them, or even to get close. The last of Red Flight was gone, now, and the three remaining fighters of Blue Flight weren’t going to be able to do a damned thing about those heavies. His AI’s warbook was busily cataloguing the enemy fleet . . . two heavy cruisers, a light carrier, half a dozen destroyers, a couple of monitor gun platforms, a heavy transport . . .

Jesus! What did they think the USNA had deployed out here on this damned little iceball? Salad Bowl was a civilian research station, nothing more, an exobiology outpost hunting for alien life in the salty deep-ocean pockets beneath the Enceladean ice. The Starhawk squadron had been placed here to protect against minor Pan-European raids . . . but what he was seeing here was a large-scale invasion. That transport was almost certainly a troop ship.

They might yet manage to do some damage. “Listen up, team,” he called. “We’re on a vector that will take us within ten thousand kilometers of that transport. I think it’s probably a troop ship, okay? Hit that baby, and we might be able to throw a major wrench into the Pannies’ plans.”

A troop ship meant troops, which meant the Pan-Europeans were here to occupy Enceladus or some other body in the Saturn subsystem . . . Titan, possibly, or the Huygens ERRF observatory in Saturn orbit. Destroy or damage it badly enough, and those invasion plans would have to be scrubbed. Gallagher had two Kraits left in his armament bays; he would shoot one and save the other as a just-in-case.

“That’s gonna really stir up a hornet’s nest,” Joyce said.

“Yeah, boss,” Truini added. “And what’s the point, anyway? We have to surrender. We’ve freakin’ lost!”

Gallagher considered the question. Out here on the cold, empty ass-edge of the system, concepts like duty and honor just didn’t count for as much as they might back in more civilized areas. Here, you fought for your buddies.

Or, in this case, the other members of the squadron back in the Salad Bowl, the loaders, manglers, technicians, and all of the other support and logistics personnel that made a squadron work. Not to mention some six hundred scientists, technicians, and support personnel stationed at the Bowl.

“Yeah, and how are we supposed to do that, True?” Gallagher replied. Another antimatter warhead detonated in the distance, flooding the area with a harsh and deadly light. Surrender was not a matter of simply contacting the enemy . . . not when their electronic defenses were up to prevent attempts to hack into fighter control systems or AIs. “If the Bowl tells us to stand down, we stand down. Until then, we fight, damn it!”

There was no response . . . and Gallagher realized with a sudden cold impact that Truini’s fighter had vanished from the display with that last detonation. It was down to Gallagher and Joyce.

“Blue Two calling Fox One!” Joyce announced. “Missiles away!”

Gallagher programmed the shot and triggered it. “Fox One!”

“Their fighters are trying to cut us off!

“I see them.” He considered their options . . . which were few and not good. He considered ducking in Saturn’s rings and immediately discarded the idea. The thicker portions of the rings were too distant—the outer reaches of the massive and brilliant B Ring orbited over 120,000 kilometers farther in from Enceladus, more than a third the distance between Earth and Luna.

But damn it, they needed cover.

Nuclear fireballs flared and blossomed in the distance. The enemy transport was still there . . . but it was no longer decelerating. Maybe they’d done some damage. Maybe . . .

Something about the data coming up on the alien transport didn’t add up. The ship was longer than a French Orcelle-class transport—nearly 700 meters—and its power curve was closer to that of a battle cruiser than a troop ship. Gallagher called up a magnified image . . . and he stifled a sharp, bitter exclamation.

He didn’t know what that . . . that thing was, but it wasn’t a troop ship.

No time for analyses now. He would store the data and hope he lived to transmit it.

“Okay! Make a run for Enceladus, Karyl. Close pass . . . crater hop if you have to. We’ll see if we can lose ’em in the ice!”

“Right behind you, Frank.”

The problem with being so badly outnumbered was the openness out here, with enemy fighters and capital ships now moving in from all sides. If they could get down on the deck of Enceladus, half the encircling sky would be blocked, and the radar and laser signatures of the fighters themselves might be masked by the ice skimming beneath their keels.

“Enceladus Base, this is Blue Leader!” he called over the tactical channel. “We’re down to two fighters! I think we managed to ding their troop ship, but they’re trying to swarm us! What are your instructions?”

“Blue Flight, Enceladus Base. You’ve done what you can, Frank. Get the hell clear of battlespace. RTB when you can.”

“Copy.” RTB—Return to base—when they could, if they could. More Black Mambas were streaking toward them, now. If things had been bad before, they were worse now. The enemy fighters were furious at the attack on the Confederation capital ship. Gallagher launched several more sandcaster rounds, then put on a burst of raw, hard acceleration that sent him hurtling toward the fast-swelling white disk of the moon. He was aware of the crater-pocked surface growing swiftly larger, of the dazzle from a distance-weakened sun glinting from the ice plains below . . . and then he was twisting around his drive singularity, fighting to shift his vector to one a little closer to parallel to the moon’s surface. Enceladus was so near now that its bulk blocked out the far vaster loom of giant Saturn.

Three enemy fighters were following him down. Where were the rest?

Where was Karyl?

He didn’t know. The three bandits on his six were closing fast, though. It looked like they were lining up for a gun attack rather than another volley of antimatter warheads. Maybe their missile rails had gone empty. Maybe . . . maybe . . .

A nuclear fireball blossomed to port, the detonation rapidly lost astern. They were popping nukes at him then . . . and one had just impacted the surface. He swerved to starboard, angling toward the tiny moon’s south polar region, still accelerating.

His fighter shuddered, and he heard the rapid-fire banging of small high-velocity pellets against his hull. He cut back on his speed . . . then cut back again as the shuddering increased in strength and decibel level.

A shimmering, hazy wall rose against the black of space from the horizon ahead.

Shit! In the excitement, Gallagher had forgotten about the moon’s south pole . . . and the tiger stripes.

Cassini, an early robotic probe exploring the Saturn system, had discovered the mysterious jets streaming out from the moon’s south polar region in 2005. The constant tug-of war between Saturn and Enceladus created tidal heating and heavy tectonic activity, generating titanic cryovolcanoes erupting from four parallel fractures—deep cracks in the icy crust popularly known as “tiger stripes” for their dark color. Geysers of water emerged at high pressures from the vents and froze almost instantly, creating plumes extending as far as 500 kilometers up and out into space.

Much of this ice drifted back to the surface of Enceladus as snow, carpeting the moon’s southern regions to create a brighter, whiter surface much younger than existed in the north. The rest drifted clear of the satellite and formed the broad, highly diffuse E ring of Saturn, a 2,000-kilometer-thick belt circling the planet all the way from the orbit of Mimas, an inner moon of the planet, out to Rhea.

Those cryovolcanic plumes had been the first evidence that Enceladus might harbor a liquid-water ocean beneath the ice . . . and possibly life as well. Enceladus base had been established a century and a half earlier to search for that life—a far more difficult task than on Jupiter’s Europa. While the subsurface ocean had a temperature close to 0˚ centigrade, the surface of the ice was a numbing 240 degrees colder, just 33 degrees above absolute zero. And unlike Europa, the internal ocean seemed to exist in pockets, limiting the areas where the xenobiology people could drill.

The effort had been worth it, however. Life had been discovered beneath the Enceladean ice . . . very, very strange life, life based on hydrogen-germanium chemistry—on organometallic semiconductors rather than on carbon chains.

Exactly how an ice ball like Enceladus had acquired enough germanium—a relatively rare element on Earth—to evolve life based on the stuff was a mystery; how it worked was a bigger mystery still. Simply identifying the flecks of organometallics exchanging photons with one another in the Enceladean oceans as being alive had taken the better part of a century . . . and a near-total rewrite of the definition of the word life.

Enceladus Station, located in the permanent blizzard 100 kilometers from the terminus of one of the tiger stripes, was a xenobiological outpost maintained as a joint venture by Phoenix University of Arizona and the Universidade de Brasília. With Brazil siding with the Confederation against the North American rebels, there’d been some understandable political stresses at Enceladus. VF-910 had been dispatched to the moon to keep the peace . . . and the scientific neutrality of the base.

Obviously, it hadn’t worked out as planned. The Confederation had dispatched a naval squadron to seize Enceladus and to isolate North America from the rest of Earth’s scientific community.

None of this was of particular interest to Gallagher at the moment, as he skimmed above the polar ice toward a misty wall, which, at his current velocity, would have nearly the same effect on his ship as a cliff of solid ice. He gave orders to his AI, nudging the fighter into a slightly different path. Those tiger stripes each were about 35 kilometers apart. It would be like threading a needle, but he might slip between the plumes if he could maintain a low-enough altitude.

The Pan-European fighters were still behind him, following him in.

Hurtling between two towering plumes that filled the sky with misty light, Gallagher flipped his fighter end for end again, hurtling tail-first and head-down, meters above the roiled and jaggedly broken icy surface. He had one Krait remaining. He rolled back to keel-down, giving orders to his AI in brief, staccato bursts of thought.

“Fox One!”

His last Krait dropped from his keel, ignited, streaked aft . . . and detonated on the ice. The flare was blinding . . . and an instant later a fresh and violent plume of freezing water geysered into space above the hole he’d punched into the surface, directly in the path of the trailing enemy fighters.

Unfortunately, the expanding plasma shock wave from his missile caught the Starhawk and nudged it to one side, nudged it enough to send it skimming through the fringes of one of the other plumes. Gallagher felt a savage shock, saw pieces of his fighter ripping free . . .

. . . and then the jolt of deceleration slammed against him, sending him hurtling into blackness as he lost consciousness. . . .

Chapter Six

4 March 2425

Emergency Presidential Command Post

Toronto

United States of North America

1640 hours, EST

“The President of the Confederation Senate is on the link for you, Mr. President,” Marcus Whitney, the Chief of Staff, said. “The new President, I should say.”

President Koenig glanced at the others in the room—Pamela Sharpe, the Secretary of State. Lawrence Vandenberg, the Secretary of Defense. Dr. Neil Eskow, the Secretary of Science. All maintained facial expressions of careful neutrality.

“You have the security issues worked out already, I presume?”

“Of course, sir.”

The security problem was far more difficult than merely one of virus control. A direct data link between Geneva and the emergency USNA capital in Toronto could easily serve as a conduit for a variety of electronic attacks—viruses, worms, or brute-force virtual assaults aimed at downloading confidential data or knocking out the American communications network. Powerful e-security AIs would be monitoring the exchange on both sides of the Atlantic, making sure that only the video and sound being exchanged between the two government leaders would pass the firewalls.

There was also the question of e-psych attacks, which would amount to a direct assassination attempt. Koenig and his Confederation counterpart carried sophisticated nanochelated circuitry inside their brains, cerebral implants that let them interface directly with computers, vehicle control systems, medical scans, the Global Net, and, of course, mind-to-mind communications links. It was possible to hack another person’s implants, either to steal data or—more viciously—to infiltrate personal RAM and distort the victim’s perception of reality. Such an attack could leave a victim hopelessly insane . . . or so distort his reality that he acted as though he were schizophrenic.

The virtual agents resident within implant hardware—Koenig’s personal in-head secretary, for instance—were designed to screen out such attacks . . . if only to block unauthorized attempts at communication, or the transfer of electronic advertising. The ICEware carried by Koenig and other government leaders was several orders of magnitude more powerful and comprehensive than what was available to average citizens, and should be proof against any possible electronic attack.

There was always the chance that the other side had come up with something new, however. The electronic battleground was constantly evolving, constantly growing more complex, more subtle, and more dangerous.

The secretary of defense broke the uncomfortable silence first. “Sir,” Vandenberg said, “I really don’t think that taking this call is a good idea.”

“Why is that?”

“Simple. It’s likely to be a plot to get at you. They might have something new that our ICE can’t handle. Something dangerous.”

ICE, an old acronym for intrusion countermeasures electronics, was the catchall term for electronic software defenses, some of it artificially intelligent, some not.

“Konstantin says they do not,” Dr. Eskow said with a shrug. “And Konstantin should know. It monitors the Global Net closely, and would be aware of any such new developments.”

“I don’t see Konstantin running our antiviral software,” Vandenberg said.

“Of course not,” Koenig said. “The time lag from the moon and back is too long. God knows what could sneak through in three seconds.”

In fact, clones of Konstantin were already running on several USNA networks on Earth, though they were more closely circumscribed in operational procedures and restrictions than was the hyperintelligent AI on the moon’s far side. Most humans still didn’t fully trust AIs that were too intelligent . . . or too independent.

And Koenig didn’t fully trust any AI networks that might already have been compromised by Confederation hacks.

Still, there were times when you needed to take a chance. If you sat inside a sealed box doing nothing because someone out there might be trying to get you, you would never get anywhere.

“I’m going to take the call,” Koenig said, deciding. “I’m sick of working in the dark against these people. Maybe he’ll let something slip.”

“Stay behind your avatar, Mr. President,” Eskow said. “He’ll certainly be staying behind his.”

Avatar was the term given to a computer-created simulation based on the real person. With a decent AI behind it, it could even mimic the organic personality so closely that people linking in on the Net could not tell whether they were talking to the person or to their electronic secretary. Avatars could be a convenience or they could be a kind of personality fashion statement. They also could be designed to create a certain psychological impact. What Eskow was suggesting was that Koenig remain electronically masked by his avatar in the conversation. If the Confederation did manage to slip a nasty worm through the link, it would hit the electronic presence first, and, with luck and some very fast electronic reactions, be stopped there.

But that would also mean that Koenig would be isolated from the discussion, experiencing it secondhand and with little opportunity to guide it. He shook his head.

“I’ll be careful, Doctor. But there’s no point in my being here if I’m going to let an electronic puppet do my talking for me.” He looked at his SecState. “Pam? What’s the global lineup right now? Has anything changed I should know about?”

“Nothing substantial has changed since this morning’s PICKL, Mr. President,” she said. The PICKL was the President’s Intelligence ChecK-List, a data download prepared by the various USNA intelligence services for his review first thing each morning. “We have feelers out to Brasilia. They may pull out of the war over the Columbus atrocity, though they probably will stay with the Confederation. If they stay with the Confederation, Argentina may pull out. Those two are still at each other’s throats.”

“Russian Federation? North India?”

“They’re both solidly with us, now. But we’re not yet sure how much practical use those alliances might provide.”

“And Mexico?”

“Still solidly against us, sir. Confederation agents have been promising them the return of the old U.S. Southwest.”

“Aztlan,” Koenig said, frowning and nodding. “I know. Old news. Okay, let’s do this. Marcus?”

“The link is ready, sir. He’s waiting. Or his avatar is.”

“Right.” Koenig sank back in his chair, which responded to his thoughts, opening up, opening back, letting him lie back in a reclining position. He closed his eyes, and an inner window opened. A face formed out of static, and in Koenig’s mind’s eye, he was seated now in a large conference room, across an expensive mahogany table from President Christian Denoix de Saint Marc.

He was surprised at first that he wasn’t sitting opposite General Janos Matonyi Korosi who, according to USNA Intelligence, was currently the real head of both Pan-Europe and the Confederation. But Denoix’s presence was not, perhaps, all that surprising. The Confederation would be scrambling to put a legitimate face on their war—and that meant a civilian leader, not a military one. Denoix might well be little more than a figurehead. It would be good to keep that in mind.

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