Star Carrier 6: Deep Time (27 page)

“Okay. I’m going to—” St. Clair broke off in mid-sentence, then added, “
Shit!
”

“What now?” Gregory asked him.

A dozen elongated, silvery shapes had just surrounded St. Clair’s fighter, watching him with unblinking eyes.

“I’m afraid,” he said slowly, “that we have company.”

1/4 Marines

4
th
Regimental Assault Group, 1
st
MARDIV

Invictus Space, T+12 MY

1737 hours, TFT

Major Harrison Smith slammed his Apache Tear into the looming black wall of the alien ring’s interior bulkhead and thoughtclicked for an entryway. The nanomatrix of the assault pod’s forward hull clung to the alien wall and released its package of nano-D: molecule-sized disassemblers that began taking the wall apart almost literally atom by atom, but
very
swiftly. His instruments registered a breach, then analyzed the atmosphere on the other side—nitrogen, hydrogen, methane, and traces of ammonia at three atmospheres and a temperature of minus four Celsius. That matched the data from the Glothr ship back in the Sol System, and must represent their native environment.

Majors aren’t normally expected to lead close assaults themselves, but this was a special case, and becoming more special second by second. Casualties had been extremely heavy, and there’d been problems maintaining communications both with the
Marne
and Colonel Jamison,
and
among the Marines in the assault group. Rather than hang around outside and pretend that he knew what was going on, Smith elected to punch through into the interior of this enormous thing, round up as many Marines as he could, and see if he could find the humans supposedly imprisoned in here.

The three-dimensional schematic glowing in his in-head showed other Marines entering the structure nearby. He pressurized the interior of his pod to three atmospheres, opened the seal separating him from the Glothr structure’s interior, switched on his command beacon, and stepped through.

Gregory

VFA-96, The Black Demons

Invictus surface, T+12 MY

1737 hours, TFT

“What are they doing?” Gregory asked. He tried switching his visual input back on, but nothing happened. Either the cold had finally gotten to it, or, more likely, the wildly shifting changes in temperature had broken something crucial.

“N-nothing,” St. Clair replied. “Not so far. They’re just . . . watching.”

“Maybe they’re not military. They’re scouts or something.”

“Maybe. The reports I saw a little while ago said they were fighting hard enough inside the ring.”

How, Gregory wondered, do you judge the intent of a completely alien being? True, these things were robots, not living creatures like the Glothr, but they must have been programmed with Glothr values and purposes. What did they want?

“They’re moving . . . well, a little,” St. Clair reported. “They just backed off maybe two . . . three meters.”

“Still just watching?”

“Yup. I think we should continue trying to get you out of there. They haven’t attacked . . . but they haven’t shown any interest in helping us, either.”

“Look . . . I have an idea.”

“What is it?”

“I’m going to open my ship and stand up. You be ready to come grab me.”

“Wait! I thought you said you’d only have a couple of seconds! I don’t think I can do it that fast . . . and we’d still be risking major hypothermia, frozen limbs—”

“I was calculating those numbers based on heat loss through the soil beneath me.”

“Yeah? So . . . ?”

“I’m going to be standing in my cockpit, which isn’t that cold yet. And I’m going to be
in a vacuum
.”

“Ahh . . .”

When Gregory had run the numbers earlier, he’d done so based on the heat loss of the entire crashed Starblade where it was in contact with the Invictan surface. He’d forgotten that the cockpit itself had a certain amount of insulation . . . and that the very best temperature insulation of all was provided by hard vacuum. It was tough getting hard numbers . . . but it looked like he would have longer—perhaps as much as eight or ten seconds—before he froze out there.

And he was willing to risk it.

“What are our friends doing?” he asked.

“Nothing. Just watching. It’s kind of getting on my nerves, y’know?”

“Okay. Move on down closer to the surface. Let me know if anything changes.”

“Okay. I’m ten meters above you. The aliens followed me down . . . but they’re still just floating there in a circle. Like, I don’t know. Like they’re waiting for orders.”

That was perhaps the most unnerving bit of news of all. But with only minutes left to him, Gregory decided he had to do
something
.

He thoughtclicked a command, opening up the cockpit inside its nanomatrix shell . . .

And the shell exploded.

1/4 Marines

4
th
Regimental Assault Group, 1
st
MARDIV

Invictus Space, T+12 MY

1738 hours, TFT

According to IR scans, there were several small areas of the ring at higher temperatures than most of the structure. Most were probably involved with life support or heat exchange, but one had been picked out by
America
’s intelligence department and her AI as a habitat area set up for human POWs. Radiated heat readings through layers of insulation suggested that the hab area was being held at thirty-seven degrees Celsius—human body temperature.

Major Smith dropped to the deck, startled at the sudden imposition of gravity. He’d been told that Charlie One had manufactured internal gravity to order, but not experienced it directly. His suit told him the local gravity was running at 1.8 Gs; interesting that that didn’t seem to translate to the ring’s exterior. Maybe it was a short-ranged field effect, like the temporal distortion projected from their time benders.

In any case, Humankind had a
lot
to learn from these critters. If
we can get these bastards to talk.

He engaged his armor’s exoskeletal functions, allowing him to walk normally despite the increased gravity. He also switched on his external lights. The passageways in here were pitch-black. He suspected that the EMP moments before had fried the lighting system.

Assuming the Glothr used lights. He’d been briefed on the fact that vision wasn’t their primary sense, so maybe this area was always this dark.

Several more armored Marines showed up a few seconds later, homing on the command beacon he’d switched on moments before.

“This way, Marines!” he ordered.

“Ooh-
rah
!”

They stormed down the indicated passageway, turned a corner . . . and came face to face with one of the ubiquitous Glothr robots. It hovered there in mid-passage, watching them with glassy eyes.

And didn’t appear to have seen them.

“Whaddaya think, Major?” Gunnery Sergeant Vince Semmler asked. He reached out and gave the floating machine a shove. It drifted slowly across the corridor. “Fried by the EMP?”

“Looks like. Or else it’s not getting orders from its controllers.”

“I dunno,” Staff Sergeant Rezewski put in. “If its circuits got fried, it shouldn’t still be floating there, should it?”

“Fuck it,” Semmler said. “Leave it and c’mon.”

They threaded their way through another fifty meters of left, right, and straight ahead, coming at last to a solid bulkhead.

“Rezewski!” Smith snapped. “Use a breacher.”

“Aye, aye, Major.”

The breacher was a rubbery disk two meters across that adhered to the bulkhead. A nano-D charge around the perimeter ate through the wall in seconds; the center of the disk remained intact, a dark, translucent sheet stretched taut, with the feel, the
give
, of rubber.

“We’re through, sir,” Rezewski said.

“Go!” Smith said. And the first Marine in line stepped through the breach.

Gregory

VFA-96, The Black Demons

Invictus surface, T+12 MY

1738 hours, TFT

The outer layers of the fighter’s nanomatrix hull had been super-cooled on the Invictan surface, taken down to temperatures fifty-two degrees
colder
than liquid nitrogen, colder even than nitrogen snow. As the cockpit pod split and opened, it struck the frozen matrix, which shattered.

Gregory had once seen a demonstration—a block of wood lowered into liquid nitrogen, then struck against a table. The cascade of glittering, frozen particles, like broken glass, was eerily similar to the fragmenting ship. Only too aware, now, of the deadliness of his deceptively quiet surroundings, Gregory stood up.

Despite being insulated by the surrounding vacuum, he could feel his shipboard utilities—which with helmet and gloves doubled as an emergency environmental suit—stiffening around him, could feel the cold as though it literally were seeping in.

Impossible, of course. Heat was escaping his body, not cold seeping in, but that was what it undeniably felt like. His feet . . . he couldn’t feel his feet anymore, and his legs were starting to burn.

He felt oddly tranquil, despite the pain, despite the sudden realization that he may have just made a serious mistake. The landscape was serene, dark, utterly silent. It would have been easy to step out of the ruin of his Starblade and onto that flat, rock-strewn plain. That step, he knew, would have been lethal.

He also felt heavy. The planet’s gravity was dragging at him with almost twice the pull of home. But he managed to stand up straight . . . and raise his arms.

Overhead, St. Clair’s fighter descended like an unfolding blanket, the alien robots encircling it at a range of thirty meters. The blackness descended on him, scooped him up, folded him in . . .

And Gregory screamed with pain.

1/4 Marines

4
th
Regimental Assault Group, 1
st
MARDIV

Invictus Space, T+12 MY

1739 hours, TFT

Smith stepped through the opening in line behind the first few Marines. The breacher ring was filled with a form of nanomatrix, tightly stretched and only a molecule thick. The stuff clung to his armor as he moved through it, maintaining a perfect pressure seal, closing off behind him as he stepped through.

The chamber beyond was small, claustrophobically so, dominated by massive structural supports and deep, deep black shadows that shifted and jumped as the Marines and the lights mounted on their armor moved.

Inside were seven capsules, a human sealed inside each one.

“The power in here has failed,” Semmler reported. “The EMP took everything off-line. We need to get these people out of here
now
.”

“Do it.”

The atmosphere in here was poisonous, the temperature above freezing only because of the heat radiating from the seven capsules. The men and women inside those tubes appeared to be fully awake and alert as the Marines’ lights passed over them, making them squint in the glare.

Smith had been concerned about the POWs in their pods, but he was also worried about getting the POWs out of the ring. They didn’t appear to have environmental suits of their own, which would mean they would have to be taken out in emergency e-pods—essentially nanomatrix balloons that could hold one human and perhaps an hour’s worth of air inside while rescuers hauled them across space to a rescue vessel. And with the room filled with cold poison, making the transfer would be difficult in the extreme.

Fortunately, the life-support capsules appeared to have been designed for easy transfer. Pressure plates at the base of each recessed at a touch, allowing the tubes to be detached, still sealed, from their supports. They weighed a lot in 1.8 Gs—almost two hundred kilos apiece—but they could be rolled across the deck, then manhandled by two Marines through the nanoseal.

They were too large to fit inside the MAPP-2 pods, but Smith had already called for help, and a SAR tug was outside, cutting a hole through the wall big enough for the Marines to jockey each cylinder through.

Strangest of all, though . . . the Marines had help. As they began rolling the former prisoners out of the claustrophobic room—surely the most
undignified
rescue in Marine history—a number of the floating robots showed up and began helping to move each cylinder. They said nothing, and they ignored transmissions from the Marines.

But without their help, the evacuation would have taken a lot longer.

What was going on?

Outside, it appeared that the battle had ended.

Chapter Twenty-four

8 August, 2425

Gray

USNA Star Carrier
America

Invictus Space, T+12 MY

1015 hours, TFT

The Star Carrier
America
orbited the black planet, just outside the rim of the planet’s artificial ring. On board, the peace negotiations were under way.

Gray just hoped that
peace
meant the same thing to the Glothr—the
Kin
, as they called themselves—as it did to humans.

“We swarm together,” the alien intoned, the buzzing of its electrical field translated by
America
’s AI and sent through the thousands of humans linked into the network. The Glothr drifted within its native habitat, a black and frigid ocean somewhere far beneath the surface of the Steppenwolf world of Invictus.

“We swarm together,” Dr. Lawrence Rand replied.

Gray and Rand were on board
America
, in a briefing room in front of an audience of some hundreds of her officers and crew. With Gray seated off to one side on a stage grown for this interview, Rand stood in front of a screen displaying the view from a first-contact robot, a FiCo named Pepper. To Gray and the others in the room it looked like Rand was standing face-to-face with one of the Glothr—a translucent, blue-gray form vaguely like an upright umbrella, its mantle and tentacles waving gently in unseen, unfelt currents.

“We enfold you,” the alien’s translated voice continued, “as swarm leader.”

“What,” Gray asked over a private channel with Rand, “does that mean exactly? Is it a surrender?”

“Not sure, Admiral,” Rand replied over the same interior channel. “We know they are colony animals—kind of like the Portuguese man-of-war back on Earth—with every member of that colony having its own jobs, its own duty to the whole. They seem to see ‘the swarm’ in a similar way. The swarm leader calls the shots, but it doesn’t appear to be permanent.”

“How so?”

“The leader is any individual who happens to be at the right place at the right time and cares to pick up the scepter. Today’s leader is tomorrow’s peon. They don’t seem to care about rank or status. All they’re concerned with is getting the job done.”

“I don’t see how that would work.”

“Frankly, Admiral, neither do I. But apparently they functioned for millions of years with this type of societal structure.”

“Very true,” Gray said. “At least the Glothr don’t seem any the worse for wear after the EMP strike.”

“I’m told it scrambled them for five or ten seconds,” Rand said. “Kind of like a bright flash in the eyes of a human. And it did a reset on their robots.”

“Not quite a reset,” Gray said. But he didn’t elaborate.

The Glothr, apparently, had their own version of an advanced AI, like Konstantin and its fellow super-AIs back on Earth. It was an emergent phenomenon arising from the Swarm, the totality of the Glothr network of organic beings and robots. Evidently, it ran quietly in the background but, like Glothr individuals, it could step in and take on command functions when necessary. And when millions of Glothr in the ring had collapsed with their electro-sense scrambled, the Swarm AI had stepped in, evaluated the situation, and decided—somewhat arbitrarily—that cooperation with the human invaders offered Invictus the best chance of survival.

Gray had been thinking about that report ever since
America
’s Intel Department had submitted it. How much, he wondered, did human civilization depend on the judgment and decision-making capability of artificial intelligences?

The Glothr leader, meanwhile—their 
organic
 leader—was continuing to speak. Patterns of bioluminescence flickered and shifted deep within its body, inside the floating mass of its translucent mantle, but Gray had already learned that the light show was not the Glothr language—not
all
of it, at any rate. According to the xeno team, the light patterns conveyed details of emotion, amplifying the primary message, which was communicated through the being’s electrical field.

“It is vitally important,” the translation said, “that we learn something about you.”

“And what is that?” Rand replied. His words, translated by
America
’s AI, were translated into Glothr electrical pulses, emanating from the first-contact robot in the subglacial ocean far below. Currently, Pepper was wearing a body that looked more fish or submarine than human; somewhat disconcertingly, it was named after an early robot prototype from the twenty-first century that could make eye contact, utilize gestures and body language, make jokes, and analyze the emotions of the humans around it in order to interact with them. In a sense, that original Pepper had been the first of its kind to make contact with humans, one of the very earliest of FiCos.
I come in peace
.

Now, though, Pepper was submerged in the inky waters of the Invictan world-ocean, surrounded by silently hovering Glothr and Glothr robots. The Glothr, it seemed, had long ago genetically altered their physiologies so that they could survive both under the water and above. Human xenosophontologists were eager to discuss Glothr history with the aliens . . . and learn more about the mysterious
Zhaotal Um
in their remote past.

But first, they needed to establish a solid peace with the aliens.

The Glothr spokes-being hesitated for a long moment before speaking. “We need to know,” it said at last, “why do you reject the gift of belonging?”

“Damn,” Rand said quietly. “
That
again.”

“What’s the matter?”

“When we were prisoners, that’s all they asked us, over and over and over. And we kept telling them about humans and how we love freedom and individuality and self-determination and they just didn’t—just
couldn’t
—understand.”

Gray thought for a moment. “Tell them, Doctor . . . that we reject their gift for the good of all.”

As Pepper relayed the translation, the Glothr—
all
of the Glothr hovering on the screen—reacted as though they’d been poked with a stick. Blue, green, and yellow lights flashed and pulsed within them, and their tentacles twitched and jerked spasmodically.

Lines of type appeared on the big display screen, the FiCo robot’s analyses of what was happening. P
EPP
ER: SUBJECTS ARE DIS
CUSSING LAST STATEMENT.
S
URPRISE, DISAGREEMENT, CONFUSION.

“We do not understand,” the Glothr leader said at last.

“Tell them that—” Gray started to say.

“Uh-uh,” Rand said, stepping back and shaking his head. “Take the channel, Admiral. I don’t know where you’re going with this.”

And you think
I
know
? Gray thought, but he didn’t transmit. A new channel came up for him—the link through to Pepper and control of the robot.

“They won’t know the speaker has changed,” Rand added.

“I understand.” He opened the channel. “Our understanding of the universe,” he said, “depends on different points of view, on different ways of doing things, different ideas. If we’re all locked into one philosophy, one way of addressing problems, we don’t have as much flexibility when we try to deal with those problems.”

There was a long, cold silence from the watching aliens.

At last, pale blue lights rippled through the leader. “We comprehend.”

“Perhaps you can tell us why the Sh’daar insist we surrender our freedom.”

“Because we must face the enemy as one swarm.
We swarm as one
.”

Gray swallowed, hard. “
What
enemy?”

“The gods . . .”

Data cascaded through human awareness, translated and ordered by the artificial intelligences tapped into the Glothr information networks. Within that cascade, in nested shells of encoded qubits, lay the history of the Sh’daar Collective, beginning with the Transcendence—the
Schjaa Hok
—of the powerful ur-Sh’daar of nearly 900 million years before.

The Collective was—as some humans had theorized—an empire of both space
and
time, one stretching across nearly a billion years and embracing a population of hundreds of trillions of beings representing millions of intelligent species. At one end of that trans-temporal union were the Refusers of the N’gai Cloud . . . the small, irregular galaxy cannibalized by the Milky Way at a time when single-celled life ruled a far younger Earth. The Refusers, those members of the ancient ur-Sh’daar who had refused Transcendence, had become the Sh’daar Collective.

At the other end were a handful of technic species, the Glothr among them, fleeing the Milky Way Galaxy in search of sanctuary elsewhere: Andromeda, the Magellanic Clouds, the Draco and Ursa Minor dwarf galaxies, and others.

Civilization—intelligent life itself within the Milky Way itself—appeared to be doomed.

What, Gray wondered, had happened?

Data continued flowing into his brain, opening images of inexpressible grandeur. Gray saw the galaxy, viewed from outside, from above the galactic plane—probably from the same vantage point as the one now occupied by Invictus. The galaxy appeared . . .
complete
, perfect, a vast, glowing whirlpool of 400 billion stars, the sweep of the spiral arms predominantly blue, wreathed through with twisted lanes of black dust; the central bulge glowing faintly red, banked round about by parapets of softly illuminated dust clouds and nebulae. It was a young galaxy, healthy and in its prime, its vast clouds of dust and hydrogen gas continuing to give birth to new stars year by year.

This is the galaxy as it was in your time, a voice said in Gray’s head. But now . . . as we move forward in time . . .

As he watched, the image changed.

The transformation was startling in its intensity and in the suddenness, the completeness of it. The mathematic perfection of those gorgeous spiral arms had been broken and disrupted; the myriad stars themselves scattered, consumed or severely dimmed, their glow banked down to a fraction of what they’d emitted before; the gas and dust clouds devoured. Somehow, the galaxy had become a pale echo of its former glory—old, feeble, and waning.

At the core now rested a vast shadow, curving and smooth-rimmed, translucent and faintly golden in hue. Gray was having trouble making it out. Or, rather, he was having trouble putting reasonable meaning to what he was seeing; it
looked
like an immense, hazy sphere had been dropped into the galaxy’s central region . . . or like a bubble ten thousand light years across had engulfed the core.

Gray felt the stir as others reacted to the same images. Everyone in the room—possibly everyone in the task force—was seeing the same transmissions.

“My God in heaven,” Truitt’s voice said, ragged with emotion. “It’s a galactic Dyson sphere. . . .”

Of course.

Gray knew what a Dyson sphere was. First conceived by Freeman Dyson in the mid-twentieth century, the original concept suggested that a suitably advanced technological species might seek to trap every erg of energy generated by its sun. This would be accomplished either by building a sphere to completely enclose the star, a sphere constructed from one or more dismantled planets, or—more likely—by surrounding the star with a dense cloud of habitats and solar collectors.

The concept was linked to that of Kardashev classifications, named for Nikolai Kardashev’s suggested means of defining a civilization’s level of technological advancement. By definition, in a Kardashev Type II civilization, the builders would utilize the entire output of their star, possibly by means of a stellar Dyson sphere, whereas a Type I civilization was only able to use the available resources of its home planet.

A Type III civilization, however, would utilize the energy output of an entire
galaxy
.

Was that, Gray wondered, what he was seeing now: the Milky Way transformed by a civilization capable of harnessing the energy of 400 billion suns?

A civilization capable of wrecking an entire galaxy?

“When . . . when is this happening?” he asked.

“It was already begun in the epoch in which you came to this world,” a voice told him.

“But we saw the galaxy. It wasn’t like this. . . .”

“Because you are viewing the light that began its journey across space an average of forty thousand years ago,” the voice said. “In any case, it took perhaps a million years before any major changes could be noticed. The galaxy is quite large, even from the vantage point of gods.”

Consider a technological civilization arriving from outside the universe . . . a civilization that evolved in one of the other realities of a possibly infinite multiverse that broke through into this reality and began . . . transforming the galaxy in which it found itself. Such a civilization may be engaged in a process analogous to terraforming, but involving the transformation and complete utilization of an entire galaxy, rather than a single world.

The thought, Gray realized with a start, was coming not from the Glothr, but from
America
’s primary AI.

“Why would it do that?” he asked.

Possibly the civilization’s home universe is farther along the entropic path than are we. Its universe is dispersing, cooling, suffering its inevitable and ultimate heat death, and the civilization occupying that universe seeks escape and immortality. Perhaps they simply have the power to devour entire galaxies, but not the constraint to conserve resources
.
They may be so advanced that they don’t recognize us as sapient, and are simply tapping the available resources of neighboring, uninhabited universes
.

“We’re talking about the Rosette Aliens, aren’t we?”

Possibly. There are as yet too many unknowns for a definitive assessment.

“Okay. What do we do about it? What
can
we do about it?”

There are as yet too many unknowns for a definitive assessment.

“The Sh’daar have been trying to stop this invasion all along, haven’t they?”