Читать книгу Dark Mind - Ian Douglas, Matthew Taylor - Страница 11

29 October 2425

New White House

Washington, D.C.

United States of North America

0840 hours, EST

“So what’s up on the docket for today?” President Koenig asked.

Marcus Whitney, Koenig’s White House chief of staff, laid a secure data pad on the high-tech desk before him. “You had a nine-hundred with the Pan-Euro ambassador, sir, and an eleven-hundred with the Periphery reclamation council from Northern Virginia …”

“‘Had?’”

“Yes, sir. I rescheduled. Konstantin wants to vir-meet with you.”

“Konstantin? Wants to see me?” Generally, it was the other way around. “What about?”

“He has not divulged his agenda, Mr. President.”

The powerful AI rarely mixed its affairs with those of humans. Even so, its effects on human culture, technology, and politics had been far reaching indeed. Its input had effectively ended the USNA’s conflict with the Confederation government by employing memetic weaponry to turn civilian support against the war. It continually monitored news feeds and imagery from around the Earth, making suggestions that had averted famines, alleviated plagues, and blocked wars. It had guided presidents in both military and political exchanges both with other human states and with aliens.

Ever since Koenig had taken office as president, Konstantin had been an unofficial and highly secret special advisor. The strange thing was that the machine intelligence—not a human agency or department—seemed to have developed the idea.

And Koenig had no idea what the AI’s true motivations might be.

“I guess,” he said slowly, “I’d better find out what he wants. See that I’m not disturbed, Marcus.”

“Yes, sir.”

As his aide left the office, Koenig leaned back in his chair, which reshaped itself to more comfortably fit his frame. He placed the palm of his left hand on a smooth, glassy plate set into the chair’s arm and on the desk, the datapad winked on …

… and Koenig opened his eyes inside a small and dimly lit log cabin in Kaluga, Russia. An elderly man—white-haired, goateed, with wire-frame pince-nez and a sleepy expression—looked up from an old-fashioned book.

“Hello, Konstantin,” Koenig said. “You wanted to see me?”

As always, Koenig had the feeling that the figure before him was studying him narrowly, with a superhuman intensity quite at odds with the sleepy expression on its very human face. Everything was an illusion, of course, created by the AI and downloaded into Koenig’s mind through the virtual reality software running on his cerebral implants. The anachronistic touches demonstrated that—the real Konstantin Tsiolkovsky never had banks of high-definition monitors on the walls of his log house. Nor had the famous Russian pioneer of astronautic theory spoken English.

“Yes, Mr. President. It is time that you and I had a chat. I have some information that may be of interest.”

“You haven’t heard from your clone on the America yet …”

“No. If our calculations are correct, they have only just arrived at the N’gai Cloud … if, indeed, the two different time frames can be meaningfully compared. But we have heard from the Agletsch. They have made available some information. Gratis.”

“They gave it to us?” Koenig was impressed. “That means it’s either worthless … or of unbelievably high value.”

“Agreed.”

The Agletsch exchanged information from across a vast swath of the galaxy for other information, as well as for certain rare elements—notably isotopes of neptunium and californium. They never gave stuff away for free.

Not unless it very definitely benefited them as well.

“So what’s the information?”

Koenig waited out the slight time delay. It took one and a quarter seconds for his words to reach Konstantin on Luna’s far side, another second and a quarter for the answer to return. Every exchange had a built-in 2.5-second pause.

“They strongly suggest that we check out Tabby’s Star,” Konstantin told him.

“I don’t know that one,” Koenig said. “At least not by that name.”

“Here is the download.”

Information flooded through Koenig’s implants and into his conscious awareness.

A mental window opened, filling with scrolling text.

Object: KIC 8462852

Alternate names: WTF Star, Tabby’s Star

Type: Main-sequence star; Spectral Type: F3 V/IV

Coordinates: RA: 20h 06m 15.457s Dec: + 44° 27′ 24.61″

Constellation: Cygnus

Mass: ~ 1.43 SOL; Radius: 1.58 SOL;

Rotation: 0.8797 DAYS

Temperature: 6750° K; Luminosity: 5 SOL

Apparent Magnitude: 11.7;

Absolute Magnitude: 3.08

Distance: 1480 LY

Age: ~ 4 billion years

Notes: First noted in 2009–2015 as a part of the data collected by the Kepler space telescope. An extremely unusual pattern of light fluctuations proved difficult to explain as a natural phenomenon, and raised the possibility that intermittent dips in the star’s light output were the result of occultations by intelligently designed alien megastructures.

KIC 8462852 received the unofficial name “Tabby’s Star” after Tabetha S. Boyajian, head of the citizen scientist group that first called attention to the object. It was also called the “WTF star”—a humorous name drawn from the title of her paper: “Where’s the Flux?” At that time, “WTF” was a slang expression of surprise or disbelief.

The Tabby’s Star anomalies were eventually explained as a combination of an accretion disk and odd stellar geometry brought on by the star’s high rate of spin and resultant gravitational darkening …

There was a lot more information in the download, and Koenig waded through it. He wasn’t familiar with much of it.

In the early twenty-first century, the Kepler space telescope had continuously monitored the light coming from some 150,000 stars in a small section of Cygnus; planets orbiting those stars would periodically block a tiny percentage of the light, causing dips in the stars’ brightness.

That period, from 2009 through 2015, was a heady one of exploration and discovery, as thousands of exoplanets, worlds outside of Sol’s domain, were found, and Humankind became aware of the fact that the Milky Way alone might contain 40 billion worlds like Earth. Out of all of those target stars, however, only one had showed a light curve as bizarre as one sun at the very edge of the target area: KIC 8462852. Light dips were frequent, sharp, and aperiodic—behaving like large numbers of huge objects orbiting their star “in tight formation,” as one astronomer put it. One particular object did seem to have a regular period. The first time it was spotted, it obscured 15 percent of the star’s light. The second time, 750 days later, it obscured 22 percent of the light.

Twenty-two percent? A super-Jupiter, the largest world possible, typically obscured about 1 percent of the light from its star as it passed in front of the star’s disk. To cause that big of a drop in the light output of the star, the eclipsing object would have to be so large it covered nearly a quarter of the star’s face. This could not be a planet, so what the hell was it?

Dozens of theories were fielded—possible natural explanations, including huge dust clouds, masses of perturbed comets, and colliding planets. None worked very well. The system was too old to have dust clouds or accretion disks, the chances of finding it just when planets had collided or comets descended were nil, and the amount of detectable infrared radiation was a bad fit for all of those possibilities.

Increasingly, astronomers were forced to consider the unthinkable—that the odd light curve of KIC 8462852 was due to some sort of alien megastructure, an intelligently designed and built structure or series of structures, such as a Dyson sphere under construction or, more likely, a Dyson swarm—thousands of objects absorbing energy from the star. The light curves seemed to suggest solid-edged, irregularly shaped structures with distinct boundaries rather than diffuse clouds of dust.

But the alien megastructure idea had to be the very last possibility to be considered. That was not because the astronomers didn’t want to think about aliens, but because the alien hypothesis was not falsifiable by scientific testing … and so it could not be considered until every other possibility had been tested and ruled out.

And eventually, a natural explanation was found. Fast-spinning stars could suffer an effect called gravitational darkening while flattening from a sphere into an oblate spheroid; several large planets transiting across different parts of the star’s surface, plus an accretion disk of dust, could cause greater or lesser dips in the light curve.

There were problems with that theory, though. The star did spin quickly—at the equator it rotated once in 21 hours and a few minutes as opposed to 25 days for Sol—but not fast enough to cause severe distortion of the sphere. And, again, the star just wasn’t young enough to have an orbiting cloud or accretion disk of dust.

But by that time, the twenty-first century had been in free fall toward utter chaos. Stunning and widespread political corruption, quickly rising sea levels, economic collapse, global war with Islam, the First Sino-Western War, and the ravages of the Blood Death … it was a wonder, frankly, that Humankind had survived. The hanging of the first space elevator, in the twenty-second century, had helped reverse the collapse, bringing in the raw materials, cheap energy, and improved technologies that ultimately transformed the planet.

But as Humankind began to establish a firm foothold in the solar system, the excitement over KIC 8462852 was largely forgotten. It became an interesting anomaly, quickly explained and as quickly filed away and ignored.

“Okay,” Koenig said after several minutes reviewing the material. “An interesting observation, but it says here they explained it. Why are the Agletsch interested in the thing? Or, maybe I should say … why do they want us to be interested?”

“They did not discuss that,” Konstantin replied. “But they seem to believe that our explanation was wrong. That Tabby’s Star is in fact the location of an advanced alien civilization.”

“But not an ally of the Sh’daar, I take it.”

“Correct.”

Humankind now understood that the Sh’daar were interlopers from the remote past, from T-_0.876gy … a term usually abbreviated as “Tee-sub-minus,” or, in other words, from 876 million years in the past. They appeared to have recruited a number of alien civilizations in T_prime (meaning time now, the twenty-fifth century): the Turusch, the H’rulka, the Nungiirtok, the Slan, and quite a few others. That alliance, called the Sh’daar Collective, had been deployed against Humankind in an effort to force them to give up tech-singularity-inducing technologies. The Collective apparently extended into the future as well; the Glothr, from a rogue planet millions of years in the future, might well have been working with the Sh’daar, though the nature of that relationship was still uncertain.

The only reason Humankind had survived against that alliance as long as it had was the fact that the different members of the Sh’daar Collective had as much trouble communicating with one another as they did with humans. Organizing a joint military campaign across millions of years and with dozens of space-faring species with wildly diverse means of communicating turned out to be damned near impossible.

“Huh,” Koenig said, thoughtful. “If the Tabby’s Star aliens haven’t been pressured by the Sh’daar, they might turn out to be useful allies for us.”

“Exactly. Assuming, of course, that they care to involve themselves with humans.”

“What … they might not because we’re so primitive? Or would they be put off by our body odor?”

“Whatever terrestrial astronomers observed at Tabby’s Star in the year 2015,” Konstantin reminded Koenig, “would have happened 1480 years earlier … in the year 535 C.E., to be precise. If they were actually building a Dyson sphere when Europe’s Dark Ages were just getting started, where are they, and what are they building now? Such beings might seem like gods compared to humans.”

“The Stargods …” It was an old idea, one suggesting a source for unexplained technological artifacts like the TRGAs scattered across the galaxy … or the Black Rosette at the heart of Omega Centauri. Laurie Taggart had been a passionate devotee of that idea, a member of the Ancient Alien Creationist Church.

But it was also an idea that explained nothing.

“What people enamored of the Stargods tend to forget,” Konstantin said, “is that such beings very likely have absolutely nothing in common with us. Would you stop to communicate with an anthill?”

“I don’t know,” Koenig replied with a virtual shrug. “It depends on whether I could understand what the little buggers were saying. And there are entomologists who would be interested in finding a common language, if there was one.”

“It is possible to push such metaphors too far, Mr. President. The point is that the Tabby’s Star aliens may have nothing whatsoever in common with humans, and no wish to communicate with them … or to help them against the Sh’daar.”

“I could also imagine them having reached their own technological singularity,” Koenig said. “They might have built the thing, whatever it is … and then left. They’re not around any longer.”

“True. Still, the fact that the Agletsch have suggested that a human ship explore Tabby’s Star outweighs, somewhat, the low probability of finding useful allies there.”

“Well, if anyone in the galaxy knows about such allies, it would be them. I just wish we knew a bit more about the Aggie agenda. What the hell do they get out of all of this?”

“You will need to treat this … gift of information with caution,” Konstantin said. “The Agletsch are Sh’daar agents, members of the Sh’daar Collective. We must assume the Agletsch have an agenda of their own, a reason to share this information freely. It is unlikely that they would actively help us against the Collective.”

“Maybe they’re tired of sticking to the Collective’s party line. Maybe they’re trying to rebel.”

The idea had been explored before. In the past, some Agletsch had seemed to be working outside of any Sh’daar influence. Others definitely worked within. There’d been … hints that they would prefer that their entire civilization be free of Sh’daar influence. And, indeed, the information they had traded to humans in the past concerning various Sh’daar client races had again and again proven to be priceless.

But what was their angle this time?

And can we risk ignoring their advice while we try to figure that out?

“I would like to send our best out there,” Koenig told the AI, coming to a decision.

“The star carrier America,” Konstantin replied. “Admiral Gray.”

“You know, Konstantin, we do have other star carriers. Not enough, maybe … but we have others.”

“Most currently undergoing repairs.”

“There are the Declaration and the Lexington.”

“Both untried as yet. And the Declaration is still undergoing space trials. I recommend using America when she returns from the N’gai Cluster.”

“We were going to deploy America out to the Black Rosette. Operation Omega.”

“But to explore what might well be an entire Dyson sphere,” Konstantin pointed out, “it would be best to have several fighter wings available. Star carriers offer certain specific tactical advantages not possible with cruisers or even light carriers.”

“Point,” Koenig conceded, reluctantly. “But we’ve taken some heavy casualties. We may not have the luxury of using our first choice.”

TC/USNA CVS America

Flag Bridge/CIC

N’gai Cluster

1640 hours, TFT

Admiral Gray floated in the CIC, gazing into a tangled jungle of suns ahead, against which even the biggest Sh’daar warships appeared to be toys. He remembered this vista from his last deployment here, back when he’d been a fighter driver under the command of Admiral Koenig.

Now he was admiral … but the view was the same.

Local space was crowded with suns, including hundreds more brilliant than Venus at its brightest in the skies of Earth. Six stars, in particular, outshone all others—a perfect hexagram of dazzlingly brilliant blue suns gleaming almost directly ahead. The Six Suns were the hub of the N’gai Cluster, a kind of central, focal monument for the Cluster’s star-faring civilization. Each giant star was forty times the mass of distant Sol, orbiting with the others around a central gravitational balance point in a perfect Klemperer rosette. Obviously they’d been engineered that way, probably nudged in from elsewhere in the galaxy and dropped into position. Quite possible those blue-white giant suns themselves were artificial, engineered by some highly advanced science. The stellar arrangement suggested an astonishing degree of technological prowess and skill, one millions of years in advance of current human capabilities.

Eight hundred and some million years in the future, in the time Gray thought of as the present, those suns had long since gone supernova, reducing themselves to black holes—the enigmatic Black Rosette at the center of Omega Centauri. The N’gai Cluster—a dwarf galaxy—had been devoured by the gravitational hunger of the much larger Milky Way. The Omega Centauri star cluster itself was now known to be the remnant nucleus of this, the N’gai Cluster, 872 million years later.

Gray stared into the brilliance of the Six Suns, and wondered …

What were the Rosette Aliens?

All he knew was that they were enigmatic and highly advanced beings of unknown capabilities and unknown origin who’d appeared at the Black Rosette and begun building … something, a structure vast and utterly mysterious.

Were the Rosette Aliens somehow related to the Sh’daar?

Maybe we’re going to find out at last, Gray thought.

Numerous other artifacts also hung against that dazzling starscape, all indicating an advanced civilization far more technically proficient, far more ancient than anything merely human, such as the TRGA cylinders and artificial planets, not to mention strange structures, vast and incomprehensible. There were enormous tube-shaped habitats hundreds of kilometers across, rotating to provide artificial gravity and displaying terrain across their curving inner surfaces spread out like maps. Black holes ringed by artificial structures were obvious sources of high-tech energy, and starships the size of sprawling cities made their way across the crowded backdrop of the dwarf galaxy’s core.

A number of Sh’daar vessels, many considerably larger than America, by now had gathered around the human fleet, bending space briefly, and bringing the battlegroup across several light years to the dwarf galaxy’s heart. Now those ships were guiding America and the other vessels to their final destination, an entire world larger than Earth, covered over completely with black metal and the tangled, blazing knots of what could only be urban centers and vast industrial facilities. More of that planet’s surface appeared to be roofed over in artificial, light-drinking ebon materials than was open to the sky.

It was a single city the size of a planet.

The metallic world did not appear to have a sun, but was wandering among the densely packed stars of the cluster’s core, bathed in their light.

“The Adjugredudhran commander of the Sh’daar flagship reports that this is their capital world,” Konstantin-2 reported. “Daar N’gah.”

“Very well,” Gray replied. “Thank you. Do we have their permission to approach the consulate?”

There was a long pause. “Affirmative, Admiral. Deep Time currently is in an extended orbit, about half a million kilometers farther on. They request that we give Daar N’gah wide clearance due to local traffic.”

Which might, Gray reflected, be the full truth, or it might reflect Sh’daar concerns about more rebels appearing and the potential for collateral damage to the planet if another firefight began. Either way, it made sense to him from a tactical standpoint if he were in their position.

“Tell them we will comply.”

America, under her own power now, swung wide of the black metal world and decelerated into the indicated orbit. The consulate station unofficially known as Deep Time gleamed ahead in the harsh, reflected light from the Six Suns, a silvery, glittering torus rotating to provide those aboard with artificial gravity.

Deep Time had started out eight months earlier as a small USNA deep space military base constructed in the N’gai Cloud to keep an eye on the Sh’daar, a concession by the Collective possible only with the base’s near-total demilitarization. No lasers or particle cannon, no high-velocity KK weaponry, nothing that might upset the unknowable currents and eddies of time itself. The men and women stationed here were permitted sidearms, but the posting was strictly made on a volunteer basis. Hand lasers and man-portable pee-beeps were no match for five-kilometer flying mountains.

A couple of months earlier, while America had been deployed to the far future, the Deep Time station in the far past had been designated as a kind of semiofficial consulate, Humankind’s ambassadorial presence in the N’gai Cluster … though, again, no one knew what the Sh’daar themselves thought of the arrangement. The consulate staff, including almost a hundred xenosophontologists, had been studying the Sh’daar and their civilization, at least as it had existed in the remote past, the epoch known as Tee-sub-minus.

Humans now knew that the ancient Sh’daar had time-traveled to Earth’s galaxy in the twenty-sixth century, the epoch they called Tee-sub-prime, and made contact with the various star-faring civilizations that had been fighting their on-again, off-again war with Earth. On Earth, it begged the question were the Sh’daar of the twenty-sixth century under the control of the ancient N’gai civilization? No one knew for sure, and attempts to query the ancient Sh’daar had so far been frustrating and inconclusive.

With the civil war on Earth concluded at last, however, it was time to find out the truth … and also for the humans to warn the ancient Sh’daar about what they had learned even further into the remote future. The America battlegroup had been dispatched as an escort for the Glothr emissary—an opportunity to show the flag, and to back up the Glothr representatives with firepower if necessary.

Gray desperately hoped that firepower would not be necessary. The Sh’daar were so far in advance of Earth technology that it was difficult to even compare the two. Human tacticians still weren’t sure what it was that the Sh’daar had feared about America and her escorts twenty years ago … or why they’d given in so easily.

Or if they had truly given in at all, Gray thought.

“Range to Deep Time One now four thousand kilometers,” Mallory reported. “We’re slowing our approach.”

“We’re receiving telemetry from DT-1,” Pam Wilson, the communications officer added. “They report everything quiet and normal.”

“Very well.” So far, so good …

The attack as they’d emerged from the TRGA had shaken Gray more than he cared to admit.

Gray no longer needed image enhancement and magnification to see DT-1. It was visible in CIC’s forward view, just a kilometer away, now.

“Konstantin?” Gray asked. “Are you ready?”

“Of course, Admiral. You may release me at your discretion.”

“Captain Gutierrez,” Gray said. “If you will …”

“Aye, aye, Admiral. Releasing the baby in three … two … one … launch.”

The Tsiolkovsky Orbital Computer Assembly—TOCA, for short—was a ten-meter cylindrical habitat that had made the voyage out from Earth strapped to America’s spine aft of the landing bays. It carried the computer hardware that was housing the sub-clone downloaded from the original Konstantin AI.

Gray wasn’t certain the Sh’daar understood the concept of “ambassador,” but they’d given permission for the TOCA cylinder to be brought to N’gai, and for it—and Konstantin-2—to be linked to the Deep Time facility. The fact that the AI had already been in touch with the Adjugredudhran commander said they at least accepted Konstantin-2 as someone they could talk to.

Something, Gray thought, definitely had changed in Sh’daar attitudes. Twenty years earlier, they’d been terrified that a human battlegroup had penetrated both space and time to reach this cluster. The Sh’daar had been willing to do almost anything—like end a war—to make the humans leave. Speculation and scuttlebutt had played with the idea that they were afraid human activity here in the past would rewrite the future—a future in which they had a vested interest.

Now, however, they seemed to be welcoming contact.

Gray suspected that they feared something else more than they feared humans … even humans playing in their own temporal backyard.

The cylinder carrying Konstantin’s sub-clone passed America’s shield cap and dwindled toward the gleaming silver torus.

And Gray couldn’t help wondering if even a super-AI was going to have trouble figuring out just what made the Sh’daar tick.