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31 January 2426

VFA-96, Black Demons

SupraQuito Yards

Earth Synchorbit

1018 hours, TFT

Through the vista opened by his fighter’s AI in his mind, Lieutenant Donald Gregory stared out into the tangle of orbital structures spread out before him. The SupraQuito Synchorbital was the largest of the human facilities in orbit over Earth, consisting of some hundreds of major stations and facilities strung together in a long, brilliantly lit arc.

The collection of structures was balanced on the Quito space elevator at an altitude of 37,786 kilometers, and a single orbit of the Earth took precisely twenty-four hours, which meant that the complex kept pace with the same spot on the turning Earth. From there, a slender tower reached down to its anchor point atop a mountain on Earth’s equator, and up into the black of space to the tethered asteroid that kept the whole assembly in dynamic tension. Four centuries earlier, synchorbit had been the parking zone for a swarm of unmanned communications satellites. Now it was one of three major communities in Earth orbit, with a permanent population of over sixty thousand and some thousands more each day traveling up or down the “E,” or arriving or departing on fleets of both interplanetary and interstellar ships.

The local sky, Gregory saw, was crowded with activity. The two badly damaged star carriers, Lexington and his own—or what used to be his own—America had been towed into position off the Navy yard, along with a couple of small asteroids. The two battered carriers were now almost obscured by swarming nanorepair ’bots busily eating away at the damaged hull surfaces, while simultaneously stripping the asteroids of raw material and bringing it across to the ships in steady streams.

We can rebuild our ships on the fly, Gregory thought. We can give them new life with this tech. But we can’t do anything for my squad mates.

Like Meg …

Lieutenant Meg Connor had been killed at Invictus, a frigid, ice-clad world out beyond the rim of the galaxy and 12 million years in the future. Gregory had lost his legs in that action. They’d grown those back for him … but nothing could bring back Megan.

Or Cynthia DeHaviland, killed in the hellfire of Kapteyn’s Star just a month ago.

“Tighten up, Demon Four!” the squadron’s CO snapped at him. “Belay the rubbernecking.” Commander Mackey sounded stressed.

What the hell do you have to be worried about? he thought, a bit petulantly, but he bit down on the words. “Copy,” was all he said. A moment’s inattention had let his Starblade fighter drift almost imperceptibly within the seven-ship formation, and with a thought he brought himself back into line. The spacelanes above and around the SupraQuito orbital facility were indeed crowded with ships large and small, construction tugs, intrastation transports, ship’s gigs, liberty boats, space-suited personnel on EVA, mobile repair shacks, and provisioning vessels. Theoretically, a lane had been cleared for the fighter squadron, but there was near-infinite opportunity here for a mistake.

And in space any mistake was likely to be expensive, fatal, or both.

At least Don Gregory was no longer suicidal. For a time after Invictus he’d been thinking about that a lot. The depression, at times, was overwhelming. His own in-head circuitry had urged him more than once to seek help, but he’d managed to put it off … and to avoid a mandatory checkup with the psych department. A down-grudge on his mental health would ground him … and might even get him kicked out of the Navy.

And now he thought he might see a better answer.

The seven fighters were moving at only eighty meters per second, a crawl against the scale of the titanic structures around them. They’d launched moments before from the America, followed a twisting route to stay clear of the nanoswarms and the small asteroid providing raw materials for the carrier’s repairs, and dropped into a long, slow approach to the main naval base dead ahead.

“There she is,” Lieutenant Gerald Ruxton called over the squadron channel. “Our new home!”

USNA CVL Republic was six hundred meters long, just over half the length of their former ship. Like America, though, she looked like an open umbrella, with a long, slender spine behind a dome-shaped shieldcap filled with water. In the shieldcap’s shadow, two modules rotated about the central keel, providing artificial gravity for the crew. A CVL, or light carrier, she had facilities to carry three combat squadrons of twelve fighters each, plus a number of auxiliary vessels, including a search-and-rescue squadron. VFA-90, a strike squadron called the Star Reapers, was also being transferred from America to the smaller carrier. In addition to VFA-96, the fresh-minted VFA-198, the Hellfuries, would be coming up from Earth later in the day.

After Kapteyn’s Star, the Black Demons could only muster seven fighters. They were supposed to be getting replacements up from Oceana, on Earth, but frankly, Gregory would believe that when he sat down with them in the ready room. Fighter losses during the past six months had been ungodly heavy, and they were having trouble recruiting and training replacements planetside fast enough to keep up with demand.

“VFA-96, this is Republic Primary Flight Control. You are cleared for final on Bay One, six-zero mps on approach.”

“Copy, Republic PriFly,” Commander Luther Mackey replied. “Bay One, sixty mps.”

Slowing sharply, the Starblade fighters fell into line ahead, moving in on the Republic from dead astern. Gregory was second in line, behind Bruce Caswell. He let his fighter’s AI cut his velocity and adjust his angle of approach; the landing bays on a star carrier were moving targets, rotating about the ship’s spine to create the illusion of gravity. Docking required more-than-human precision, and a slight upward bump of the thrusters just as the Starblade swept across the bay’s threshold. A feeling of gravity surged through Gregory’s body as the bay’s magnetic capture fields snagged his ship and brought him to a relative halt at the end of the deck.

“Demon Four,” a voice said in his head. “Trap complete. Welcome aboard, Lieutenant.”

Automated machinery grappled with his fighter, lifting it smoothly up through the overhead, making room for the next fighter in line behind him. The deck matrix molded about his Starblade for a moment, maintaining the vacuum in the landing bay as his fighter transitioned into pressure and the orchestrated bustle of deck personnel tending the incoming Starblades. Gregory’s cockpit melted open and released him, and he stepped out into the open.

“Welcome to the Republic, Lieutenant,” a woman with a commander’s insignia on her utilities said. Gregory felt her ping him as she accessed his in-head RAM and downloaded his personnel records and orders. “The ship will show you to your quarters. Debriefing at eleven hundred, Ready One.”

“Thank you, Commander.” Her name, he read through his in-head, was Sandra Dillon, and she was Republic’s ACAG, the assistant commander Aerospace Group. He opened a channel to the Republic’s AI and requested directions into the labyrinthine interior of the ship.

A light star carrier was considerably smaller than a monster like the America, but she still was an enormous vessel, with kilometers of internal passageways and compartments and a crew of more than two thousand. Junior officers quartered four to a stateroom; he found his berthing compartment and claimed a rack. Then he followed the ship’s directions to take him up to one of the ready rooms.

Gregory had been in the Navy for four years, now, and was an old hand at this. They would be getting the standard welcome-aboard talk, get to meet the ship’s CAG, and if they were lucky, find out something about the expedition to which they’d been assigned. That said, the setup for this mission was unusual: a Navy ship, with Navy personnel and three fighter squadrons … but with a civilian skipper and a load of double-dome civilian xenosophs. So that meant they were pulling first-contact duty.

Gregory didn’t much care one way or the other. He’d been there, done that, and been issued a brand-new pair of legs. At the moment he had only one question.

When the hell was he going to be able to get liberty? There was some very important business he needed to conduct ashore.

USNA CVE Guadalcanal

Orbiting Heimdall

Kapteyn’s Star

1213 hours, GMT

Captain Laurie Taggart floated into the bridge compartment of the escort star carrier Guadalcanal and pulled herself down into her command chair. “Captain on the bridge!” Commander Franklin Simmons, her XO, announced as her seat enclosed her lower body, gently restraining her in the ambient microgravity. In front of her, Lieutenant Rodriguez, the ship’s combat information officer, intently studied the repeater screens that partially surrounded him, and Taggart’s eyes widened as she glanced at them.

“What the hell is that?” she demanded. She’d received a “captain to the bridge” call moments earlier, but they hadn’t told her what the call was about.

“Don’t know for sure, Captain,” Rodriguez told her. “But it’s got to be the Rosies. Nothing else could work on that grand a scale!”

“Does the rest of the fleet see this?”

“They will when the signal reaches them, Captain. Transmission time … ten more minutes.”

Taggart stared into the screens a moment longer, then linked in with Nelly, the ship’s AI, opening the same channel in her mind.

She gazed into wonder …

Not for the first time Taggart questioned if these beings truly were the Stargods of her religion. She’d drifted away from the old beliefs lately, but it was impossible to feel that inner stirring of awe and not at least wonder.

They were in orbit over an Earth-sized moon of the gas giant Bifrost. Heimdall was a barren, desolate world now, though it had given rise to intelligent life billions of years in the past. For the past 800 million years or so, it had been the site of the so-called Etched Cliffs, a super-computer network carved into solid rock and spanning the world. Several alien species had vanished into that network, living digital lives within a virtual universe of their own making.

Those uploaded minds, uncounted trillions of them, were gone now, devoured by the Rosette entity—“the Rosies,” as Rodriguez had called them. For weeks the world had been utterly dead and empty. But now …

It looked like aurorae, slow-moving bars and circles of pale blue-green light, but the patterns were far too regular and organized to be natural emissions within the local magnetic field. They were emerging, it looked like, from the primary Etched Cliffs site, but expanding second by second with bewildering speed and complexity to engulf the world of Heimdall.

The Rosette entity had created large numbers of geometric constructs in open space, but the structures had vanished after the Battle of Heimdall. Navy xenosophontologists had assumed that the aliens had withdrawn.

Evidently, Taggart thought as she studied the phenomenon, they had not.

“Helm,” she said.

“Helm, aye, Captain.”

“Take us out of orbit. Come to one-one-five minus one eight, five-zero kps.”

“Come to course one-one-five minus one eight at fifty kps, aye, aye.”

She didn’t know what was going on down there, but she wanted her ship well clear of it, whatever it was.

Her ship. Laurie Taggart’s military career had taken some sudden and unexpected shifts in vector over the past few months. She’d started off as senior weapons officer on board the star carrier America … but then she’d received a new assignment as Exec on board America’s sister ship, the Lexington. From there, she’d volunteered for TAD—temporary attached duty—as skipper of the Lucas, a Marine transport and stealth lander, and then had returned to take command of the Lady Lex when Captain Bigelow had been killed.

She’d been the one who’d brought the crippled Lexington home.

Of course, there was no way the Navy Department was going to let her keep that billet. She was far too junior, too low on the Navy’s rank hierarchy to skipper the Lexington. Upon reaching SupraQuito, though, she’d received a field promotion to the rank of captain and been given command of the light carrier Guadalcanal.

She suspected that Trev—her lover, Captain Trevor Gray—had made the recommendation for her promotion, but he’d refused to confirm or deny her accusation. Instead, he’d snuggled her in close and merely whispered, “Hush. You’ve earned it.”

Now she just hoped she could keep what she’d earned. The light show was engulfing the entire globe of Heimdall now and reaching far out into space as well.

“Captain?” Lieutenant Peters, on sensor watch, called. “We’re getting solid returns now. Fireflies.”

“Shit …”

Fireflies referred to small, autonomous objects, ranging from dust specks to a few meters across in size, that seemed to be associated with the Rosette Alien structures. They flew in unimaginably vast swarms, could fit themselves together into solid components, or they could destroy a starship simply by ramming into it at high velocity. Fireflies were believed to be part of an enormous swarm intelligence numbering in the hundreds of trillions and providing the underlying computronium matrix for the Rosette intelligence.

What, she wondered, was the best call, here? Stay put and observe? Rejoin the rest of the Kapteyn’s Star flotilla out at Thrymheim, the system’s outermost planet some twelve light-minutes distant? Probe the bewildering tangle of light structures now unfolding across local space? Launch Guadalcanal’s fighters?

Her orders, the standing orders for the five-ship flotilla here, were simply to patrol the Kapteyn’s Star system and alert Earth if the Rosies showed up again. Judging by what was unfolding out of Heimdall, they’d never left in the first place, and Earth was going to want to know about that.

“Get us back to the others,” she told the helm officer.

“Aye, Captain.”

“Exec? Go to general quarters.”

This was not looking good.

USNA FME Olympia

Rosette

Omega Centauri

1214 hours, GMT

Some 15,800 light years removed from Earth, an AI called Limpy by the humans working with it stared into strangeness as well. Although he did not think in the same way that humans did, and did not make the same value judgments, it knew that something was going on … and that it did not look good.

Omega Centauri was the largest globular star cluster in the Milky Way galaxy—10 million stars with a total mass some 4 million times that of Sol, packed into a sphere 150 light years across. At its gravitational center, deep within that teeming swarm of stars filling an impossibly crowded sky, six black holes, each the size of a world, orbited, in a patently artificial manner—a Klemperer rosette.

Centuries before, Terran astronomers had demonstrated that Omega Centauri was not, in fact, a typical globular cluster, but rather that it was the stripped-down core of a small galaxy that had been sucked in and devoured by the much larger Milky Way more than half a billion years before. Large galaxies, it was known, were cannibals, shredding smaller galaxies and slurping up the remains. Several stars—among them the red dwarf Kapteyn’s Star, only 12.7 light years from Sol, had been proven by their spectral fingerprints to be escaped members of that ancient galaxy.

Much more recently, human warships engaging the so-called Sh’daar Empire had traveled back through time and discovered that galaxy, called the N’gai Cluster by its myriad inhabitants, during an epoch when it was still just above the Milky Way. At the heart of N’gai, they’d found what was almost certainly the precursor of the Rosette—six hyper-giant blue stars serving as a kind of beacon or monument for the Sh’daar.

Here within Omega Centauri, however, those hyperstars had long ago exploded, turning into black holes whirling around a tortured volume of space not much larger than Earth. And there was more. The enigmatic being known as the Consciousness had been busily building … something. Titanic structures apparently constructed of pure light hung suspended around the hexagon of rotating singularities and extended in all directions to impossible infinities.

The monitor Olympia, a high-tech listening post disguised as an innocuous chunk of rock the size of Mt. Everest—crewed by 150 humans and a late-model AI with some very special programming—had slipped into orbit around the Rosette only weeks before. With downloads based on data snatched from the Consciousness at Kapteyn’s Star, Limpy could eavesdrop on the Consciousness by linking in to back channels and sidebands to tap into conversations between a few of the far-flung individual devices making up the whole.

So far, the effort had not been particularly productive. One xenosophontologist had declared that the eavesdropping effort was akin to finding out what a human was thinking by analyzing the waste emissions of a couple of the bacteria in his gut. Limpy felt that the chances of getting something useful were better than that, but he understood the problem. The Consciousness was very, very large and complex, and even the very best human-directed SAIs had little chance of understanding the entity in more than an extremely basic way.

To Limpy, it was a chance worth taking.

Right now, the AI on Olympia was drifting across the face of the Rosette, its orbit taking it cross the opening between the six whirling singularities. In the space at the center, stars were visible … but not the thronging, massed stars of Omega Centauri. Olympia’s bridge crew was looking, quite literally, through a hole punched in spacetime. They were looking into somewhere—and somewhen—else.

Clearly, the Rosette was a stargate of some kind. The high-velocity rotation of those black holes around their common center twisted the normal, sane dimensions of spacetime out of all reason, opening numerous gateways into the unknown. The starscapes glimpsed within that whirling gateway might be other regions of the galaxy, other times, or even other universes entirely.

The being called the Consciousness had come through from one of those elsewheres. The Consciousness, the Rosette entity, the Alien Intelligence … all of those were names for something Humankind had never truly encountered and might never be able to understand.

Limpy was here to try to learn more.

“Hey, Limp?”

“Yes, Captain Mosely?”

“What’s all that stuff over there? Opposite the Rosette opening?”

He knew exactly what Mosely was referring to. He’d been watching the phenomenon grow and develop for several minutes now … a huge cloud of what looked like smoke, white and gray-silver in the massed starlight.

“Unknown, Captain. It appears to be clouds of micromachines similar to those you call fireflies, numbering in the trillions.”

“What are they doing?”

“Coming in this general direction.”

“Shit …”

The Olympia AI continued watching for several moments. “Captain, I would suggest you sound general quarters.”

“I was just arriving at the same conclusion.”

A second later, Olympia’s internal passageways rang with the shrill clanging of the alarm. Not that it much mattered—the swarm was on them before most of the crew was able to take their positions. Yet the lead elements of the cloud swept past the ship at a range of several hundred kilometers, and it soon became clear that the cloud’s target was not the Olympia.

“So where are they going in such a damned hurry?” Mosely wondered aloud, thinking the danger had passed.

And then a shudder ran through the drifting mountain, followed by several savage shocks.

“Limpy!” Mosely called. “We’ve been hit!” The starfield outside began drifting. “We’re rotating!”

“We haven’t been hit, Captain. We have been caught in an extremely powerful gravitational stream.”

“What the hell is a ‘gravitational stream’?”

“A narrow, tubular volume of space has been distorted in such a way as to create rapid movement toward the Rosette. We have been caught by the fringes of the effect and are being swept along.”

“Toward the Rosette …”

“That is correct, Captain. Unless we can break free, we will pass through the central lumen of the hexagon in another forty-three seconds.”

The Olympia possessed gravitational drive engines, but the ship was slow and underpowered for a vessel of its size and mass. Mosely was shouting orders, trying to engage the drive and bring the ship clear, but the AI had already determined that there simply was not enough power for the ship to break free, not in the time remaining.

Olympia’s capture did not appear to be a hostile act; indeed, it seemed to be completely accidental. The column of gravitationally warped space enveloped the vast swarm streaming through space toward the Rosette. It seemed likely that the devices themselves were generating the warp as a means of propulsion, and that their destination was somewhere on the other side of the Rosette gateway through spacetime.

Regardless of the reason, Olympia was being dragged along with it.

With emotionless efficiency, Limpy compressed a complete record of recent events into a laser comm message and fired it into space. There were other vessels drifting in the heart of Omega Centauri that would get the record back to Earth.

Ahead, the blurred ring of distortion created by the rapidly circling singularities expanded, filling the sky. Brilliant hues of light—light trapped within the gravitational anomaly—created a radiant halo effect that resembled a titanic, unblinking eye. At the very center of the distortion, within the eye’s pupil, a starfield had appeared. Limpy did a rapid scan and assessment and discovered that the starfield matched nothing in his own memory.

And then Olympia fell through the eye and vanished from local spacetime.

SupraQuito Space Elevator

In Transit

1635 hours, TFT

Gray was glad that he always traveled light. After his interview in Geneva, he’d been taken to a hotel for an uncomfortable night’s sleep, and then he attended a six-hour briefing covering things of which he was already well aware: the wrecked high-technic civilization at Tabby’s Star, the discovery of the Omega Code, and the fact … no, the presumption that a highly advanced civilization existed at the brilliant blue-white star Deneb some 173 light years from Tabby’s Star.

Because he’d been the one to uncover most of this information, Gray sat bored and cross-armed through most of it. He was able to correct a presenter at one point, however. There was a possible motive for the Denebans to attack the Satori, the civilization at Tabby’s Star. The Satori had encircled their sun with gravitational thrusters and been accelerating their entire civilization, star, Dyson swarm, and all, in the direction of Deneb. Why was still unknown … but the Denebans evidently hadn’t taken kindly to pushy neighbors.

It would be well, he told the large audience gathered in the Ad Astra center’s amphitheater, to keep that in mind when they approached Deneb for the first time.

Later that afternoon, he, Vasilyeva, and a dozen of her xenosoph people had boarded another, considerably larger, grav flier for the very nearly 10,000-kilometer flight to Quito, in the Unión de América del Sur.

From there, a brief tube ride had taken them to the base of the first of Earth’s three space elevators, anchored to a mountaintop perched directly astride Earth’s equator. The group had then boarded a special express skycar for the trip up to SupraQuito.

Express meant an acceleration of one G—which, added to the one G of Earth’s surface gravity, meant that the passengers were under two gravities for the first part of their trip. The magnetic skycar was impeccably appointed, however, with luxurious reclining seats designed to keep the passengers as comfortable as possible despite the sensation of another person sitting on their chests. Decks, bulkheads, and overhead projected views of their surroundings—in particular the gloriously beautiful vista of the cloud-wrapped Earth falling away below them.

Not that any of them had any particular interest in watching the Earth. Gray was focused on his breathing as they shot faster and faster into the sky above Quito, magnetically accelerated along the taut Earth-to-heaven cable.

The sensation of crushing weight lessened bit by bit as the skycar rose higher. Thirty-two minutes after leaving the elevator port, they were traveling at 19.5 kilometers per second and they were at the halfway point, almost 19,000 kilometers above the mountaintop. Acceleration ceased, and the passenger compartment rotated through 180 degrees, until the vast blue-and-white expanse of the Earth below swung around and took up a new position above them. They were now decelerating at one gravity, though it felt like considerably less because the Earth now was working against that acceleration rather than adding to it.

“I thought we would be in zero-G once we were in space!” one of the scientists grumbled. His name was Dr. Liu and Gray had been told he was on loan from the Shanghai Institute of Advanced Technology.

“Only if you’re in orbit,” Gray told him. “If you’re in free fall, you’re basically falling around the Earth … but you’re never outside of the reach of its gravity. This part of the space elevator isn’t in orbit, and if you were to open a hatch and step outside right now you’d fall all the way back down to Ecuador.”

“It’s different up at geosynch,” Vasilyeva added gently. “We’ll be in free fall there.”

Liu grunted, and Gray fell silent, feeling a small disquiet. He would have thought that any scientifically literate person would know that, and not make such a rookie goof.

Expertise in one scientific area, evidently, didn’t qualify the person as an expert in others. Space, however, was a place where ignorance could get you killed.

He wondered how savvy the rest of this crowd was when it came to basic orbital mechanics.

One hour and five minutes after leaving Earth, the skycar decelerated into SupraQuito Synchorbital Station, and a five-minute tube run brought them to the yards.

Gray sat in the tube capsule looking up through the overhead transparency at a labyrinth of struts and railguides, and orbital structures, gantries, and dockyard facilities slowly moving past against the backdrop of space. Ahead, docked within her gantry, the USNA CVL Republic looked just as Gray remembered her.

He was coming back on board her, he knew, with decidedly mixed feelings. He was eager to get back on board a ship—any ship—once again, and the sooner the better. There was little enough on Earth to hold him there now, he knew. Each time he returned to explore his roots within Manhatt, he found more and more change, less and less a sense of home or belonging.

But his interview with the Pan-Euros had shaken him. They seemed to have a nearly apocalyptic prescience about this mission, a feeling that failure might well spell disaster for all of Humankind.

And knowing that so much was riding on his decisions, his experience, filled Gray with a deep and angry foreboding.