Darkness Falling Read online

  Of course, the astrophysics department had a sharply different take on things. The local star could not be Sol. It didn’t have enough mass . . . and, paradoxically, it was both hotter and it had twice the diameter of Earth’s sun.

  “So what was Newton’s explanation for the star being so different from Sol?” Symms wanted to know, jumping the conversation back to an earlier topic.

  “What? Oh . . . well, according to him, the sun should be starting to expand into a red giant phase just about now. The thing is, our sun has been getting 10 percent brighter about every billion years or so . . . and a billion years after our time, Earth would have become so hot that the oceans boiled away. In fact, Earth would likely have turned into a copy of Venus long before that, with a high-pressure atmosphere of superheated steam.”

  “Sure. There was some speculation that we were going to trip that booby trap ourselves last century.”

  “We almost did,” St. Clair agreed. “We were that close to cooking ourselves. But it would have happened anyway sooner or later, just with the sun naturally getting hotter and hotter.

  “Anyway, maybe a few million years after we . . . ah . . . started our voyage, our descendants must have decided to move the whole planet out to where it was cooler. Planetary engineering on an epic scale.”

  “Okay, that would explain Earth suddenly becoming a moon of Jupiter’s,” his executive commander told him. “But there’s still the problem of the star itself. According to the planetographers, that star only has about 90 percent of the mass of our sun. There’s no sign of a planetary nebula, no indication that our sun has lost mass. You can’t tell me they swapped stars, too!”

  “No, but with an advanced enough technology, they could have pulled some of the mass right up out of the gravity well. ‘Star lifting.’ Remember the topopolis in Andromeda?”

  “Yes . . .”

  “Well if that fuzzball tangle of a habitat could use mass from its star, why couldn’t somebody do the same here and extend Sol’s age?”

  “But why would they do that and move the planet?”

  “Four billion years is a long, long time, ExComm,” he replied gently. “I can’t speak for people that far ahead of us, but at a guess, they moved the planet when Earth first started getting too warm a few million years after our time. Maybe—I don’t know—a million, 10 million years after we left? Then, maybe a billion years later, when the sun started to go into its red giant phase, they tinkered with the star itself.” He shrugged. “Maybe we can ask them when we meet them.”

  “If they talk,” she said, “and don’t decide to shoot first. Until a few days ago, they were trying their best to wipe us out of the sky.”

  “Yeah. Not exactly conducive to free and open communications, huh?”

  And yet communication was crucial in this moment, because two vital questions remained for St. Clair: Were the Xam here, and would they fight?

  The Vera Cruz and her escorts should be able to answer those questions. The trick was doing it without involving unacceptable risk to the Tellus habitat and the people on board. The huge ship was already closer to the supposed-Xam homeworld than St. Clair would have preferred.

  “My lord,” Cameron said. “Vera Cruz reports alien ships coming in from out-system.”

  “Where? Ah . . . I see them.”

  One moment there’d been nothing. In the next, the alien fleet was here, decelerating in an instant from near-c to zero.

  “Damn. Are they attacking?”

  “Not yet, sir. They appear to be putting up a barrier between us and the planet . . . like they’re watching our ships.”

  “Watching is okay,” St. Clair said. He could see them in more detail now. There were hundreds of thousands of them, slim, black needles each a few tens of meters in length. They traveled linked together into a single enormous cylinder, but as they arrived at their destination they split apart into a swarm of separate ships. Ad Astra’s xenotech people still had no idea how they were powered, or even what they might be fully capable of.

  But those needle shapes were identical to those they’d encountered earlier when they’d fought the Xam and the Andromedan Dark. The Kroajid referred to them as “Dark Raiders,” and noted that they seemed bent on destroying virtual populations, the digitally uploaded inhabitants of the Galaxy who appeared to have withdrawn from reality. So although they may be able to do more, St. Clair knew that each jet-black needle was fast, maneuverable, and armed with powerful weaponry.

  He almost opened a channel to Marine HQ, intending to caution them against maneuvers that might be interpreted as an attack, but thought better of it. General Wilson knew what he was doing.

  “So is that it?” Symms asked him. “We park a Marine transport in orbit and stare them down?”

  “Not quite, ExComm,” St. Clair replied, grinning at her. “We’ll see if they want to talk to Newton. Or Newton’s avatar, I should say. Even the Dark showed signs of . . . curiosity.”

  “Yeah. It couldn’t understand why we didn’t want to be absorbed by it.” She laughed. “For a super AI spanning an entire galaxy, the Dark doesn’t show that much intelligence.”

  “Maybe it’s just so smart we humans can’t understand it,” St. Clair replied. “We’ll have to see what Newton has to say about that.”

  “We are deploying the avatar now,” Newton’s voice said within St. Clair’s mind. “Stand by. . . .”

  Answers. They needed answers. . . .

  So far, there were only questions.

  Chapter Two

  Marine Captain Greg Dixon, the newly minted CO of Charlie Company, 3rd Battalion, watched the black swarm ahead maneuvering to block them from the planet and its high-tech ring.

  “All stop.” The voice coming in over 3rd Batt’s tactical channel was that of General Wilson, the expedition’s Marine CO, not Colonel Becker’s. Shit . . . the brass was in a micromanaging mood today. . . .

  Dixon thoughtclicked an icon in his head, tapping the gravitic thrusters on his MX-40 unit and bringing himself to a halt relative to the planet. His helmet didn’t have a visor, but instead fed him an all-around view of surrounding space directly through the circuitry implanted in his brain. On his in-head, the swarm of alien needleships looked like black smoke, with the ringed planet beyond only dimly visible.

  “Hold your positions,” Wilson’s voice cautioned. “Newton is trying to open a channel. . . .”

  Dixon felt nightmarishly exposed and vulnerable. The last time he’d seen those ships they’d been trying their best to kill him, and they’d damned near succeeded. What the hell were they doing here, facing technology like that?

  More important, what the hell were they doing just waiting around?

  It didn’t help that he was the new kid on the team. Until a week ago, he’d been the company’s assistant CO . . . but Captain Hanson had bought the farm in that desperate fight inside NPS-1018, that bizarre, colossal, alien fuzzball habitat shrouding a red sun in Andromeda.

  They’d not been able to recover the body. The attackers had been coming through portals opening up in thin air—striking from the twisted geometry of higher dimensions.

  Dixon was still having nightmares about it.

  “They’re dopplering!” Becker called.

  Wilson ordered, “Engage! All ships engage!”

  Several patches within the black haze had suddenly blueshifted, meaning a large number of needleships accelerating sharply to relativistic speeds. That was the deadliest part of this kind of combat: an oncoming attacker was traveling just behind the photon wave front announcing his arrival.

  High-energy lasers and charged particle beams lashed out, drawn in Dixon’s awareness by computer graphics but invisible in the real world. Nuke-tipped missiles boosted into the melee, and the first deadly, sun-bright blossoms of nuclear annihilation unfolded in ghostly silence.

  The enemy needleships, thank the Marine God of Battle, were not heavily armored and didn’t seem to have extensive energy shielding. Th
ere were just so many of them. Dixon targeted one vessel that appeared to be coming straight at him, and watched it flare into a fast-expanding ball of hot plasma. He kicked his backpack drive then, and hurtled into the fray to kill some more.

  But Marines were dying as well. The needleships were firing beams of positrons—antimatter electrons that erupted in flashes of light, X-rays, and hard gamma radiation when they touched normal matter. Just twenty meters to Dixon’s left, PFC Jacob Fedor vanished in a dazzling pulse of light as a needle’s beam slashed through him.

  “Charlie Company!” Colonel Becker called. “With me!”

  The battalion commander’s battle armor lit up green within Dixon’s in-head, a beacon for the company’s Marines. Dixon adjusted his vector and boosted, weaving through the rapidly unfolding storm of battle.

  Becker, Dixon saw, was trying to work his way through the cloud of enemy ships . . . maybe get between them and the planet. Pulling nearly fifty gravities, the newly minted captain hurtled through the cloud of needleships, Marines, and tumbling debris after the colonel. The Gs weren’t the issue: gravitic drives worked by bending local space; you were essentially in free fall even when you were boosting high-gravs. Navigational maneuvering was the big problem. Dixon could nudge his suit to one side or another to avoid ships or debris in his path, but the faster he moved, the less time he had to spot an object, analyze its threat, and avoid it.

  The maneuver, Dixon thought with a fatalistic inward shrug, was doomed. Against the alien numbers, the human fleet would not be able to last more than minutes . . . possibly no more than seconds. The individual Marine fighters and combat suits deployed at the moment in front of the Tellus Ad Astra numbered a few thousand, but there were literally millions of the black needles out here . . . several thousand of the damned things for every Marine in the squadron.

  He figured he could at least take a few of them with him.

  He loosed a triplet of M-90 Shurikin shipkillers, missiles as small as his forearm with tamped vac-E warheads, dispersing them for maximum effect. White light seared across his in-head vision, momentarily blotting out his sight. The AI controlling his suit rolled him hard to the left, avoiding an expanding cloud of high-velocity fragments just ahead.

  As the plasma fireballs faded, he could see again . . . but for a moment he thought something was wrong with his visual feed. Surrounding space had taken on a grainy texture. Had the nuclear flashes fried part of his circuitry?

  Then he realized that the graininess was moving . . . that it was, in fact, dust or smoke obscuring his vision of distant objects. Then he could hear the steady patter of tiny impacts across the outside of his armor.

  He queried his AI; what the hell was that stuff? His first thought was nanotech disassemblers—microscopic machines launched in clouds and programmed to take apart whatever they touched—but these objects were simply bouncing off. Maybe they were some sort of surveillance system, released from the rings in order to keep tabs on the human fleet?

  The unknown objects appear to be disassembling the Dark Raider ships, his suit’s AI told him. They appear to be both larger and smarter than our own disassemblers.

  Half a kilometer away, a slim black needle went into an end-for-end tumble, as fragments of its hull spilled into vacuum. Those fragments each dwindled away; it looked like the disassemblers were making more disassemblers by taking apart the enemy vessels, rebuilding the bits and pieces into new units, and programming them on the fly.

  Impressive.

  A moment later, Dixon swept across the vast surface of the alien ring at a distance of just twenty kilometers. The structure was immense, almost thirty thousand kilometers wide from inner edge to outer rim. Even after all his time in space, Dixon had never quite lost the amazement at the size of things. The inner edge arced across the sky just 9,000 kilometers above the planet’s equator; the proportions of the ring to the planet were eerily similar to those of Saturn back home, which gave the world an eerily familiar aspect.

  Dixon wondered why the ring’s inhabitants hadn’t opened fire on the Marines. They were Xam, weren’t they?

  Maybe not. He was realizing it had been the ring that released the weapon that was fastidiously dissolving Xam ships, but ignoring human ships and Marine armor. And that meant somebody else occupied the ring, some enemy of the Xam.

  The dust cloud, he saw, was growing thicker and the destruction was now increasing exponentially. “Break off, break off!” Becker ordered. And the Marine armored suits began rising above the melee.

  The order made good sense, so far as Dixon was concerned. The clouds of alien disassemblers were taking care of the problem nicely without relying on the Marines risking their own lives. Marines were damned good at fighting, but that was no reason to seek out death for its own sake.

  Apparently the Xam felt the same way. Their needleships were now in full retreat, streaming back across the plane of the ring. Some appeared to be reassembling themselves into a single ragged-looking cylinder kilometers in length, but most remained separate, accelerating to near-c and vanishing into the emptiness beyond the gas giant and its ringed moon.

  And the Marines were left adrift above the gray sweep of the artificial ring.

  “RTB, Marines,” Becker ordered. “Let’s get back to the barn.”

  Dixon exhaled in relief as the Marine armored suits and scattered fighters began coming about on to new vectors that would take them back to the Vera Cruz.

  Newton had been in communication with the ringed world ahead for several minutes now. Language software, recently given to the expedition by the Kroajid and punningly referred to as the “Roceti Stone,” had provided the artificial intelligence with the key to communicating with a number of the alien species in this epoch. It would work only between machine minds—no human could comprehend this complex series of nested algorithms and symbolic logic, much less actually pronounce it—but Newton now could serve as the expedition’s translator.

  According to the database included with the program, there were millions of extant languages across the Galaxy, ranging from vocalizations to changes in skin color to shifting patterns within electrical fields to the eerie buzz of vibrating hairs to microwave pulses to just about anything else imaginable. The most efficient languages were those used among AIs, machine to machine, and it was one of those that had just challenged the approaching human ships.

  And so as Newton approached the alien fleet, transmitting several million different electronic versions of “hello” on as many different frequencies, it was not particularly surprised to receive an answer. What was surprising was that the reply essentially translated as “Welcome to Ki,” and included a list of docking instructions guiding them into the planet girdling ring. The ring, Newton was told, was open to all who came in peace, but only certain parts of it—roughly 15 percent of the structure—were accessible by beings possessing human biochemistries.

  While all this was going on, the Marines had engaged in a fierce exchange of fire lasting all of twenty seconds, and after Newton had explained who and what the humans were, Ki had sent out the cavalry. The rest had been extraordinarily fast-paced anticlimax.

  Newton then entered into a rapid-fire exchange of information with an entity that referred to itself as “the Mind of Ki,” presumably an artificial intelligence of some sort. The Xam, Newton was informed, did not rule here, did not control Ki . . . and were not a threat.

  “And who does rule here?” Newton asked.

  “The Mind of Ki,” was the simple but enigmatic reply.

  As Newton informed the Ad Astra of this unexpected development, it wondered exactly what the Mind of Ki was . . .

  . . . and whether it could be trusted.

  With the face-off in front of the ringed planet now resolved, at least for the moment at any rate, St. Clair was on his way back to his home in the Tellus starboard hab. There was a stop he needed to make on the way, however—someone he needed to see . . . or, at least, someone he needed to check
up on.

  He was not at all looking forward to the meeting.

  Ad Astra’s sick bay was an immense hospital facility located on Deck 24 forward of the bridge tower. There were additional hospitals forward in each of the Tellus habitats; the one for the starboard hab was located in the town of Bethesda, just half a kilometer from his home, and those, of course, enjoyed one standard gravity as the habitat rotated. The sick bay, however, was in zero-G, though a number of adjunct wards were located in Ad Astra’s centrifuge section for those patients who required gravity.

  St. Clair entered Ward Two and grasped a traveler—a handhold that fit comfortably in his grip and was attached to one of the spiderweb of slender cables laced through the facility’s open spaces. He thought of the doctor he’d come to see, and the traveler immediately began accelerating down its cable—shifting twice through junctions—and brought him at last to the office of Dr. Kildare 117 AI Delta-2pmd.

  Named for a fictional doctor from several centuries earlier, Kildare was a medical robot; the letters pmd in his designator stood for “psychiatric medical doctor.” An android, he looked perfectly human, right down to the caring and attentive bedside manner.

  It—no, he was one of the medical AIs charged with caring for Tellus Ad Astra’s growing complement of insane personnel. There were, St. Clair thought, far too many of those . . . and the number had been growing.

  “You wanted to see me, Doctor?” St. Clair asked.

  “Yes, Lord Commander. About Lord Adler.”

  St. Clair nodded. He’d thought that was why he’d been called. “Has there been any improvement in his condition?”