7 August, 2425
Place of Cold Dreaming
Invictus Ring
0515 hours, TFT
“God . . . why is it so dark?”
“We don’t understand your question, Ambassador. What do ambient light levels have to do with anything?”
“Just let us have a little light. . . .”
“You are bathed in light, Ambassador. Let us stay on the topic of current discussion.”
Seven-one-cee-eight waited for a reply, studying the line of humans suspended in their sealed plastic tubes through broad-spectrum analyzers. There were six of them in a line, immobilized in their containers, glowing with their own heat. Conduits and piping connected each, maintaining the hellish environmental conditions these creatures appeared to require. Oxygen . . . Seven-one-cee-eight gave the Glothr equivalent of a shudder, its mantle rippling as a wave of emotion pulsed around its circumference. And a metabolic temperature well above ambient normal. Seven-one-cee-eight was comfortable at a temperature of four degrees Celsius, though its measuring units were different and it used a base 24 numbering system; body temperature for humans appeared to be thirty-seven Celsius. They radiated heat, rather than absorbing it from the environment; in fact, they were radiating so much heat that it was dangerous for Glothr to come anywhere close to one of them.
Fortunately, the god-robots weren’t affected by the hot little aliens, and Seven-one-cee-eight could watch from the comfort of its saltwater-ammonia quarters. The robots were designed to tolerate far more extreme environments than a room filled with hot oxygen-nitrogen gas.
“We shall begin again,” Seven-one-cee-eight told them. “Tell us why humans reject the gift of belonging. . . .”
Seven-one-cee-eight hoped the translation was adequate. The humans appeared to understand what it was saying, but sometimes there were . . . nuances and shades of meaning that were as slippery as ammonia ice melting at the bottom of a pool. The worst part of it was that humans appeared to have no electrosense at all . . . and that made communication a decided challenge.
Their speech did not depend on sound waves, but on precise and subtle modulations in the electrical fields generated by their bodies. Seven-one-cee-eight’s name—those four characters were the first of a much longer string, while cee was twelve in base-24 notation—referred to specific sequential frequencies in a fluttering electrical field. Their name for themselves, which began with the characters En-jay-three-kay, numerically encoded the term Abyss Kin. “Glothr” was the name given to them by other aliens within the Sh’daar Collective.
The humans appeared to be completely insensitive to Kin modulations of electrical fields, which made them not only dumb in terms of communication, but blind as well. The Kin possessed light-sensitive organs, but sight was a relatively minor sense, one of twelve they possessed, and useful primarily for gathering emotional data from the color shifts and pattern changes of other individuals. The physical nature, shape, mass, and movement of their environment and what was in it all were perceived as changes in the surrounding field. The humans, with painfully weak electrical fields running over their integuments and apparently no means whatsoever of actually detecting them, must perceive the universe around them in a very, very different fashion than the Kin indeed.
In fact, humans seemed to be crippled in a number of respects—no magnetic sense, no lateral-line pressure sense, no group movement sense, no . . . it was impossible even to translate three of the concepts. To compensate, humans appeared to rely far more heavily than did the Kin on light perception. One other sense that seemed to be important to them as well, though similar to sensing pressure waves in the water, had no exact corollary among the Kin. Apparently, they used it to detect the pressure waves that they generated as a form of communication. Numerous Sh’daar races had evolved this sense, though it was difficult to understand how sound waves could carry anywhere near the informational content of an oscillating electrical field.
“Gift . . .” the human said, as though struggling with the concept. “I don’t . . . understand . . .”
Seven-one-cee-eight gave the equivalent of a sigh—a flutter of green and yellow exasperation. How could it be sure of the quality of the translation? Human metabolism—and, in consequence, the speed of their thinking—appeared to be on the order of two to three times faster than the Kin. And the difficulties of translating fluctuations in an electrical field into pressure waves, and back again, were almost insurmountable. The only way the task was possible at all was through the intermediary efforts of powerful artificial intelligences, and of the robots.
Seven-one-cee-eight increased the power with a thought. “Tell us why humans reject the gift of belonging.”
Like many sapient species across the Galaxy, these humans were partly organic, partly machine. Imbedded within their brains, and elsewhere throughout their central nervous systems, was nanotechnically chelated circuitry that incorporated computers into their flesh-and-blood makeup. Kin software agents had tapped into the machine part of this combination, linking directly to memory, operating system, and the software AI running there. Through that link, Seven-one-cee-eight could communicate directly with the humans . . . though certain contextual or cultural concepts continued to prove difficult. It couldn’t tell for sure how much of that was due to genuine fuzziness in the translation programs . . . and how much was due to stubbornness on the part of the humans.
“It’s so . . . dark. . . .”
“Why would you need light?”
“Because I can’t see!”
The word translated for Seven-one-cee-eight as “perceive visible light.” It worked at the implications of this for a moment, then came to a startling realization: that the aliens, evidently, were sensitive to electromagnetic wavelengths, and that this sense was far more important to them than to the Kin. Perhaps it needed to see . . . or became emotionally distressed when it could not.
“I do not understand what you’re saying. In any case, you do not need to perceive light to answer my questions . . . Ambassador.”
“Ambassador” was another incomprehensible concept. The first humans to be contacted directly, the ones that called themselves the Terran Confederation, had spoken of ambassadors, as though a special type of being was necessary to achieve meaningful communications. Its superiors had directed Seven-one-cee-eight to play along with the humans when it made first contact with them on their world . . . but the alien’s strange customs were fast becoming a hindrance rather than an aid to a clear exchange of information.
Seven-one-cee-eight increased the power of its signal again.
It had no other reasonable alternative.
USNA Star Carrier America
Invictus Space, T+12 MY
0940 hours, TFT
Gray drifted in the midst of the USNA fleet, the ships spread out around him like glittering toys. They weren’t that close to one another in reality, of course. The AI facilitating the briefing had pulled the separate images together across several million kilometers to create a composite panorama, allowing the human viewpoints gathered in virtual space to survey the entire task force.
The repairs were almost complete. A chunk of Turusch wreckage hung alongside the Vulcan, its green-and-black outer hull armor gone, now, the remaining structure dwindled to an amorphous gray mass as clouds of nanodisassemblers continued to take it apart, atom by atom, and haul them in continuous streams into the repair vessel’s multiple storage bunkers. Larger worker ’bots swarmed around several of the other ships, applying repair nano and raw materials shipped across from the Vulcan, patching gaping holes, reapplying surface armor, and serving as large-scale 3-D printers to nanufacture new gravitic projectors, weapons, and sensor arrays layer by molecule-thin layer.
“How about fighter recovery?” Gray asked.
“We still have three missing fighters, Admiral,” CAG Fletcher said. “We have long-range probes looking for them, of course, but this long after the battle . . .”
She let the thought trail off, unfinished. A dead fighter was so terribly minute when lost within that aching gulf beyond.
“Keep on it,” Gray said. “As long as possible. What else?”
“We’re low on reserves of radioactives, sir,” Talbot said. “And we haven’t found any in the Tushie wrecks. That puts a cap on the number of fission warheads we can assemble.”
Gray nodded understanding. An m-type asteroid would be rich in most heavy metals, including uranium, but salvaging wrecked ships wouldn’t score that kind of bonanza unless they happened to recover the dead ship’s magazines.
“Also, some of the ships report they’re still short of water,” Talbot went on. “What’s floating around in local space is too widely dispersed to make it worthwhile scooping it up.”
None of the wrecks they’d investigated so far possessed intact water reservoirs. Usually, when a ship was torn apart by a charged particle beam or a nuke, any water stores on board were gushed out into hard vacuum, where they froze into flecks of ice—each the size of a grain of sand—and rapidly dispersed. Unless a large cloud of nanocollectors was released very quickly, it simply wasn’t worth the effort to try to gather them all up.
“How bad a shortage?” Gray asked.
“We have about one third of her original stores,” Captain Benjamin McFarlane, New York’s CO, reported. “We stopped the leak before all our water was gone.”
“The Northern Cal is at about half, Admiral,” her captain, Janet Davis, said.
The other damaged ships were at similar levels: none low enough to preclude fleet ops, but something on which to keep a watchful eye.
There would be water at Invictus, of course, far more water than on all of Earth. Hell, the Glothr swam in the stuff, literally. But just now it seemed highly unlikely that the aliens would be willing to share their bounty with the Earth-human fleet.
It was frustrating. Normally, it would be a simple matter to find just one kilometer-sized iceteroid, which would be big enough to provide ample reaction mass for the entire fleet. They had enough—and a bit to spare, perhaps—for a battle or two more on this side of the TRGA, but Gray hated running things so close to the wire.
“Maybe we should go back,” Captain Ray Mathers, of the light cruiser Columbia said.
“What, and leave our people here?” That was the commanding officer of the Marine contingent on board the Marne, Colonel Joseph Jamison. “Unacceptable!”
“We may have no alternative,” McFarlane put in.
On the surface, the safe play was to pull out, to go back through the TRGA to the Beehive cluster, where there would be plenty of loose chunks of ice in the Oort clouds of some hundreds of nearby suns.
Gray deeply mistrusted that option, though. While that Turusch fleet might have come through from a different place and time than Task Force One, the likeliest scenario seemed to be that they’d followed the human ships through from America’s home spacetime, and that the survivors of the recent battle had broken through and gone right back to where they’d come from. They might have reinforcements waiting over there, and if so, they almost certainly would be waiting to ambush human ships coming through the cylinder one at a time. Task Force One might find itself in the same severe disadvantage that the Turusch had faced on this side of the TRGA.
“There’d damned well better be another option,” Gray said. “Our drones still haven’t returned.”
Hours ago, to test whether or not the Turusch were waiting on the other side of the TRGA, Gray had ordered three of America’s battlespace drones to thread their way back through the cylinder at thirty-minute intervals, take a look around, and return with vid images and scanner readings of what was waiting on the other side.
But none of the drones had turned around and come back, which was . . . suggestive. It wasn’t definitive yet; drones often had trouble threading the wildly fluctuating spacetime matrix of a TRGA, or the bad guys might have left a single ship over there on guard, while the rest headed home for repairs. Still, it was enough to give Gray pause.
And Gray wasn’t ready to risk a one-at-a-time encounter with a large and very angry Turusch battlefleet waiting in ambush.
“Do we have any alternate Triggah pathways mapped for this one?” Captain Mendoza, of the Illinois, asked.
“Not with any confidence,” Mallory replied. “In any case, it’s very unlikely that we’d be able to find a gateway to anywhere useful.”
“We estimate,” America’s AI said, “a less than one ten-thousandth of a percent chance of recognizing where we emerge.”
That was the essential problem with TRGA cylinders. Estimates put the number of distinct spacetime paths through a given TRGA in the tens, possibly the hundreds of millions, but possible destinations included stars scattered across much of the galaxy, and a span of some millions of years. The only way to map a given pathway was to send a ship through, then do a thorough survey on the other side. Identifying stars and the general period of time in which the ship had emerged could take years, and might never be completed.
And if they just jumped through without a survey—like they had on the way to Invictus—they would end up somewhere unknown, with no idea of where or when they were.
Gray was prepared to try that in the event of an emergency, with no other way of saving his fleet, but he wasn’t that desperate just yet.
“How about trying to talk to them?” Fletcher asked.
“Sure,” McFarlane put in. “If we can’t fight ’em, maybe we could talk ’em to death.”
“Nice idea, CAG,” Mallory said, “with one small problem. We came here expecting to talk to them, and they ambushed us. I don’t think they want to talk.”
“The Turusch ambushed us,” Fletcher told him. “Maybe the Turusch acted independently. Maybe the Glothr want to talk, and the Turusch were trying to block that possibility.”
“And we have two pilots from the Demons,” Gray pointed out, “who say a mob of Glothr ships were after them. And the Pax and the Concord have vanished. We have to assume the Glothr are hostile.”
“Damn. You’re right.”
“America AI,” Gray said. “Do you have anything to suggest?”
Gray always felt a bit weird asking the AI his opinion, but he also knew that given half a chance, he could come up with unexpected—and highly creative—ideas.
“A direct attack against Invictus,” America’s AI said, “would be suicidal. As would a return through the TRGA, as would having the task force remain here. That suggests that you will need to defeat the enemy using deception.”
“You have a suggestion?”
“Possibly. A direction for your consideration, at least.”
“Let’s hear it, then.”
“It seems likely that if the ships of this task force were captured, the ships would be taken to the same place that they are holding the High Guard ships, and that that is also where they are holding Ambassador Rand and his people.”
“Possibly . . .”
“Almost certainly. The Glothr would be unlikely to set up and maintain separate quarters within which to create a standard terrestrial environment just for prisoners.”
“Seems logical,” Jamison said.
And the carrier’s AI began unfolding its idea.
Place of Cold Dreaming
Invictus Ring
1210 hours, TFT
“Tell us why humans reject the gift of belonging.”
“I don’t know. I guess it seemed like a good idea at the time.”
Seven-one-cee-eight considered the answer, and wondered if the human was being insolent, arrogant, or simply responding with truth. Human emotions were extremely difficult to judge. Among the Kin, one simply had to read the flutter of luminescent organs through transparent integument to know exactly what the other was feeling. Humans were . . . different.
“Have you made progress, Seven-one-cee-eight?” The words crackled through its electrosense, transmitted by its swarm center.
“No, Nine-dee-el-six,” it replied, and the flash of blue at the top of its thorax paled to green to show its frustration. “No, and I begin to fear that meaningful communication with this species is impossible.”
“Why? Our computer linguists cracked their language codes, with Agletsch help. It should be a simple thing to transpose their words into modulated electrical pulses.”
“It would be, Nine-dee-el-six, if these creatures had the same worldview as we.”
“Worldview? What difference does that make?”
“It’s . . . difficult to put into pulses. They fear being in the dark, some of them.”
“So? Surely this is not important.”
“It seems to be important to them, at least over a long period of time. Vision is their primary sense, approximately what electrosense is for us. They are blind to electrical pulses.”
“Strange . . .”
“There’s worse. Because they have no electrosense, they are unaware of the presence of others of their species nearby. They also seem to fear being alone. Several have commented on what they refer to as the ‘emptiness’ of this part of space, outside of the galaxy.”
“Perhaps we can exploit these weaknesses. If they are uncomfortable, they may wish to cooperate, to answer our questions, so that we will be inclined to make them more comfortable.”
“I was working with that idea, yes. But it is difficult to know how far we can go without causing permanent physical or psychological harm.”
“That surely doesn’t matter. All that matters is that we learn what we need to know about these creatures.”
“The attempt may prove to be counterproductive.”
“We have a great many prisoners at the research facility,” Nine-dee-el-six said. “Continue working with them until you find one willing to cooperate.”
“Very well. I will continue to focus on the commanders of the two ships, and on the one that calls itself ‘an ambassador.’ They appear to hold positions analogous to that of a swarm center.”
“As you think best.”
“We swarm together,” Seven-one-cee-eight replied.
VFA-96, The Black Demons
Invictus Space, T+12 MY
1620 hours, TFT
Lieutenant Gregory drifted in strangeness, an entire universe compressed into narrow, colored rings forward, his Starblade skimming just beneath c. In another few minutes, he saw, it would be time to commence deceleration.
Twelve fucking million years . . .
He wondered if humans had survived to this epoch . . . wondered if it would even be possible to find out. If Humankind had survived, the species must have evolved into something quite different by now.
There was a lot of speculation about human evolution, including the idea that human evolution, at least on the grand scale, had ceased. By taking control of his environment, by drastically extending the human life span, by genegineering his own genome, by merging his biology with his technology, Humankind had at least pushed back the most urgent evolutionary pressures, the demands of natural selection and survival of the fittest. To a certain extent, perhaps, the pace of human evolution had slowed, certainly.
But it hadn’t stopped. And twelve million years was a long time . . . twelve times longer than the survival time of the typical mammalian species.
There was a concept Gregory had heard in ready room bull sessions and in cosmological docuinteractive downloads: deep time, time on a geological scale. The Navy had already been forced to come to grips with the concept, knowing that the Sh’daar had emerged in the remote past, more than 800 million years ago.
And now he was hurtling toward an alien world 12 million years in the future. The mind could not quite take in chronological vistas on those scales.
Pulling back from those gulfs, he focused instead on recent memory: his rendezvous with Meg in the observation dome atop America’s spine. God, she was beautiful, but more than that, he was sharply aware that his feelings for her had steadily been shifting of late—from fuck buddy to something more.
Something much, much more.
He wanted to call her on a private channel, but the squadron was under comm discipline. Communicating ship to ship while nudging light speed was difficult enough. But no one in the fleet knew how well the Glothr could pick up such signals, or translate them, and that made radio silence all the more imperative.
Certainly, the Gothr knew they were coming by now. The question was just what they were going to do about it . . . and when.
A ping snapped him back to the here and now. His AI was alerting him to a contact, something up ahead.
“What have we got?” he asked.
His AI responded with impressions rather than words. Unknown . . . possible danger . . . something big . . . in excess of three hundred thousand tons . . .
A readout of hard data scrolled down through his awareness. His fighter’s sensors couldn’t see the oncoming object, but AI analysis could suggest what it might be.
And it was swiftly maneuvering toward the fleet.
USNA Star Carrier America
Invictus Space, T+12 MY
1621 hours, TFT
“Incoming target,” Mallory snapped. “Closing fast.”
Well, it would be, with the fleet already hurtling toward it at close to the speed of light itself. The light carrying the data would be coming in just ahead of the object, leaving precious little warning time. The fighter cloud, extending well out beyond the main fleet, had spotted the thing first.
“Weapons tracking,” Commander Taggart reported.
“All task force vessels are locking on, Admiral,” Talbot added. Then, “What the hell is that?”
“Our Glothr friends coming out to gather us up,” Gray replied. “Let’s not make it easy for them.”
“Time, Admiral,” Captain Gutierrez told him.
“All ships . . . initiate deceleration.”
AI commands synchronized perfectly flashed from ship to ship. Depending on design, some vessels began projecting gravitational singularities astern. Others flipped end for end with the same effect, their hab modules protected from the high-velocity sleet of relativistic particles by power modules and aft sponsons.
The protective cloud of fighters would continue for minutes more, dispersing ahead of the fleet, and threaten the enemy.
“Comm,” Gray said. “Transmit the signal.”
“Transmitting, Admiral.”
And now . . . the wait began. . . .
Place of Cold Dreaming
Invictus Ring
1631 hours, TFT
“Seven-one-cee-eight! We are receiving a laser-com transmission . . . encoded electropulse!”
“Let me feel it.”
A circuit closed, and Seven-one-cee-eight felt the crackle and tingle of a modulated transmission . . . not in its own language, but in the artificial pidgin created to communicate with the humans. Much of the meaning was garbled and vague, but enough meaning came through the stilted translation to chill Seven-one-cee-eight’s ammonia-water lymph.
“Glothr. You brought us here to communicate with us directly, or so we were led to believe. Instead, you ambushed us, seized our personnel, and have captured two of our vessels. Among civilized species, these are hostile acts which can result in all-out war.
“Humankind desires peace with the Glothr, but we will fight if forced to do so. I suggest that our original plan—talking—would be more productive, and far less destructive of your world, and its artificial system of rings and orbital structures. The decision, however, is entirely yours. Please let us know your decision before we reach your world and begin selecting targets. . . .”
Seven-one-cee-eight bristled at the challenge and at the implied threat, the depths of its mantle glowing in deep blues and near ultraviolet. The humans presumed to order the Kin?
Their audacity, their sheer arrogance was stunning. What made them think they could challenge a world of 15 billion inhabitants with a fleet numbering fewer than twenty ships, and a technology centuries behind that of the Kin? Insanity!
“Deploy the twisters,” Seven-one-cee-eight ordered. “Let’s teach these upstart children a proper lesson.”