Copyright

HarperVoyager

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018

Copyright © William H. Keith, Jr. 2018

Cover illustration © Gregory Bridges

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018

William H. Keith, Jr. asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008121129

Ebook Edition © October 2018 ISBN: 9780008121136

Version: 2018-10-24

Dedication

As always …

for Brea

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-one

Chapter Twenty-two

Chapter Twenty-three

Chapter Twenty-four

Chapter Twenty-five

Epilogue

Keep Reading …

By Ian Douglas

About the Publisher

Prologue

The Consciousness had known of Earth and of the starfaring civilization centered there for a long time. Indeed, given that it spanned vast gulfs of time as well as space, it was as if it had always known.

In the heart of the teeming sphere of 10 million ancient suns known to the humans as Omega Centauri, at the central rosette of six massive black holes orbiting their common center in a patently artificial arrangement, the Consciousness brooded on the intelligent beings it had found in this new, painfully young universe.

Intelligent was such a relative concept.

This was bolstered by the fact that the Consciousness had … tasted a number of them, sampling the minute ships and other structures within this volume of space.

Most of the minds it had sampled were of pathetically slow and limited capabilities. A few—a very few—were of higher orders of intelligence, though none came close to the Consciousness in terms of depth or scope of Mind.

Methodically, the Consciousness consumed those worth the effort.

The rest it deleted.

And with a slowly increasing vigor, it explored more deeply into this corner of the new universe. It had identified a sullen red ember of a star, called Kapteyn’s Star by the minds it had assimilated, with a world engineered by beings uploaded into digital form, extremely ancient beings called the Baondyeddi, the Adjugredudhra, and the Groth Hoj. These species, parts of a corporate polity referred to by various sources as the Sh’daar, were in hiding from some unknown threat … quite possibly from the Consciousness itself, though the digital refugees didn’t seem to know exactly what it was they feared.

Despite their attempts to make themselves undetectable—including the slowing of their awareness of time down to seconds on each century, the Consciousness had found them … and it had devoured them, absorbing trillions of minds into its own teeming hive, giving them order and a sense of purpose that had been lacking before.

And in the process it learned of the N’gai Cluster … and of the human presence much closer at hand.

And on the human homeworld, just twelve light years distant from Kapteyn’s Star, the watching beings of that planet anticipated the arrival of the Consciousness over Earth with an increasing and existential dread.

Chapter One

30 January 2426

Battery Park

New York City

1545 hours, EST

“Get the hell out of my head!”

“I submit that we will have to talk at some point,” the voice in his head told him. It sounded faintly amused.

Trevor Gray, formerly of the USNA Navy, scowled. “Why?” he replied, blunt and challenging. “Damn it, Konstantin, you’ve wrecked my life. You know that, don’t you?”

“It was necessary for you to leave naval service. Vital, in fact.”

“Bullshit. You no longer own me. And I don’t think we have a thing to say to one another.”

Gray prowled the transparent observation deck extending out over the choppy waters of New York Harbor. At his back, the newly grown towers of what once had been the Manhatt Ruins stabbed skyward, gleaming glass and silver in the winter sun. The place had … changed during the past year, changed more than he’d ever imagined possible. The spot where he was standing had been underwater a few months ago. Now it was clean and shiny, with a scattering of civilians who looked like tourists.

He could sense Konstantin, the powerful AI entity based at Tsiolkovsky, on the far side of the moon, watching him closely from the vantage point of his own in-head circuitry. That took a little getting used to. Konstantin’s principal hardware might be on the moon, but its—his—consciousness could be anywhere within the Global Net on Earth, in low earth orbit—LEO—or in cislunar space. And for sure, a tiny fraction of the super-AI was here in Manhatt, interacting with Gray through his in-head circuitry.

“I need you,” Konstantin told him, “to meet with Elena Vasilyeva …”

“Damn it, Konstantin, you know how I feel about the Pan-Europeans.”

“The war is over, Captain,” Konstantin told him, as though explaining why to a four-year-old. “In any case, Ms. Vasilyeva is Russian. They were on our side, remember?”

“Sorry,” Gray said, his mental voice sharp. “It’s kind of hard to just forget about Columbus, y’know?”

“Which the Russians had nothing to do with, you may recall,” Konstantin said. “In any case, no one is asking you to forget about Columbus.”

Gray turned and scowled up at the new towers of Manhattan, his shoulders hunched against the chill, late-January wind off the water. He did not, in fact, hate the Europeans … not exactly. The destruction of the USNA capital at Columbus had almost certainly been an act by rogue elements within the Genevan military. Pan-European attempts to seize territory along the USNA east coast had been strategic opportunism, pure and simple, and the true causus belli had been their conviction that Humankind had to accept Sh’daar demands and restrict their fast-developing technologies.

And Konstantin was right. With the signing of the Treaty of London, the war was over. Even the alien Sh’daar were friends, now … of a sort. The recent discovery that they’d been under the influence of intelligent colonies of bacteria had finally enabled Humankind to begin to understand just what they wanted … and what they truly were.

No, Gray might not trust the Pan-Euros, but neither did he hate them. His anger right now was reserved for the AI that had arranged to have him drummed out of the Navy. At Konstantin’s urging, he’d taken the star carrier America to the long-time stellar mystery of KIC 8462852—a distant, F3V sun better known as “Tabby’s Star.” What America had brought back, an alien e-virus called the Omega Code, had been of tremendous importance … but his fourteen-hundred-light-year detour had been in direct and blatant disregard of orders. Naval officers, even admirals, could not simply ignore the dictates of military command procedure, even when ordered to do so by super-AIs. The court-martial board had directed that Gray be reduced in rank to captain, and that he retire from the Navy.

Only recently had Gray learned that it had been Konstantin who’d recommended to the board that he be summarily cashiered.

With friends like that …

“I’m bringing in a robot shuttle,” Konstantin told him. “Will you meet with Ms. Vasilyeva?”

“Why? More to the point, why me?”

“The Pan-Euros want to meet you face-to-face. Ms. Vasilyeva has requested that her team get to speak with you first. You are … something of a legend, Captain. Even among those who once were the enemy. You have the reputation of a brilliant tactician, and some of them, I believe, are a bit in awe of you.”

Gray made a sour face at the obvious attempt at flattery. “Sure. Whatever …”

“Ms. Vasilyeva’s xeno team has some new assets that should make first contact with the Denebans more immediately productive.”

“If you say so.” A new thought occurred to him. “But why do we have to use the Pan-Euros at all? What’s wrong with Doc Truitt? When it comes to understanding alien civilizations, he’s the best. He’s told me that on several occasions.”

George Truitt had been the senior xenosophontological expert on board the America. He was testy, rude, and difficult to work with, but he did know his stuff.

“Dr. Truitt has returned to Crisium Base, where he will be working on interpreting the data from the Tabby’s Star Dyson swarm. His work there is absolutely essential. I assure you that Dr. Vasilyeva is as qualified as he is in the field … and considerably easier to work with.”

Gray cocked an eyebrow at that. How did the AI know whether or not it was easy for one set of humans to work with another?

“There’s something more.”

“What’s that?”

“The identity of the ship you will be using. It may be of interest to you.”

“Not America,” Gray said. And stifled the sharp pang at the thought of her. America, along with her sister ship, Lexington, had been badly savaged a month ago out at Kapteyn’s Star. Both carriers had made it back to Earth orbit, but they were in bad, bad shape.

“That is correct. America will be undergoing extensive repairs at the SupraQuito yards. Your vessel will be the Republic.”

His eyes widened at that. “The … Republic?”

People always talked about how damned small the Navy was. If you served long enough, you kept running into the same shipmates, the same vessels, the same commanding officers. This seemed to prove that ancient adage.

“Yes. She’s being taken out of mothballs and provisioned for the expedition. I believe you know her?”

“Hell, I was her CAG! I was her ACAG from oh-nine to eleven … then CAG from eleven to fourteen!”

“I know. Might that help you feel better about this assignment?”

“You know, I damn near cried when they retired her.”

“She was obsolete and overdue for retirement. As the Sh’daar War and the Confederation Civil War both wound down, she was taken off the line. However, the upgrades she will be receiving should again make her quite a formidable vessel.”

“Damn you, Konstantin.” But he relented. “Okay. But I still don’t know what you expect me to do or say.”

“I’ll be there to guide you, Captain.”

That wasn’t exactly an encouraging thought.

He was about to retort in kind when a bright star appeared in the dusk over the water of New York Harbor, rapidly approaching. Dropping lower, it resolved itself into a red-and-silver Sentinel 5000 autonomous flier. Its low-level AI pilot settled it gently on the observation deck and lifted the gull-wing door.

“So where are we going?” Gray asked as he ducked through into the passenger compartment. It was roomy and tastefully sleek inside—the luxury model. The robot pilot was invisibly tucked away somewhere forward. The dome roof gave him a full three-sixty view, and a thoughtclick would turn parts of the deck underfoot transparent as well.

“Geneva,” Konstantin told him.

Of course.

The door closed silently and the robotic transport rose into the sky on quietly humming grav-impellers. To the southwest he could see Lady Liberty, still on her pedestal after 540 years. Her right arm, which had broken off and fallen into the harbor at some point during the city’s decay, was back in place, the copper flame of her torch gleaming with the last touch of the setting sun. After centuries of neglect she once again represented the spirit of freedom and democracy in the North-American union.

But for how long that might ensue was anybody’s guess. North America had dodged two nasty bullets in the Sh’daar War and in the conflict with Pan-Europe.

As bad as they had been, though, Gray seriously wondered if it could survive the quiet rise of its own super-AI minds.

The flier swung about, still gaining altitude, and passed above the tallest towers of Lower Manhatt. As it did, the nagging question finally surfaced for Gray.

“I still don’t understand,” he told the super-AI partially resident within his head, “why you wanted me out of the Navy. It was my whole life …”

“I understand your feelings, Captain,” Konstantin said, using his honorary retirement rank—which felt like a needle digging into the wound. “But I—and you—encountered certain limitations in what we could do when you were part of the military hierarchy. In order to make contact with the Denebans, you will need a degree of freedom and free will impossible for a naval flag officer.”

“Bullshit. The president—”

“President Koenig has his own problems,” Konstantin explained, “and his own agendas. His decisions are closely circumscribed by those around him, and by the requirements of his office. I require a true free agent. Why are you, of all people, so wedded to your position within the military line of command?”

“Maybe because I belonged.”

Still, it was a good question, and one Gray had been wrestling with for a long time.

Gray had grown up in the Manhatt Ruins, a Prim making a marginal living working a small rooftop farm right over there … perched within the crumbling rooftop wreckage of the TriBeCa Tower, a couple of hundred meters above the flooded avenues of the city.

Damn … he couldn’t even locate the labyrinthine tower any longer. With nano-engineering, new buildings could be grown, and old ones completely made over into new structures in a matter of hours.

Made it easier to forget the past, he supposed.

More than three centuries ago, rising sea levels and the resultant social unrest had led to large swaths of what had been the coastal areas of the former United States of America being abandoned. The so-called Peripheries had been cut off from the technologies and from the social and governmental services of the new United States of North America. They’d become lawless frontiers too expensive to maintain, too difficult to control.

When Angela, his wife, had had a stroke, he’d been forced to get her to a medical center within the USNA proper. Angela had been healed … though either the treatment or the stroke itself had … changed her, dissolving her part of the emotional bond between them.

Gray had gotten over it … well, for the most part, at any rate. It had taken a long time and blossoming relationships with other people, but he’d finally done it. Sometimes he went for days now without even thinking of Angela.

And it had only taken him twenty-six years to get there …

In a world of such rapid changes, Gray was an outlier.

Overall, though, Gray had approved the unexpected course change in his life. In a quarter of a century, he’d worked his way up the ladder of rank, eventually commanding the star carrier America, and then serving as flag officer for the entire America battlegroup. He’d found a place for himself. He’d found respect—no mean feat for a former Prim in the Risty-dominated ranks of naval officers. Risties, derived from aristocrats, represented the worldview of a majority of USNA citizens and especially of naval officers. Primitives, lacking the high-tech cerebral implants and social e-connections of full citizens, were seen somehow as less than fully human.

It made Gray feel good that—even if it was just a possibility—his rise through the ranks, his accomplishments as a naval officer, even his victory over the aliens at Kapteyn’s Star all had been due to his fighting that old social stigma of Prim.

But now Konstantin had arranged to make him a civilian again. Of a sort, that is. Because he was still being swept up into bigger schemes.

It wasn’t like he could go back to the TriBeCa farm, though. No, the North-American government was taking the Peripheries back. Washington, D.C., had been fought over, drained, and rebuilt; swamplands from the Virginia Piedmont to Savannah were being reclaimed; here in Old New York City the Locust Point and Verrazano Narrows dams had been completed, and the water levels encroaching on Manhattan were slowly dropping.

Under steady assault by swarms of architectural nanoassemblers, the Ruins were ruins no more, as white towers grew from the sea’s retreating caress. For the past year, teams of neurobiotechnicians had been moving through the city, offering the inhabitants the chance to shed their status as Prims; soon, the very idea of Prims would be a thing of the past.

Just like me.

He studied the white towers from the sky … their lack of vegetation and obvious decay. Their clean sterility. Their bright newness in the lights of the city coming on to dispel the dark of early evening in winter.

He shook his head. There was no place for him any longer in the Navy and there certainly wasn’t a place for him down there among those newly grown skyscrapers. He felt out of place … and out of touch.

“Konstantin?” He still didn’t want to talk to the artificial intelligence, but he’d become too reliant on having his questions answered. Usually, that was handled by his own in-head RAM, but he was genuinely curious about what the AI would say.

“Yes?”

“What’s happening to them? The people like I was, down there in the Ruins?”

“Most have already been relocated.”

“Where?”

“New New York. Atlantica and Oceana. The New City around the Columbus Crater. Wherever they want to go, really. Quite a few have volunteered for off-world colonies. Mars. Chiron. New Earth.”

“‘Volunteered?’ No relocation camps?” He’d heard stories …

“There are relocation camps for the Refusers. However, I assure you that they lack for nothing.”

Refusers.

It was actually the translation of a Sh’daar term for those who’d refused to accept the Sh’daar Transcendence—their long-ago version of the Technological Singularity. It was also used, sometimes, to describe certain humans or human groups who rejected some aspects of modern technology. There were human religions, Gray knew, that rejected manipulation of the human genome, or medical life-extension technology.

In this case, Konstantin’s use of the word referred to those Prims who would not take cerebral implants, for whatever reason, preferring what they thought of as “living naturally.” Some would be afraid of change … or simply wanted to hang on to what they already had in the face of the unknown.

Gray didn’t agree with so extreme an ideology, but, having been there, he certainly understood where it came from. And it rankled him to hear about them so easily dismissed.

“Why do you ask?” Konstantin wanted to know.

“Sometimes I still identify more strongly with the other Prims than I do with full citizens.”

“Full citizen is an archaic term, Captain. They all are being happily and productively assimilated into the overall culture.”

Yeah, right. Happily assimilated was a contradiction in terms.

The phrasing wasn’t what truly bothered him, though. What Gray carefully guarded from the voice in his head was the fear that AIs, like Konstantin itself, were increasingly herding Humankind along narrowing paths that led to the gods alone knew where, paths understood and shaped by the AIs and utterly beyond the intellectual or emotional ken of organic humans. Beyond what made a human, well, human. Gray had worked with Konstantin many times and still didn’t fully trust a machine intelligence that, almost by definition, he was unable to fully understand.

He was only now realizing that he trusted Konstantin far less than he trusted the Pan-Europeans. And the realization bothered him.

“Flight time to Geneva,” the robot announced in Gray’s head, “fifteen minutes.”

The flier accelerated, leaving the gleaming towers of the new Manhattan vanishing below the horizon astern.

New White House

Washington, D.C.

1602 hours, EST

“Captain Gray is on his way,” Konstantin said quietly in President Alexander Koenig’s thoughts. “As you directed.”

Koenig was seated at his desk in the newly grown White House, located approximately on the site of the original. For several centuries, Washington, D.C., had been submerged, its buildings and monuments in ruins, its grounds flooded and engulfed by mangrove swamps. As with the Manhatt Ruins, dams and flood walls had been nanotechnically grown across the tidal estuary to the southeast so that the swamps could be drained. The reclamation was far enough along that the seat of the USNA government had only weeks before been moved from Toronto back to its historic seat in the District of Columbia.

Koenig sat back in his chair, looking over the reconstruction. The work was ongoing and expensive … but progress was being made.

Now, other kinds of progress needed to be made.

“Good. Did he put up much of a fuss?”

“Not really. He is suspicious of the Pan-Europeans, of course, and, as expected, he trusts neither my motives nor yours. He does not like being manipulated.”

“Hardly surprising. You pulled a damned dirty trick on him, you know.”

“Yes, I do. But if the threat to Earth is as severe as I believe it now is, we cannot afford to have him tied down by the traditional chain of command.”

“Maybe not. But at least we could have told the poor son-of-a-bitch …”

“Mr. President, this is something we must not leave to chance … or to human will and fallibility.”

Koenig scowled. “Sometimes, Konstantin,” he said slowly, “I get the feeling that you don’t trust humans.”

Geneva

Pan-European Union

2217 hours, GMT+1

It was raining and dark as the flier shrieked in over Burgundy, dropping swiftly from its cruising altitude of forty thousand meters, its outer surface reconfiguring from hypersonic mode to landing. “Going from sperm mode to turkey mode” was how fighter pilots described it, as the ship morphed from a sleek teardrop to a flattened, domed box with wings for landing. A former Navy pilot, Gray wondered if he would have to edit those memories sometime soon. They were a part of him, sure … but they were of damned little use now beyond pure nostalgia.

The lights of Geneva Spaceport glared up ahead, with the European capital’s urban sprawl delineating the black emptiness of Lake Geneva beyond. They touched down on a commercial pad, where an embarkation tube attached itself to the flier as the gravs were still spooling down.

Elena Vasilyeva, a tall woman in black with colorful abstract animations writhing over her face and hands, was there on the passenger concourse to meet him. “Captain Gray?” she said, extending a hand. “It was good of you to come on such short notice.”

It’s not like I had a whole lot of choice, he thought, but he kept it to himself and shook her hand. She was speaking Russian, but he heard the words in English as his in-head software translated them in real time.

“No problem,” he replied. “A pleasure. I’m sorry you had to stay at work so late in order to meet me.”

“It … what is the expression? It goes with the territory. This way, if you please.”

They traveled by mag-tube to the Ad Astra Confederation Government Complex, and a large meeting room a couple of hundred meters up, near the top of the tower. The space’s floor-to-ceiling windows looked out over the aptly named Plaza of Light and its titanic monument, Popolopolis’s statue Ascent of Man.

A number of other people were already present in the room, including several European military officers. Gray stopped at the threshold. “I was given to understand that this would be a civilian operation, Ms. Vasilyeva.”

“It is, Captain Gray,” a European Spaceforce admiral told him. “Operation Cygni, a joint European-American scientific and first-contact expedition to the star Deneb. However, as you must be aware, there are serious military and governmental implications to this mission.”

“Admiral Duchamp is correct,” an AI voice said in Gray’s thoughts. “In any event, we all wished to meet the man who would be commanding the expedition.”

“You could have done that in virtual reality,” he said.

In fact, the real reason for his transatlantic jaunt this afternoon had been bothering him quite a bit. With VR, people could meet in cyberspace, within AI-created realms with such resolution and fidelity to detail that it was quite impossible to tell illusion from reality.

“Perhaps,” the AI told him, “but we would not have known whether we were meeting the avatar or the actual person.”

“Nikolai is quite protective of us,” Duchamp told him. “He wanted us to get a good feel for the man who will be leading Operation Cygni.”

“ ‘Nikolai?’”

“For Nikolai Copernicus,” Vasilyeva explained. “An artificial intelligence housed here in Geneva analogous to your Konstantin.”

“A pleasure to meet you, Nikolai.”

“I am delighted to make your acquaintance. Until now I knew you only through back channels with Konstantin, and through intelligence reports and strategic analyses. To be frank, some of our people feared that you are a … I believe the Americanism is ‘cowboy.’ Shooting first, asking questions later.”

“And is that how you see me now?”

“Oh, most certainly not, Captain,” Duchamp told him. “We have all seen the reports of your encounters at Tabby’s Star. And many of us have been wondering why your senior staff would have retired you. It seems a poor use of a valuable asset.”

“Having met you, Captain,” Nikolai said, “and having spoken with you directly, I can unreservedly recommend that Operation Cygni proceed as it is currently organized, with our xenosophontological team under Captain Gray’s direct command.”

“So how about it, Konstantin?” Gray used a private channel to communicate with the AI without being overheard by the others. “I haven’t heard of this AI before.”

“Nikolai has only come on-line in the past few weeks,” Konstantin told him.

“A baby, huh? Can he be trusted?”

“As much as I can be trusted.”

Had that been sarcasm, Gray wondered? Or humor? Or a subtle rebuke? He found it difficult to understand what a super-AI was feeling—if feeling was the proper term—when he spoke with one.

“That’s not saying a great deal.”

Konstantin ignored the jibe. Gray wasn’t even certain that it was possible to insult the AI. “Nikolai,” Konstantin told him, “is several orders of magnitude faster, more powerful, and more compact than I. The Europeans wish to include a copy of him on the expedition to Deneb.”

“I’m not sure that’s such a good idea,” Gray said, transmitting on the group’s shared channel again. “The Omega virus, remember?”

“Nikolai was designed in part to be immune to Omega,” a sophontologist told him, “as well as to other potential e-threats.”

Gray wondered how any of them could be so certain of that, though. The Omega virus had been an alien software packet smuggled from Deneb back to Tabby’s Star … and it had apparently been responsible for the destruction of the Tabby’s Star civilization. Brought back to human space, it had been employed against the Rosette Aliens at Kapteyn’s Star, and evidently had been responsible for stopping the monumentally powerful invaders …

… at least for now. The Rosetters hadn’t been destroyed in the encounter by any means. As far as the xenosophontologists were concerned, they’d simply been forced to halt their advance toward Earth and actually notice the humans defiantly standing in their way.

“A copy,” Gray repeated. “Where? I mean, the Republic is going to have pretty limited running space for a full AI.”

“In this,” one of the civilian sophontologists said. She moved her hand in the air, summoning a hologram. “We call this the Helleslicht Modul Eins.”

Gray’s translator software told him the meaning of the German phrase: Bright Light Module One. The 3-D diagram floating in front of the woman was egg-shaped and, according to the listed dimensions, some three meters long and massing five metric tons.

“Dr. Marsh is a member of our xenosophontological team,” Vasilyeva told him. “But her specialty is advanced AI.”

“I see.”

“The HM-1’s internal matrix,” Marsh explained, “is essentially computronium—solid computing matter—with quantum circuitry of sufficient complexity and power to support Nikolai with plenty of room to spare.”

She sounded quite proud … and if she was even partly responsible for this device, she had every right to be. Artificial intelligences like Konstantin—in particular super-AIs, or “SAIs”—were resident within large computer complexes, usually underground and anything but mobile. Konstantin, for instance, had begun his existence in a subselene facility beneath Tsiolkovsky Crater, on the far side of the moon.

Using the far-flung Global Net, they could send independent parts of themselves anywhere within cislunar space. Pared-down copies of them, subsets of the larger and more powerful original software, could be resident within the electronic networks of starships or orbital stations. A sub-clone of Konstantin had made the passage to Tabby’s Star on board the star carrier America, and even smaller copies had been used to remotely contact the alien Dysonswarm intelligence there, and the uploaded minds called the Satori.

But that had been a fraction of what the original was capable of.

Gray wasn’t certain how massive the Tsiolkovsky complex was, but he knew it was big. If the Europeans had managed to build a computer that could run a similar SAI in a volume amounting to a few cubic meters, that was more than impressive.

It was a giant step forward for SAIs.

“So why does Nikolai want to go to Deneb?” Gray asked. He hesitated, then looked up at the ceiling. “I assume you do want to go, Nikolai?”

“Very much, Captain Gray,” Nikolai said.

“We cannot stress the importance of this expedition too much, Captain,” Duchamp added. “It is vital—vital—that we engage the Deneban civilization peacefully, to learn about them and their abilities, and perhaps to secure their aid in our confrontation with the Rosette Aliens.”

Gray shook his head. “I have to be honest with you, Admiral,” he said. “The Denebans may not be a good prospect for contact, let alone military aid. As best as we can determine, they utterly destroyed a technologically advanced culture at Tabby’s Star without even attempting to negotiate or open lines of communication.”

“We know that, Captain,” Duchamp said. “It was for that reason that we approached your President Koenig to request that we be included in Project Cygni. A copy of Nikolai, working with a copy of your Konstantin, offers, we believe, our best hope of establishing peaceful contact and technological help. It is unlikely that organic humans will be able to communicate in a meaningful way with such an advanced civilization.”

“But human oversight of the expedition is necessary,” Vasilyeva told him. “And when we learned that President Koenig was considering you as the expedition commander, we knew that there was hope.”

“Why?” Gray asked, genuinely baffled.

“Captain … we know too well that you can win battles, even wars. But what interests us is your ability to win peace.”

Chapter Two

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.

Chapter Three

1 February 2426

Lieutenant Gregory

SupraQuito Synchorbital

1218 hours, TFT

The offices of Paradise, Inc. were located in a rotating wheel attached to the synchorbital complex just outside of the naval yards. Gregory had checked himself off of the Republic and taken a mag-tube to the office structure’s microgravity hub, from which he caught an elevator “down” to the wheel’s one-G rim. The reception office was luxuriously appointed, with viewalls set to peaceful mood-abstract animations, and with hauntingly ethereal music piped through from hidden speakers.

An android robot took Gregory’s personal stats, and he was ushered through to an inner space where he met Kazuko Marukawa, seemingly adrift in swirls of colored light. “So, Lieutenant Gregory,” she said with a dazzling smile as he took a chair opposite her desk. “What brings you to Paradise?”

“I’ve … lost someone,” he told her. “Someone very important to me. I’ve been wondering about the eschatoverse.”

“An eschatoverse,” she said, gently correcting him. “We build one exactly to your specifications. We have, quite literally, billions of available models to choose from.”

The thought of his own private heaven felt uncomfortably claustrophobic. “Isn’t that … I don’t know … kind of lonely? A virtual universe just for me and whoever I bring along?”

“Not at all. Think of your ’verse as a bubble … but one that is constantly merging and interacting with others, with many others. You would have access to the entire virtual multiverse of billions of distinct realities. We offer ready-made realities representing the afterlives of hundreds of distinct religions and belief sets. We offer realities tailor-made to your specifications, where you can fly with a thought, enjoy superhuman powers, anything that is possible for you to imagine … and much, much more! Your new reality, I assure you, will be far, far more intricate, more interesting, and more fulfilling than the so-called real world is for you now!”

Gregory knew about virtual uploads. It was the same trick, more or less, used by the Baondyeddi and other technically advanced alien species to vanish down a virtual rabbit hole out at Heimdall. Human technology had been moving toward this goal for centuries, but virtual uploads had become practical only within the past few decades and on a much smaller scale.

But that scale was growing fast.

“So … I know it’s possible to make a copy of the human brain,” he told her. “And that copy can be uploaded into a computer that’s running a virtual simulation of a world … of an entire universe, even. But if I uploaded myself into one of your bubbles … would that really be me? I mean … even a perfect copy of my mental state is still a copy. What happens to the … uh … real me?”

She laughed and shook her head. “Lieutenant, you would be amazed at how many times we hear that exact question!”

“You would be amazed, Ms. Marukawa, how much I would hate to wake up and find that I was the version of myself that didn’t get uploaded.”

“Do you believe in the soul, Lieutenant?”

“I’m … not sure. I don’t think so …”

“Well, let’s concentrate on your conscious awareness, your sense of self. You have one, I assume?”

He was becoming annoyed with her perky assertiveness. “Of course I do.”

“Your brain is a network of interconnecting neurons … about one hundred billion of them linked with one another in complex structures through up to eleven topological dimensions, yes?”

“Uh … yeah …”

“The interactions of all of those neurons give rise to memory, to decisions, to what we call consciousness.”

He nodded.

“Okay. If I were to take just one of your neurons and replace it with a microscopic nanocomputer, maintaining all of those synaptic linkages … would you notice the difference?”

“Probably not.”

“Would you still be you?”

“Yes …” He saw where this was going. He’d heard the argument before, but still wasn’t sure he bought it.

“And if I replaced ten of your neurons … ten out of one hundred billion. Would you still be you?”

“I know what you’re saying, Ms. Marukawa. If you could magically replace my neurons one at a time, eventually, my brain would be all machine instead of organic jelly and my mind could be transferred to a robot body … or uploaded to a supercomputer. If all of the connections are the same, I shouldn’t notice any difference.”

“Your consciousness would be preserved, identical to what you think of as you in every way.”

“I understand all of that. What I don’t understand is how you can move my conscious mind from here”—he tapped his forehead—“into a machine. That’s different than just swapping out parts.”

“All I can tell you, Lieutenant, is that we’ve had no complaints.”

“What happens to the organic body once the consciousness leaves it?” He realized as soon as the words were out that it was a damned silly question.

“The organic brain is destroyed in the scanning process, Lieutenant. The body is disposed of in a manner determined by the client. We offer a number of mortuary—”

He held up his hand. “I don’t think I want to hear that part. Listen … about my friend …”

“This was someone you loved?” He nodded. “A woman?”

“Her name was Megan.”

“Do you have a recording? Or is she already in an eschatoverse?”

He sighed. “I have her avatar.”

“Ah.” Marukawa’s face fell. “We can offer you an extremely lifelike simulation, of course. A dedicated AI recreates her appearance, her emotions, her thoughts and mannerisms based on the available data. It’s not—”

“It’s not really her. I know.”

Gregory leaned back in the chair, fingers drumming on an armrest. The flow of soft light and random shapes around him was distracting, even hypnotic. He needed to think this through.

Meg’s avatar had been the electronic version of her she used to communicate with others virtually, a kind of personal assistant and secretary that could seamlessly stand in for her electronically. He thought of it as a kind of sketch of the real person, though that hadn’t stopped him from having long conversations with it since Meg’s death. Everyone had one—everyone except Prims, of course, or religious fanatics who didn’t believe in using such things.

Gregory had been considering suicide for some time, now, a simple and painless way out of the pain of a world without Meg. Paradise, Inc. offered him an option: even if the mind—not the real Don Gregory—was transferred to a simulated universe, the Gregory left behind would end, and that in and of itself would be a form of heaven.

And if this company was able to transfer the conscious mind, the self, the sense of ego and being and self-awareness that was Don Gregory, he would wake up in a better, richer, more vibrant universe with at least the illusion of Megan with him again.

Maybe in time he could forget that she was an illusion wrapped around a packet of AI software.

Marukawa seemed to be reading his thoughts. “We can edit your memories during processing, Lieutenant,” she told him. “You could be unaware that she was a copy. If you wished, you would be unaware that you were living in a simulated universe.”

He chuckled. “I’ve heard it suggested that we’re already in such a simulation. And how would we know?”

“An untestable hypothesis,” she said, “but a fascinating one.”

“If we are living in a simulation, someone up there programmed a piss-poor reality for us.”

“And that, Lieutenant,” she said cheerfully, “is why Paradise, Inc. is here. Now … you’re currently on active duty?”

“I am. Two more years before I can resign my commission.”

“That is not a problem, Lieutenant. We can make a reservation for you, and even begin designing your ideal universe for you before you process.”

“I’ll need to think about it, ma’am,” he told her. He stood up. “One more question?”

“Of course.”

“How do I pay for all this if I’m dead?”

“You turn over your personal credit when you come for processing, Lieutenant, with a ten-thousand-credit minimum. The more credit you transfer, the larger the field of available universes open to you once you cross over. The cost is applied to the ongoing maintenance of your eschatoverse, to administrative overhead—”

“Including your own salary, I’m sure.” He grinned at her. “Thank you, Ms. Marukawa. You’ve been most helpful.”

“We look forward to your new life with us, Lieutenant.”

Gregory left the office and made his way cross-complex to the Free Fall, a watering hole popular with naval officers enjoying some downtime “ashore.” His conversation with Marukawa had brought up a couple of unpleasant points.

First and foremost, of course, was the inescapable fact that Meg was dead, that if he shared an artificial reality with her, it would be with an electronic illusion, not with the real person. Okay … he could edit that part out of his memory. But still, the idea was … unpleasant.

There was also the very real question of eternity. Nothing lasts forever, and that certainly included the computers and AI networks girdling Earth in the various synchorbitals or buried underground on the moon and elsewhere. Granted, someday all of those networks might be subsumed into a larger, more powerful, more advanced electronic infrastructure. He could imagine Humankind building its own Dyson swarm, like the one they’d discovered out at Tabby’s Star … or even a Kardashev-3 galactic Dyson sphere, like the one they’d glimpsed a few million years in the future. If that happened, Paradise, Inc.’s virtual multiverse would likely get picked up and passed along.

But Gregory had seen what happened when the Rosette entity had descended on Heimdall, just twelve light years from Sol. Uploaded minds occupying artificial realities there had been … eaten. Were they still alive—assuming of course that digital minds in a virtual reality could be thought of as “alive”?

What if the entity came to earth one day … maybe after he’d turned off his organic body and begun cavorting in a Paradise, Inc. heaven?

Or … shit. What if the maintenance workers just decided to walk off the job? What if someone pulled the plug?

He didn’t like the idea that his very existence would be utterly dependent on someone, anyone, else.

It might be a better idea in the long run, Gregory thought, to come to grips with the universe he was in now.

TC/USNA CVS Republic

SupraQuito Yards

Earth Synchorbit

1427 hours, TFT

“Bright Light Module One is on board,” the ship’s executive officer said. Commander Jonathan Rohlwing turned and gave Gray an unfathomable look. “Republic is ready in all respects for departure.”

“Personnel?”

“We still have twelve personnel ashore, but all are due back on board by sixteen hundred hours.”

“Very well.”

Was there a measure of resentment in Rohlwing’s voice, Gray wondered? Republic would have been Rohlwing’s command, presumably, had they not dragged Gray in off the street, dusted him off, and put him in the command seat.

Gray wouldn’t have blamed his exec if he did resent what had happened. This whole arrangement—kicking him out of the Navy, then bringing him back as a civilian CO—was ridiculous.

It wasn’t entirely without precedent, though. Centuries before, in the wet Navy, certain classes of supply and cargo ships had been civilian vessels with civilian skippers … but in an emergency the ships could be activated as military vessels under military command.

And yet they’d kept their civilian skippers.

But command of a ship, any ship, demanded absolute trust between crew and captain. That trust ran both ways, too. The ship’s XO had to trust his captain to make the right decisions and give the right commands. At the same time, Gray had to know that he could trust Rohlwing to follow his commands to the letter.

As always, building that two-way trust would take time.

Gray just hoped that they had that time.

USNA CVE Guadalcanal

Orbiting Heimdall

Kapteyn’s Star

1650 hours, TFT

The Guadalcanal had reached the rest of the small flotilla keeping watch within the Kapteyn’s Star system. Captain Taggart had linked through to Admiral Rasmussen and his staff on board the heavy cruiser Toronto in orbit around the ice giant Thrymheim, the system’s fourth planet.

For several hours, now, Guadalcanal had drifted in a slow orbit with the rest of the flotilla. On her external feeds, Taggart could see the other five ships of the group—the flagship Toronto, a North Chinese light cruiser Shanxi, and three destroyers. The ’Canal had long since fed the Toronto images of what they’d seen over Heimdall. Now the small squadron was watching and recording the light show taking place sunward, over five astronomical units distant within the inner core of the system. At this distance, almost 9 AUs, the tiny red sun was a sullen-ember pinpoint, one barely visible to the naked eye. The Rosette entity’s construction consisted of a surreal tangle of geometric shapes and lights, and it appeared to be unfolding out of itself, growing rapidly larger and more complex.

“It’s matching the patterns that were here before the battle,” Taggart told Rasmussen over the tactical link. “I think once those structures are built, they can turn them on or off whenever they please.”

“The structures are anchored within the spacetime matrix,” Dr. Howard Thornton of Toronto’s xenosoph department observed. “Captain Taggart is right. They store the pattern of those shapes inside 4-D space and summon them when they need them.”

“How the hell do they manage that?” Rasmussen demanded.

“If I could tell you that, Admiral,” Thornton said, “I would be from a K-2 civilization. Maybe K-3.”

Referring to the Kardashev Scale, what Thornton meant was that Humankind was nowhere near the technological level they would need to be to understand what was happening, let alone produce those results. Whatever the Rosette entity was, it was eons ahead of Humankind on the learning curve and was manipulating spacetime in ways that suggested an ability to suck up every erg produced by a star … and quite possibly considerably more.

Taggart again felt the stirrings of a deep, inward religious awe.

For years she’d been a member of her former husband’s church, the Ancient Alien Creationists. It had taken her several years to shake that belief set; Trevor Gray’s discussions with her had eventually helped convince her that the AAC’s image of advanced galactic aliens tinkering with the human genome was weak and hopelessly anthropocentric. Beings powerful enough to do that—rewiring spacetime to their own advantage—wouldn’t give any thought at all to a bunch of paleolithic hominids crouching in their caves. In fact, past experience with the Rosetters suggested that they didn’t even notice star-faring species at Humankind’s current levels of advancement … didn’t notice, or didn’t care.

That revelation was crushing in its implications. Humans, she thought, tended to believe they were pretty hot stuff … and meeting something like the Rosette Consciousness was devastating to the human ego.

“What the hell are they doing in there?” Rasmussen wondered aloud over the link. “And why?”

“They appear,” Thornton observed, “to be surrounding Kapteyn’s Star with scaffolding of solid light. And I seriously doubt that we are capable of understanding why …”

Taggart noticed something in the data readout appearing on her in-head display. “Admiral?”

“Yes, Captain Taggart.”

“We’re picking up movement, sir … lots of it. Looks like a cloud of fireflies something like an astronomical unit across—”

“My God …”

“—and it’s headed our way damned fast.”

TC/USNA CVS Republic

SupraQuito Yards

Earth Synchorbit

1707 hours, TFT

“The ship is ready in all respects for space, Captain.”

“Very well. Release grapples fore and aft.”

“Magnetic grapples released, sir.”

“Helm, engage thrusters. Take us astern, dead slow.”

“Thrusters, dead slow astern, aye, aye, sir.”

Gray felt the slight thump and a surge of acceleration as the Republic began backing out of the docking gantry. There was nothing for him to do at this point but watch. The ship’s AI was in control of all steering, power, and navigation functions, though human ratings and officers remained in the loop. The Republic’s artificial intelligence was far more capable than merely human brains, with far better sensory awareness of the ship’s surroundings.

“We are clear of the gantry, Captain.”

“Very well. You have the course.”

“Yes, sir. Aligned, laid in, and locked.”

“Accelerate.”

“Accelerate, aye, aye.”

The synchorbital complex off to port blurred and vanished as the Republic accelerated under gravitics. The waning crescent of the Earth rapidly dwindled in apparent size, together with Earth’s moon. In another few seconds Earth was merely a bright star gently drifting toward the sun.

Gray pulled up the reference on their destination within the Encyclopedia Galactica, and an in-head window filled 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 x 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 …

There was a lot more, material added since America’s visit to the system weeks before. For over three centuries, astronomers had found comfort in finding natural explanations for the star’s oddball behavior that did not involve alien super-civilizations. The most popular theory combined the star’s high rate of spin causing gravitational darkening with the presence of an oddly tilted accretion disk—despite the fact that infrared studies of the system had never been able to detect an accretion disk’s warm presence. Other theories involved collisions of large planets with the star, causing an overall brightening that had been slowly dimming over the centuries.

The trouble was that none of those explanations fit all of the observations, and all were so coincidentally complex as to be unlikely in the extreme.

Gray found it amusing, actually. In 1960, Freeman Dyson, a mathematician and theoretical physicist, had suggested that any search for advanced civilizations in the galaxy be on the lookout for stars that unaccountably dimmed or winked out—indications of what became known as a Dyson swarm or Dyson sphere. These were hypothetical megastructures intended to capture all of a star’s radiation output by means either of a spherical cloud of solar collectors or a solid shell enclosing the star. By the early twenty-first century, Humankind had been thoroughly primed to discover signs of extraterrestrial intelligence … and yet when they’d actually spotted precisely what Dyson had predicted, they’d dismissed them as natural phenomenon.

Then the star-faring species of interstellar traders, the Agletsch, had strongly urged Konstantin to check out the star KIC 8462852. Gray had disobeyed orders to follow Konstantin’s directions and taken America to Tabby’s Star, where they’d discovered the ruins of an alien megastructure, and the surviving digital intelligence they called the Satori.

And now he was returning. They would visit the Satori at Tabby’s Star, then attempt to make contact with whatever was at Deneb, an unknown something that had destroyed much of the Satori infrastructure.

Whether or not the Denebans would be willing to help Humankind against the Rosette entity—or even communicate with them—was still very much an open question.

Forty minutes later, the Republic was boosting at seven thousand gravities, an acceleration unfelt because every atom of the ship was accelerating at the same rate within a gravitational field, essentially in free fall. They were moving at a sizeable percentage of the speed of light, and the sky ahead and aft was beginning to look strange as relativistic effects began to manifest.

“Captain Gray?” Lieutenant Ellen Walters, the duty sensor officer, called. “We’ve got something weird going on. Bearing two-eight-five minus one-five.”

Gray looked in the indicated direction, magnifying his in-head view. He saw … light.

“Xeno Department,” he called. “What do you make of those structures to port?”

“I’m not certain, Captain,” Dr. Vasilyeva replied. “It appears to be a Rosette light show.”

“That’s what I thought. Republic? Can you correct for relativistic aberration?”

“Correcting, Captain.”

Their high-velocity motion through space was bending incoming light beams, seeming to shift the images of stars and other objects forward, distorting them. At their current velocity, about six-tenths c, the effect wasn’t pronounced, but it was annoying. Republic’s AI applied a mathematical algorithm to the ship’s optical receivers, and the image snapped back to crystal clarity.

Beams of light appeared to be emerging from empty space, diverging slightly, like the entrance to a tunnel. A faintly luminous fog was emerging from the tunnel mouth, as geometric shapes carved from white and yellow light began to take form.

“Definitely Rosette phenomenon, Captain,” Vasilyeva said. “Are you going to change course for an intercept?”

Gray considered the question for only a second or so. “Negative.”

“Captain!” Commander Rohlwing said. His executive officer sounded shocked. “If that’s the Rosette entity … I mean … it’s not supposed to be here! Earth will need every ship to mount a defense!”

Gray closed his eyes. He was being presented with the same impossible choice twice within the space of a few weeks, and it freaking wasn’t fair!

“First,” he said, “a light space carrier does not have the sheer firepower to make a difference fighting that thing. Second … and more important, right now Earth’s only hope is for us to get to Deneb and get help. And that’s precisely what I intend to do.”

“But—”

“Comm! Transmit corrected images of what we’re seeing out there back to Earth and include a warning. Tell them what’s coming.”

“Aye, aye, Captain. Speed-of-light transmission time currently is eleven minutes.”

“Will it get to Earth before that … thing?”

“Yes, sir. Our message will beat it … By about eight minutes.”

“Then that’s the best we can do.”

The next dozen minutes passed in silence, as Gray and those members of the crew not actively engaged in operating the ship watched the unfolding patterns and shapes of light. They’d all seen much the same at Kapteyn’s Star, or heard about it from men and women who’d been there.

I wonder, Gray thought with some bitterness, if Earth will still be there when we return.

It was distinctly possible that even if the Denebans agreed to help them with some incredible high-tech weapon they could use against the Rosette, they’d get back to Earth only to find that they were too late …

Chapter Four

1 February 2426

New White House

Washington, D.C.

1802 hours, EST

“Incoming message, priority red one-one, Mr. President.”

“Thank you, Pierre,” Koenig replied. “Decode and play.”

“Yes, sir.” The voice was that of a new AI built into the New White House. It had been named after Pierre Charles L’Enfant, the French architect who’d designed the layout of the original Washington, D.C., in the late eighteenth century.

“Excuse me, Gene,” Koenig told the tall man with him in the Oval Office. “I need to take a call.”

“Of course, Mr. President.”

Leaning back in his chair, Koenig closed his eyes and opened an inner window. The transmission was from the Joint Chiefs, and had been relayed from the Republic, now an hour outbound. Though made grainy and low res by distance, Koenig could see the image well enough. Light exploded out of empty space, unfolding like a flower, opening and expanding. Moments later, a faint haze appeared to be streaming from the effect’s central core.

“That smoke or fog is, we believe, a cloud of what our people call fireflies,” Lawrence Vandenburg, his secretary of defense, said in his mind. “Not nanotechnology, exactly, but extremely tiny machines operating according to a set series of programmed instructions. They can be used to build extremely large and complex structures in open space … or they can be used as nanodisassembler-type weapons. The cloud emerged some forty astronomical units from the sun and is now on a direct course to Earth. At their current velocity, they will be here in another two and a half hours.”

“You need to see this, Gene,” Koenig said as the message ended. Admiral Gene Armitage was senior of his Joint Chiefs of Staff.

“I thought we might have more time, Mr. President,” Armitage said after digesting the transmission. “I thought we had an agreement …”

“We were never sure the Rosette entity even understood what a treaty or an agreement was,” Koenig replied, grim. “All we could be certain of was that the Omega Code made that thing sit up and take notice. It may have developed some way of counteracting the virus.”

“It probably did that a couple of nanoseconds after it was exposed,” Armitage said. “Advanced AIs work on an entirely different experience of time than do humans.”

“So why did it wait? It’s been over a month since we stopped it at Kapteyn’s Star.”

“I don’t know, sir. Maybe it just had other things to think about.”

“Deploy all available ships, Gene,” Koenig told him. “Including anything we have in the naval yards … damaged ships, fighters, the works. We need to stop that cloud from getting to Earth.”

“Yes, sir.” He hesitated. “What about the Republic?”

Koenig checked his inner clock. “Unless Gray decided to turn around when he recorded this, he’s already gone into Alcubierre Drive.” Koenig didn’t add that Gray’s orders were to get to Deneb at all costs. He would not be returning immediately.

Not that a single light carrier would add much in a stand-up fight against that, he thought, watching the vid once more.

He opened another channel. “Konstantin?”

There was no reply, and that was profoundly troubling. Konstantin was arguably the most powerful super-AI in the solar system, and Koenig depended on the artificial mind’s guidance … especially when faced with existential threats.

“Konstantin?”

Pierre responded. “Mr. President, Konstantin is no longer on-line.”

“What? Where the hell did he go?”

“I’m guessing, sir, but it seems likely that he became aware of the threat posed by the Rosette entity and has made himself difficult to detect.”

Great. Just freaking great. The most strategic powerful mind in Humankind’s arsenal had taken one look at the threat and jumped into a cyber-hole … then pulled the opening in after him.

“Send a transmission to Fort Meade,” Koenig told the White House AI. “And Crisium … and Geneva. We need the Gordian Slash … and we need it now.”

He just hoped they had something, and that it could be deployed in time.

VFA-211, Headhunters

TC/USNA CVS America

Earth Synchorbit

1913 hours, TFT

Lieutenant Jason Meier braced himself as his SG-420 Starblade dropped into its launch bay. “Headhunter Three, ready for drop,” he announced.

“Copy Hunter Three,” a voice said in-head. “Stand by. America is pulling clear of the gantry.”

What was her name? Fletcher, right. His new Commander Air Group, or CAG; she sounded near-c hot, and he was looking forward to meeting her, really meeting her and not just listening to her give a standard “welcome aboard” speech to the squadron. Yeah … her mental voice was all business, of course, but Meier thought he could detect some warmth there, and maybe a need for exactly what he could provide.

He was certainly looking forward to trying.

Jason Meier was still getting used to the changes in personnel since the Headhunters had been transferred over to the America several days before. VFA-211 originally had been attached to the Lexington, but that star carrier had suffered badly in the fight out at Kapteyn’s Star, and her fighter squadrons—what was left of them—had been transferred. Several of America’s own squadrons had been shuffled off to the Republic earlier, and Meier wondered if anyone in the Fleet had a clear idea of what was supposed to be going on.

He felt the gentle acceleration as the kilometer-long carrier pulled back from the gantry. His in-head showed a choice of views, both from America’s external vid cams and from the gantry structure itself.

God … the old girl is a mess, he thought. He had a particular affection for the carrier even though he hadn’t been attached to her for even twenty-four hours yet. It had been the America that had shown up at the last possible moment at Kapteyn’s Star and saved the collective ass of the Lexington and everyone on board her.

America, he thought, studying her as she pulled free of her docking slip, wasn’t in much better shape than the Lex, but at least she could still limp along under her own power. When their drives had failed on the way back to Sol, a small fleet of SAR tugs had come out and towed both America and the Lady Lex into the synchorbital port. There was some question, however, whether the Lex could even be repaired, or if she was going to end up being scrapped.

It was possible that the whole question was moot. The entity that had wrecked both ships at Kapteyn’s Star had just popped up in the outer Sol System, and reportedly was headed straight for Earth. Every ship that could be thrown in the thing’s path was being mustered.

The trouble was that the muster list of Earth’s warships had been badly depleted lately … by the fight at Kapteyn’s Star, by the long-standing war with the Sh’daar Empire, and by the savage little civil war that had torn the Earth Confederation apart. The USNA Navy was desperately short of ships.

If indeed, any number of the ships of Earth’s various navies stood any chance at all against an enemy as technologically advanced, as overwhelmingly powerful as the Rosette entity. Hell, much of what they’d been seen doing—manipulating space and time in ways completely beyond human understanding—didn’t even seem to count as technology.

As a well-known writer and scientific philosopher of several centuries earlier had put it, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

“VFA-211,” the sexy voice said, “stand by for immediate launch. By the numbers …”

The squadron began sounding off. “Hunter One, ready for drop.”

“Hunter Two, ready.”

“Headhunter Three,” Meier announced, “ready to go!”

One by one, the rest of the pilots reported their readiness. There were twelve ships in the squadron. Three of those were replacements newly arrived from Earth.

“All squadrons,” Fletcher called. “You’re clear for boost at five thousand gravities. Two minutes to drop …”

“Well,” Lieutenant Lakeland, Hunter Seven, said, “we’re going somewhere in a hell of a hurry!”

“Yeah, but what the hell are we supposed to do when we get out there?” Hunter Eight, one of the newbies, asked. Her name was Lieutenant Veronica Porter, and she was someone else Meier wanted to get to know better.

“Don’t you worry about that, Eight,” Meier said. “The bastards’ll see us coming in at near-c, and they’ll turn tail and run so fast that God’ll arrest them for breaking the laws of physics!”

“Knock it off, Meier,” Commander Victor Leystrom, the squadron’s CO, said. “Try to behave yourself.”

“Hey, I always behave myself, Commander!”

But he knew what Leystrom meant—he had a … reputation both within the squadron and back on the Lex: ladies’ man, playboy, the stereotypical hot fighter jock with a nova-hot tailhook. And he did his best to uphold that rep with bravado and confident flirting, though even he admitted that the details of his sex life tended to be somewhat exaggerated. There simply weren’t enough hours in the day—or in the night, for that matter—to rack up the scores he liked to claim.

But that small intrusion of reality into his life couldn’t slow down his swagger.

Leystrom, who was something of a prude, seemed to take every opportunity to shoot the hotshots in his squadron down. Professionals, he insisted, didn’t need to brag.

Where was the fun in that, though?

The minutes dragged by. At 7,000 gravities, America would be pushing the speed of light in 71 minutes, but that wasn’t the point here. The Headhunters’ Starblade fighters could hit 50,000 gravities and reach c in less than ten minutes. If the carrier dropped her fighters relatively late in her approach to the objective, however, the enemy would have less time to track them, less time to lock on their weapons. Meier doubted that those tactics would be very effective in this case. Their target was—according to the best xenosophontological guess—an extremely powerful and highly developed artificial intelligence, possibly an AI that had been around for hundreds of millions or even billions of years. It could probably think rings around anything humans could bring to bear and come up with countertactics and unexpected attacks in nanoseconds.

Still, a guy with a stone knife and the element of surprise could kill a man with a high-tech handgun, if he could get in the first blow. It was that sizeable if that the squadron would be working on.

“Headhunters,” CAG called over the squadron’s tactical net. “You are clear to commence your drop in thirty seconds.”

“Okay, people,” Leystrom added. “There is a chance that the Rosies are coming in to talk. Keep your weapons offline, I repeat, off-line until either I or C3 gives you the word. Understand?”

A ragged chorus of assents came back. “What’re the chances the bastards want to talk, Skipper?” Lieutenant Greg Malone asked.

“When the Joint Chiefs see fit to tell me, I’ll let you know,” Leystrom replied. “Just stay the hell alert, and don’t Krait ’em until you get orders. Understand?”

“Copy that, Commander.”

The seconds dragged past. “VFA-211, commence drop sequence in three … and two … and one … drop!”

Centrifugal force tossed Meier’s Starblade from the carrier’s launch tube. As he dropped clear of America’s shieldcap, he could see the objective dead ahead … a small and fuzzy patch of pale light.

“CIC,” Leystrom said. “Handing off from PriFly. Headhunters are clear of the ship and formed up.”

“CIC copies that, Hunters, and thank you. Accelerate and close with the objective.”

“CIC, Headhunters, we copy. Boosting in three … two … one … kick it!”

The flight of Starblades hurtled outward, their view of space ahead turned strange as their velocity inexorably crowded that of light. For Meier, it was as though he was suspended somehow in time, with all of the visible stars crowded into a ring of light forward, with everything else enveloped in total black emptiness, and with no feeling of movement at all.

Moments later, the fighter AIs linked and in synch gave rapid-fire commands that flipped the Starblades end for end and began deceleration.

“Headhunters!” Leystrom snapped. “Arm Kraits and Boomslangs!”

Meier thoughtclicked an in-head icon, arming his fighter’s complement of missiles—thirty-two VG-92 Krait space-to-space shipkiller missiles, plus six of the far more powerful VG-120 Boomslangs.

Light exploded around him.

The Consciousness

Outer Sol System

1932 hours, TFT

In much the same way as the human mind emerged from tightly interlinking networks of individual neurons, the Consciousness was an emergent phenomenon arising from some hundreds of billions of lesser units. That subset of itself that had just entered the Sol System was only a tiny fraction of the Whole. Other iterations of the Consciousness were back within the depths of the Omega Centauri cluster, at Kapteyn’s Star, and scattered throughout the galaxy, some in communication with one another via microscopic wormholes, some operating completely independently.

This Consciousness had made the jump from Kapteyn’s Star some twelve light years away, using data lifted from various human-ship AIs to find the human home system. As it closed on Earth, it sensed the approaching objects, but only as material abstractions bearing low-level minds of questionable sentience. For the Rosette Consciousness, aware of individual hydrogen atoms singing within the Deep, enmeshed within the etheric beauty of intertwining magnetic fields and a complex sea of electromagnetic radiation, the merely material was of little importance. Sensate to the warp and woof of spacetime itself and the interplay of gravitational ripples across the underlying fabric of myriad dimensions, the Rosette had little interest in solid objects, however swiftly they might be hurtling across the Void.

Those minds it sensed ahead promised larger, more powerful mentalities within this system, however. Reaching out with its senses, the Consciousness recognized aggregates of mass as planets, all orbiting a single star. One rocky planet in particular, directly ahead, was the focus of an extremely complex concentration of electromagnetic frequencies, gravitic anomalies, and encrypted transmissions that could not possibly be natural. If there were higher minds in this star system, they would be physically present there, on the world the human systems had identified as Earth.

Destruction of Earth, the Consciousness estimated, and the assimilation of all minds of worthwhile caliber, should require only a few minutes …

Three of the entity’s components, traveling well out in advance of the main cloud, struck material objects with combined velocities approaching that of light, kinetic energy flaring into miniature suns of appalling destructive power …

VFA-211, Headhunters

Outer Sol System

1921 hours, TFT

Meier and the other Headhunters didn’t see the oncoming projectiles. They couldn’t, not with combined velocities approaching that of light itself. Not even the fighter AIs could react in time.

Porter’s Starblade flashed into star-hot plasma an instant before the ships piloted by Malone and Judith Kelly blossomed into light and hard radiation. “Christ!” Lakeland exclaimed; his fighter brushed the expanding wavefront of what had been Porter’s fighter and went into a savage tumble.

For a stunned instant, Meier stared into the triplet of rapidly fading stars displayed in-head. No …

“CIC, Hunter One!” Leystrom yelled. “Headhunters are under attack! Request permission to fire!”

“Permission to fire granted, Hunter One.”

“Hunters! Let ’em have it with everything we’ve got! Wide dispersion, proximity detonation! Put up a fucking wall!”

Meier thoughtclicked a blinking icon, loosing a pair of VG-92 pulse-focused variable-yield Krait shipkillers. “Fox One away!” Meier yelled over the tactical channel, the battle code for a smart-AI missile launch.

“And Fox One!” Lieutenant Pamela Schaeffer called out. Other Headhunter pilots chimed in as the sky ahead filled with fast-moving proximity-fused warheads.

White flashes silently strobed against the darkness. Even one-hundred-megaton detonations were not particularly vivid in space; the flash was bright, but unless the warhead vaporized part of a ship or other large target, there was little plasma to balloon outward in a fireball, and no atmosphere to transmit a shock wave. By using proximity fusing, though, the warheads turned thousands of the incoming firefly microships into expanding clouds of hot gas, and those clouds caught more and more of the tiny craft as they swept in. At relativistic speeds, even a few stray atoms of gas could superheat the alien microships and flare them into hot plasma. In moments, there were enough expanding gas clouds that they acted like solid walls as additional fireflies slammed into them.

The human fighters continued their deceleration, avoiding the white-hot volume of destruction spreading across open space. The cloud of alien fireflies kept coming, seemingly oblivious … and in moments half of the sky was lighting up in rapid-fire pulses of heat and radiation as they slammed into hot gas and debris.

Meier fought as though he was in a trance, pulling up in-head icons and thoughtclicking them, sending missile after missile into the growing wall of white flame. He was vaguely aware of the other fighters in his squadron, vaguely aware of three other squadrons off the America adding their firepower to the melee. He couldn’t think … didn’t want to think; not about the three deaths he’d just witnessed.

And then the thoughts began flowing and he couldn’t turn them off. Malone had been a buddy, a drinking partner on liberty and an interesting guy in late-night bull sessions on board ship. As for Kelly and Porter … they were all wingmates. And that’s a bond that forms tightly, no matter if he had known them for years, like Kelly, or had only recently met them, like Porter.

Every military pilot knew this was a dangerous job, one of the most hazardous assignments on the board for naval personnel. They knew the risks and they knew the odds, and sudden death by fireball—or worse, by frozen suffocation—were constant specters tucked into the cockpit each and every time a pilot launched.

But it still was a shock each time you encountered it.

“Meier!” Leystrom’s voice called. “Watch your vector! Break right!”

He’d let his attention wander for just a moment and had been falling toward a fading blossom of plasma. “Copy,” he called back. His fighter’s AI had been nudging at him, he saw, trying to get his attention. He let the fighter’s electronic mind flip the flickering drive singularity around and sharply change his course.

The fighters continued firing Krait missiles, hurling warhead after nuclear warhead into the oncoming swarm of glowing microvessels. At the same time, the thickest part of the alien firefly swarm slammed into the wall of glowing plasma, adding fresh and rapidly moving debris to the deadly cloud.

Abruptly, however, the aliens shifted their tactics as the swarming vessels, most only a centimeter or two long, altered course to move around the wall of detonations and expanding gas clouds rather than through. In a matter of seconds, the human fighters went from holding the line to being in imminent danger of being bypassed or surrounded.

“Fall back, Hunters!” Leystrom called. “Everyone fall back!”

TC/USNA CVS America

Outer Sol System

1920 hours, TFT

Captain Sara Gutierrez sat on America’s bridge, watching the computer-generated graphics on the main screen in front of her. A similar image was showing on an in-head window, but she’d pushed that to the back of her awareness. She preferred seeing things through her own eyes rather than directly through her brain. She wasn’t certain why … though she suspected that some perverse part of her preferred to keep the data at arm’s length, in some sense, to give her brain time, distance, and a much-needed objectivity to process it. Trevor—Admiral Gray—would have called her old-fashioned … but, then, he’d had a Prim’s mistrust of implants and AI feeds, so who was he to talk?

Damn … she missed having the admiral on the flag bridge behind her. Why the hell had the top brass seen fit to yank him off the America?

The graphics in front of her were painting the Rosette swarm as a vast, angry red hand, the fingers reaching past and around the small blue cons marking the fighter squadrons. The fighters were in very real danger of being surrounded.

“CAG!” she called. “Get our people out of there!”

“Working on it, Captain! Those things are fast.”

“I would remind the Captain,” Commander Dean Mallory, the ship’s senior tactical officer aft in the CIC, said, “that what we’re seeing here is almost twenty minutes out of date.”

“I know, I know,” she grumbled. “Damn it, Keating, get us in closer!”

“Aye, aye, ma’am,” the helm officer replied. “Another few minutes subjective.”

The twists and turns of relativistic combat tended to make Gutierrez’s eyes cross, and it was a damned good thing, she thought, that the ship’s AI could handle that stuff without blinking. America had released the fighters when she was just under five astronomical units away from the objective. Those fighters would have crossed that gulf in a bit over forty minutes, reaching the target at around 1720 hours. During that forty minutes, America herself had closed the range to just under 2 AUs—say, fifteen light-minutes.

Fair enough. But that meant that America was now picking up telemetry beamed from her fighter squadrons fifteen minutes ago, letting her literally see the recent past.

But what was happening now was still hidden and would not be revealed for another fifteen minutes.

And so Captain Gutierrez and her bridge crew had seen the destruction of three fighters out of VFA-211 and were watching now as the Headhunters conducted a skillful fighting withdrawal. The outcome likely had already been decided, one way or another, but America wouldn’t see what that outcome was for another … make it another eight minutes. America was still hurtling toward the far-off firefight at a bit under seven-tenths c.

“Captain?” Mallory said, his voice steady and calm in her head. “CIC. We don’t know how our fighters will stand up against those … things. We have to be prepared to try a different set of tactics when we get there. I recommend using nano-D.”

The idea shocked … though she’d been thinking about it herself. “That’s on the proscribed list, Commander!”

“Yeah, and it may be the only damned thing we have that can touch those things!”

“Point. Do we have any?”

“Affirmative, Captain. A few thousand rounds. We were scheduled to offload it at SupraQuito, but events … ah … kind of overtook us.”

“You can say that again.” Gutierrez thought furiously. The use of nano-D was not illegal … not exactly, not yet. Use of the stuff was strongly restricted, however, bound up in red tape and prohibitions, to the point where Gutierrez would quite literally be putting her career on the line if she gave the order to use it.

Weapons-grade nanotechnic disassemblers were molecule-sized machines that attached themselves to any material substance with which they came in contact and took it apart atom by atom, releasing a very great deal of heat in the process. Just over a year earlier, in November 2424, a rogue element in the Pan-European military had launched a string of nano-D warheads at the USNA capital of Columbus, Ohio, in an attempt to decapitate the rebellious North-American government. Buildings, pavement and subsurface infrastructure, vehicles, and people all had been reduced to their component atoms in the space of seconds. The heart of the city had been cored cleanly into oblivion, replaced by a perfectly circular lake three kilometers across and half a kilometer deep. Millions had died.

After that atrocity, many had demanded a retaliatory strike against Geneva. President Koenig had managed to deflect the call for vengeance, launching instead a memetic engineering raid in cyberspace … a purely data-oriented attack that ultimately had won USNA independence from the Earth Confederation.

But after the Columbus attack, some within the government had begun calling for a ban on all nano-D weaponry. The stuff was deadly; there was always the possibility that it would escape human control. Nano-D was programmed to shut down after a certain period of time or a certain number of disassembly cycles, but if that programming failed, the cloud of hungry molecular machines might keep on going, gobbling up everything in their path. Worse, a small twist to the programming code could have the nanoD take disassembled atoms and reassemble them as more nano-D. The cloud would grow, and might easily expand to devour the planet.

Back in the late twentieth century, some people had argued against the entire idea of nanotechnology. All of Earth, they’d warned, might be transformed into a mass of “gray goo” if nanotech disassemblers began taking matter apart and building new disassemblers in a never-ending spiral of destruction.

However, like fire, nanotechnology had proven to be far too useful for human industry, medicine, and economics, despite its obvious dangers. With careful safeguards in place to control the disassembly process, gray goo had never become a serious threat. Despite those safeguards, though, nano-D weaponry had been refined and improved over the years until its potential for mass destruction in warfare had become unrivaled.

As well as fatal for some millions of the citizens of Columbus.

What, Gutierrez thought, a little desperately, would Admiral Gray have done here? America carried nano-D weaponry. Earth was under the gravest threat it had ever faced. Would he have ordered its use if he’d been the one calling the shots?

Sara Gutierrez was fairly certain she knew the answer. Gray had always been an unorthodox tactician, using what was available in new, decisive, and often astonishing ways. Hell, twenty years ago, as a young fighter pilot, he’d won the nickname “Sandy” Gray by launching AMSO rounds—anti-missile shield ordnance—at attacking Sh’daar vessels. AMSO warheads were little more than packages of sand fired into the paths of incoming missiles; Gray’s tactical innovation had been to launch that sand at capital ships at close to the speed of light.

Damned few enemy ships had survived that encounter.

Was using nano-D any less moral or ethical than throwing near-c sand at someone?

She doubted very much that Gray would have seen much of a difference there.

“Okay,” she said. “Load the first two nano-D rounds, spinal mount,” she said. “CAG! Tell our people out there what’s happening and make sure they get the hell out of the way!”

“Yes, Captain.”

According to the most recent set of regulations, ship captains were supposed to get permission from higher military authority to launch nano-D weaponry. There was a loophole, though. Sometimes, the speed-of-light time lag was just too long to make checking in with headquarters possible.

But … heaven help you if you were wrong.

“Okay. How far is the objective from Earth?”

“It’s currently crossing the orbit of Jupiter, Captain,” the helm officer reported. “But at an oblique angle. Call it eight light-minutes.”

Too far, in other words, for her to ask permission.

She took a deep breath. “Notify Earth of my intent to launch nanotechnic disassembler warheads at the target once the tactical situation is clear.”

It would have to be a case of shooting first and asking permission later. But such was the nature of deep-space combat.

Chapter Five

1 February 2426

New White House

Washington, D.C.

2045 hours, EST

“She’s going to what?”

President Koenig wasn’t angry so much as startled. Sara Gutierrez, so far as he’d known the woman through reports and after-action briefs and discussions with Trevor Gray, had always struck him as a cautious and somewhat conservative ship commander. She was a consummate professional, meticulous and very good at what she did.

Unlike Gray, she wasn’t one for dramatic gestures or surprises. Certainly, he’d never expected her to be the sort to unleash nanotechnic hell on the enemy.

“The report gives no details, Mr. President,” Marcus Whitney, Koenig’s White House chief of staff, said. “Captain Gutierrez simply said she would use the weapons once the tactical situation had cleared.”

Koenig knew all too well where Gutierrez was coming from. He’d been there himself more than once a couple of decades ago when he’d commanded the America battlegroup. A ship captain observing a battle light-seconds or even light-minutes away in fact was looking into the past. The tactical situation could be “cleared” only by getting closer … and receiving more up-to-the-moment intelligence.

Of course, the problem was even worse for would-be micromanagers watching from almost a full light-hour away. Gutierrez likely had already moved in close and launched her deadly attack … or she was about to, and there was no way that Koenig or his staff back on Earth could deliver up-to-the-second orders or advice. The fog of war had always been a problem for commanders on the battlefield; that murk became impenetrable when you added the dimension of time, and the difficulties created by communications limited by the speed of light.

“We have other warships across the solar system,” Admiral Armitage told him. “The Essex, the New York, and the Kauffman are leaving SupraQuito now, along with their support groups. Varyag, Putin, San Francisco, and Champlain have just left Mars orbit. Komet will be pulling out of Ceres in another ten minutes. We’ve sent emergency recalls to eighteen vessels on High Guard patrol, out at Neptune orbit …”

“Bottom line,” Koenig said, waving a hand in curt dismissal. “How long before we can set up an effective defensive line between Earth and those … things?”

“The defensive line will take several hours to establish, Mr. President. The first ships—a Pan-European carrier group transiting from Jupiter to Earth—should join the America within the next twenty minutes. In another two hours, we may be able to muster another fifteen vessels.”

“Our time or theirs?” Koenig thoughtclicked an in-head icon, bringing up a 3-D display filling a quarter of the Oval Office with translucent, glowing images. There were dozens of military vessels scattered across the solar system, from the Mercury power facilities tucked in close to the sun to High Guard patrols scattered through the Kuiper Belt, maintaining a watch against infalling comets. America and a red icon marking the alien intruders hung near Jupiter’s orbit, though that gas giant was currently on the other side of the sun.

The problem, as always, was that Sol System was so freaking big. Even with near-c velocities and high-G accelerations, it would take time, far too much time, to assemble them all in one place.

“The task force will join America at 1805 hours, fleet time,” Armitage told him.

“So, basically,” Koenig said slowly, “it’s up to America to hold the Rosetters where they are until the others get there.”

“Yes, sir.”

Koenig shook his head slowly. “God help us all.” He glanced at Whitney. “Anything from Tsiolkovsky?”

The chief of staff shook his head. “Nothing good, Mr. President. I talked to Dr. Lawrence on the AI Center staff. They say there’s no response from the system. It’s like Konstantin isn’t in there at all.”

“That makes no sense,” Armitage said. “Where would it go?”

“Konstantin must have created a bolt-hole for himself,” Koenig said. “The Rosetters appeared to be … feeding, for lack of a better word, on the digital uploads of the various Sh’daar beings out at Kapteyn’s Star, and that would include their AIs operating inside their virtual reality. Konstantin must have had an escape hatch in case the Rosetters came here. And he’s smart enough that we’re not going to find it.”

“So it’s hiding from the Rosetters, you think, sir?”

“Almost certainly. Let’s just hope they can’t find that hiding place either.”

Bridge

TC/USNA CVS America

Outer Asteroid Belt

2053 hours, TFT

Captain Gutierrez studied the inflow of data with grim determination. “How much longer before Task Force Ritter gets here?”

“They’re within extended launch range now, Captain,” Commander Mallory told her. She could see the computer graphics unfolding within an in-head window—the advancing wall of red light marking the Consciousness microcraft, the tiny knot of oncoming human ships, the retreating clusters of fighters. “Twelve minutes …”

“Sensors!”

“Yes, Captain!”

“How big is that thing? How massive?”

“The cloud is roughly half an astronomical unit across, Captain,” Lieutenant Scahill replied. “Mass … it’s tough to tell when it’s that diffuse, but I’m guessing something on the order of two times ten to the thirty grams.”

“That’s as big as Jupiter!”

“Yes, ma’am.”

And how the hell did you fight something as massive as the gas giant Jupiter?

Gutierrez shifted her attention back to the fighter screen, and to the teeming swarm of microcraft beyond. She was juggling a number of variables—maintaining distance from the leading edge of the cloud but moving slowly enough away from that cloud that the fighters could catch up. The fighters, too, were engaged in a kind of complex three-dimensional dance, continuing to fire nuclear warheads in front of the cloud, causing it to slow, to spread out, to break into separate masses, while staying ahead of the swarm and closing with the carrier. One squadron, VFA-190, the Ghost Riders, had already caught up with America and was currently recovering back aboard.

Despite her message to Earth, Gutierrez had not yet loosed the one ace she had hidden up her sleeve. Once she began firing nano-D at the approaching alien cloud, that region of space would become deadly for America’s fighters, and she wanted to get her people back on board before initiating the new tactics.

It seemed more and more likely, however, that she was not going to have the chance. America’s sensors were already picking up incoming fireflies slipping past the carrier’s outer hull. They didn’t appear to be doing any damage; they weren’t disassembling America’s hull or otherwise posing an immediate threat to the ship.

But they were proof that the human defensive force was losing the race.

Another fighter, a Black Knight with VFA-215, flared into an incandescent blossom.

“Weapons officer!” Gutierrez ordered. “Ready two disassembler rounds for immediate railgun launch!”

“First two rounds are loaded and ready,” Commander Kevin Daly, America’s new weapons officer, replied. “At your command …”

“Target inside that cloud. Have them detonate at least half a million kilometers beyond the farthest Starblade.”

“Aye, aye, Captain. We’re locked and loaded.”

“Fire!”

The star carrier mounted two magnetic-launch railguns running most of the length of the kilometer-long vessel’s slender spine, emerging in side-by-side ports at the center of the broad, massive shield cap forming the vessel’s prow. The ports opened … and two one-ton projectiles hurtled into space, accelerated in an instant to nearly 1 percent of the speed of light.

Recoil nudged the immense carrier … hard. Gutierrez’s seat jerked back, yanking her along. “Helm! Compensate!”

“Got it, ma’am …”

“Reload!”

“Reloading!”

“CAG! Pass the word to our fighters to lay down everything they have left around the periphery of that cloud.”

“Captain? …”

“I want to force it to move through the center.”

“Aye, aye, Captain.”

“Weapons!”

“Weapons, aye.”

“Mr. Daly! Hold your fire. In a few minutes I expect that cloud to begin contracting toward its center. When it does, I want you to slam as many nano-D warheads into that center as you can!”

“Aye, aye, Captain!”

She leaned forward, staring into the CGI panorama ahead. She could see white points of light moving swiftly out from the fighters, warheads swinging out and to the sides. Blinding flashes marked the detonations, and, sure enough, the cloud began to contract. Thermonuclear blasts were ravaging the outer edges of the alien swarm, and the individual microcraft responded by moving toward the center.

“Very well, Mr. Daly. Fire! And continue firing!”

“Firing …”

Two more warheads packed with nanotech disassemblers slammed out of America’s bow. And two more … and two more …

VFA-211, Headhunters

Outer Asteroid Belt

2059 hours, TFT

Meier and the rest of the Headhunters—those who were left, at any rate—continued to fall back toward the America, now just ten thousand kilometers distant. The Ghost Riders had already been taken aboard. The Black Knights were retreating alongside the Headhunters, all semblance of an ordered flight formation lost in the melee in front of the alien cloud.

He triggered his last pair of Kraits, sending them streaking into darkness. The order had come through from CIC moments before to fire all remaining missiles at the cloud’s perimeter, and Meier was doing so, though so far he’d seen little sign that the target was even aware of the barrage.

All he had left were his six Boomslangs.

He thoughtclicked a mental icon, triggering the release of his last missiles, sending them well out to one side of the cloud before looping them in for the kill. Kraits could be dialed up to a hundred megatons or so. VG-120 Boomslangs used focused bursts of vacuum energy to amplify the detonation to the equivalent of as much as a thousand megatons of high explosives. Generally, they were reserved for planetary or asteroid fortifications or extremely large and hardened military emplacements. The fireball flash of a VG-120 was eight kilometers across.

That, he thought with a grim finality, ought to get that swarm’s attention!

And that was it. His missile magazines were dry. He still had particle beams and a high-speed Gatling that fired depleted uranium, but those were popguns in the face of that incoming swarm.

It was definitely time to head back to the barn.

The Consciousness

Outer Sol System

2059 hours, TFT

In a sense, the Consciousness was carefully feeling its way into this star system, unsure of what was here. It was awash in data. Literally billions of sensations flooded through its laser-sharp awareness second by second, sensory input carrying gigabits of information about the density of the local interplanetary medium, about temperature, about the local gravitational matrix, about radiation, light, and magnetic moment. It sensed the eternal dance of vibrating hydrogen atoms and the wrack of lifeless, drifting dust charged with searing radiation; the sharp pulse of thermonuclear detonations; the shrill keening of hundreds of millions of radio frequencies, some heterodyned with encoded meaning, most of it empty noise.

It sensed spacecraft, it sensed the minute and insignificant flickers of warmth and electrical activity that were organic beings, it sensed the far faster and more information-rich pulses of electronic intelligences.

Local space was, for the Rosette Consciousness, a kind of maze, with flares of hard radiation appearing and dissipating in seemingly random patterns ahead of it. Each flash of heat and light annihilated some hundreds of millions of the microcraft making up the entity’s physical form, but there were tens of trillions of the craft linked into its network, and the loss of a thousandth of 1 percent of the machines was trivial, a minor ablation to be expected as it moved through the relatively dense space of a typical star system such as this. The Consciousness allowed itself to flow in those directions that offered the least resistance. An opening appeared in the radiation storms … there …

It sensed two spacecrafts, guided by simple-minded electronics, piercing the outer reaches of its diffuse body.

Then, shockingly … horrifically … the Consciousness sensed something, a dizzying sense of loss and diminution, something that just possibly might be described as pain.

TC/USNA CVS America

Outer Asteroid Belt

2059 hours, TFT

“Captain!” the weapons officer called from his station in CIC. “The swarm is reacting!”

“I see it, Commander.”

Gutierrez watched, fascinated, as the swarm, painted in red both on her main screen and in the open window within her mind, sharply contracted and began folding back within itself. There could be little doubt that it was reacting to the nanotechnic disassemblers fired into its heart. The only question was … would they be enough?

The cloud’s forward advance had stopped, at least for the moment. “CAG!” she called. “Now’s our chance. Bring our people back on board.”

“The Headhunters are recovering now, Captain. We’ll have everyone back on board in … call it ten minutes.”

Gutierrez checked other data feeds and noted that Task Force Ritter was now just six minutes away. They had fighters out, now, coming in well in advance of the light carrier Wotan. Missile trails reached out from the Pan-Euro fighters, probing the alien cloud.

The cloud seemed to be reacting less to the fresh barrage of missiles than it was to the steady drumbeat of nano-D searing into its central core. It was flowing backward now, as though trying to escape the burning touch of the nanodisassemblers, and seemed to be compacting itself.

A sphere. It was collapsing down into a smooth, black sphere …

“What the hell is happening to that thing?” Gutierrez asked.

“We’ve seen this sort of technology before, Captain,” Lydia Powell said. Powell was the new head of America’s xenosophontology department, replacing Dr. Truitt. “At the Rosette, in Omega Centauri … at Kapteyn’s Star. Those micromachines can join together in millions of different ways.”

“Right now,” Gutierrez said, “they appear to be making a planet the size of Jupiter.”

“A J-brain, Captain …”

“What’s that?”

“A jovian world made of solid computronium. It would possess an artificial mentality of staggering power.”

“What would such a thing be for?”

“I doubt humans would be able to grasp the reasoning of minds that powerful, Captain,” Powell told her.

“I just want to know why it’s quietly turning itself into a planet,” Gutierrez said. “We already know it was intelligent, a super-AI of some sort. Why change from a cloud half an AU across to that?”

“Power, Captain,” Mallory said from CIC. “As a diffuse cloud, each distinct unit was producing its own power … probably from the local magnetic field. As a single sphere one hundred forty thousand kilometers across, it could assemble internal structures to draw vacuum energy.”

“It could build some pretty hellacious weapons, too,” Gutierrez said. As she watched the forming sphere ahead, she felt a deep stirring of fear mingled with awe. “Helm … let’s increase our separation from that thing.”

“Yes, ma’am!”

“Message coming through from the Pan-Euros,” the bridge communications officer reported. “Admiral Ritter … for you.”

“What’s our c-lag?”

“Five seconds, Captain. Two-way.”

“Put him on.”

She counted down the time lapse as a laser-com beam raced out from America … with another delay as the reply lanced back.

“Captain Gutierrez,” a voice said in her head at last, cultured and slightly accented. “I’m Admiral Jan Ritter, on board the carrier Wotan. What is the tactical situation?”

“Hello, Admiral. Captain Gutierrez of the star carrier America. Here’s an update.” Gutierrez transmitted the bridge log recordings for the previous forty minutes. “We have not been able to more than distract that thing,” she added. “Our fighters have expended their weapons and are now recovering back on board. We are continuing to fire high-velocity nano-D canisters into the object. We are not yet sure if this is having any direct effect.”

Another five seconds dragged past.

“Cease fire, America! Cease fire! Do not, repeat, do not continue to fire disassemblers at the target!”

Gutierrez hesitated. Technically, Ritter outranked her. If America had been assigned to Task Force Ritter she would have been legally able to give her orders. On the other hand, America had not received orders to join with Task Force Ritter, which meant that she could do as she damn well pleased. An interesting political and diplomatic situation …

But Wotan’s fighters were entering the combat zone, which meant they would be at risk from America’s nano-D fire. “Mr. Daly!” she called. “Cease fire.”

“Aye, aye, Captain.”

“Com. Message headquarters. Update them … and request clarification of our command chain out here.”

“Right away, Captain.”

This far from Earth, it would be forty minutes for her request to reach HQ, and forty minutes more for their reply to get back to the America. Damn, she should have requested that clarification as soon as she knew Wotan’s battle group was going to join her.

It didn’t help, too, that she didn’t like the Euros … or trust them. Memories of the Confederation Civil War were still too damned fresh. She’d lost family in Columbus—her brother Steve, both of his wives, and her two young nephews. She wasn’t about to turn her ship over to the Pan-Euros without some very explicit orders indeed.

“Have your fighters reloaded,” Ritter told her, “and launch them in support of my battle group.”

“With respect, Admiral … no. Our fighters hit them with everything they had and didn’t even slow that thing down. We did get a reaction when we hit them with the nano-D, however.”

“We do not carry nanodisassembler weapons, Captain.” The words sounded stiff, a little awkward. The memetic engineering campaign that had ended the civil war, she knew, had been designed to create deep and widespread shame throughout the European community over their use of disassembler weapons on Columbus. Since then, she understood, Pan-European ships no longer deployed with nano-D weaponry. How much of that was engineered guilt and how much was public relations she had no idea, but the inevitable result was that Task Force Ritter had just shown up at a knife fight armed with marshmallows.

“If you do not join with us, America,” Ritter said, “then stay clear!”

“Admiral, I suggest that you recall your fighters, which are useless here. I will continue bombarding the enemy with nanotechnic disassemblers.”

The seconds dragged past. Ritter’s reply was blunt and to the point. “Nein, Captain. You had your chance. Now it is our turn.”

Task Force Ritter, consisting of the light carrier Wotan, a cruiser identified as the Kurst, and three destroyers, began moving toward the swiftly growing alien sphere behind a screen of fighters.

The fight began, evolved, and ended almost literally within the blink of an eye. Gutierrez and her bridge crew watched, horrified, as the Wotan suddenly crumpled as though in the grip of a titanic, invisible fist. Her shield cap ruptured with shocking abruptness, spraying glittering clouds of swiftly freezing water droplets across space as the broken remnants of a ship seven tenths of a kilometer long dwindled and twisted and was crushed down to nothing. Air sprayed into the vacuum, freezing along with the ice crystal cloud … and then the Wotan was gone, with nothing left whatsoever, save the ice clouds and a few spinning fragments of metal.

Kurst and the destroyers slowed their forward movement, but it took time to decelerate and reverse course … and the Rosette alien was not giving them that time. The Kurst died in precisely the same way as the Wotan, her hull wadding up as it collapsed until nothing was left but ice crystal clouds and glittering specks of metallic debris.

“What is that weapon?” Gutierrez demanded.

“Gravitic, Captain,” Mallory replied from the CIC. “I don’t know if it’s some sort of projected beam or maybe an artificial black hole, or if they’re using those ships’ gravitic drives against them … but whatever it is, it crushed them under the effects of several million gravities!”

“God in heaven …”

The destroyers succeeded, finally, in coming to a halt relative to the giant sphere, then flipped end-for-end and began accelerating. The sphere was following, though, looming vast against the night. The destroyer Rouen, lagging slightly behind the other two, was taken … crushed out of existence in an instant.

The survivors—two destroyers and a number of fighters, accelerated to fifty thousand gravities, fleeing as though hell itself was close on their heels …

And the ebon black sphere pursued.

“Helm! Get us the hell out of here!” Gutierrez snapped. “Com! Send a full report to headquarters!”

“Aye, aye, Captain.”

Earth needed to know what was bearing down on them out here, and they needed to know now.

“Mr. Mallory!”

“Yes, Captain!”

“Resume firing nanotechnic disassemblers into the path of that thing.”

“Aye, aye, Captain.”

“Program them to detonate outside the range of those gravitics, if you can.”

“We’re estimating a range limit of around two hundred thousand kilometers,” Mallory told her. “That’s based on the ranges at which they killed Wotan and Kurst.”

“Good.”

“Not good, ma’am. At that kind of range, the individual nano-D particles will be so broadly dispersed they might not have much of an effect.”

“What I want, Commander, is to turn that whole volume of space between us and them toxic. Put so many hungry nano-Ds in there, they’re going to get bit if they step inside.”

“Well … it’s worth a try, Captain.”

“It’s all we have, Commander.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Other ships were arriving from different parts of the Sol System, coming in a few at a time. Most were smaller than the America—gunships and destroyers and a couple of heavy cruisers, Varyag and Komet. A Chinese Hegemony contingent of eight vessels was reported en route, but it wouldn’t arrive for another thirty minutes at best.

“Pass the word to every ship as they come in,” Gutierrez said. “I want a wall up between Earth and that sphere. And they’re to use nano-D weaponry if they have it.”

A wall was the three-dimensional equivalent of a line in naval surface warfare, a formation that would give every defending vessel a clear shot at the enemy … and just maybe project the message that the Earth ships were not going to let the Rosette entity pass without a fight. Gutierrez had come into this conflict thinking of the alien cloud as a swarm of tiny ships, but she was beginning to understand them differently now. All of those microvessels out there were part of a whole; the enemy was an artificial intelligence residing within the entire alien swarm. They were facing, not a fleet, but a titanic alien being.

A being that now was extending itself, projecting beams of light in a complex three-dimensional network with no clear pattern that she could comprehend. She’d seen it before, though. Then, the Rosette entity appeared to be anchoring itself in space using solid light.

Now, the alien mass continued to move …

… and it was heading directly toward Earth, only a few AUs distant.

Chapter Six

1 February 2426

New White House

Washington, D.C.

2142 hours, EST

“Mr. President?” Marcus Whitney said. “Incoming message for you, flagged ‘Most Urgent.’ Dr. Wilkerson, sir.”

“I’ll take it,” Koenig said. He was immersed in the holographic display showing the battle and could barely see Whitney through the glowing haze of imagery.

“This transmission is also going to the Joint Chiefs and secdef, and to Mars HQ, sir.”

With a thoughtclick, the projection showing America and several other ships facing off against the giant alien intruder faded out, replaced by the strained features of Phillip Wilkerson, head of the ONI Xenosophontological Research Department at Mare Crisium, on the moon.

Koenig nodded. “Yes, Doctor. What is it?”

The almost three-second time delay for the there-and-back signal transmission between Earth and moon seemed to drag out forever. “Good evening, Mr. President. I thought you would want to know. We’re uploading a new Omega virus to the America.”

“New how?”

“It’s the basic AI-Omega structure, with layered quantum encryption in the matrix.”

“English, please, Doctor.”

“We Turusched the code. It may help us get past the Rosette entity’s immunodefenses.”

Koenig considered this. They’d used the Tabby’s Star Omega virus against that thing with at least some success once before. It had stopped, at least, and an AI clone of Konstantin had been able to talk with it.

But they’d been assuming that Omega was a one-shot weapon. The Rosette entity was an enormously fast and powerful AI, far more capable in all respects than Konstantin. It would have analyzed that first attack and would now have defenses—like an organic body’s immune system—solidly in place.

“Turusched the code?” Koenig frowned. What the hell did that … ah! He got it.

The Turusch were an alien species, a part of the Sh’daar Associative with an unusual means of communication. The beings lived in closely bonded pairs and they spoke simultaneously, but not in unison. One would say one thing, the other something else … and the sounds of the two voices blended in a series of harmonics that carried yet a third, amplifying meaning. “Turusched the code” meant Wilkerson had figured out how to write viral codes in layers, like the complex Turusch language.

A number of Turusch pairs were still living in the xenosophontological research labs beneath the Mare Crisium as a kind of diplomatic community, where Wilkerson and his people had been studying them for over twenty years, now.

“You think this will give us another shot at the Rosetter?” Koenig asked.

“It should help us,” Wilkerson said slowly, “to communicate with it. We’ve been able to nest three AIs on top of one another. The deeper minds monitor the ones above, support them, and watch out for signs that the top-level mind has been corrupted or compromised. We’re calling it Trinity.”

Koenig wondered if Wilkerson was talking about something like the way the human brain worked, with conscious and subconscious minds … or the Freudian idea of id, ego, and superego. More likely, he decided, Wilkerson was discussing AI-related technicalities—which Koenig had no clue about.

Warfare, Koenig thought, was rapidly evolving beyond the ken of humans. Whether that was necessarily a bad thing remained to be seen. But it appeared that artificial intelligence was more interested in talking with the opponent and not simply destroying it in flame and fury, and that was something Koenig—as president of almost a billion people—could understand.

The problem was, he wasn’t even sure he had a choice in the matter anymore, because weaponry was increasingly godlike in its scope and power, and the AIs wielding it were so far beyond human capabilities as to make humans completely irrelevant.

Sooner rather than later, we might just be along for the ride. For now, though …

“Keep me informed,” Koenig told Wilkerson. “Don’t let your new toy give away the farm. But if it can buy us some breathing space, let it!”

“Absolutely, Mr. President.”

Koenig cut the link, wondering again where Konstantin was. The Omega Code incorporated part of Konstantin’s matrix into its structure, and presumably Trinity did as well. But he wanted to hear from the super-AI he knew. He didn’t always trust Konstantin … but it had been a loyal advisor for years.

He could almost think of it as his … friend.

Charlie Berquist, head of Koenig’s Secret Service detail, entered the Oval Office without ceremony. “Excuse me, Mr. President. We need to move you out of here.”

“Why?”

“Now, Mr. President. If you please …”

Koenig sighed, then waved the display off. “They won’t be here for an hour at least. Plenty of time …”

“We don’t know that, Mr. President. They could be here any second, now.”

Koenig stood up behind his desk and waited as Berquist activated one of his in-head apps. A portion of the interior wall on the left side of the office vanished, revealing a small travel cylinder imbedded in its vertical tube.

“You boys come with me,” Koenig said. “There’s room.”

“I need to get back to the Pentagon, Mr. President,” Armitage told him. “They’ll be beginning their evacuation as well. But I’ll see you downstairs.”

“Okay. Godspeed.”

Koenig and Whitney followed Berquist to the escape pod and stepped inside. The door rematerialized … and then gravity vanished as the pod went into free fall.

He looked at the Secret Service man. Berquist looked human enough, but Koenig knew that he was in fact more machine than organic, a cyborg packed with high-powered communications and sensor equipment, plus some powerful if currently invisible weaponry.

“Are they evacuating Congress?” he asked.

“Yes, sir. And the Supreme Court, the State Department, and several other agencies.”

“You realize that this is all an exercise in futility, don’t you?”

“I don’t know anything, Mr. President … except that we need to get you to the ’proof.”

Koenig had been through this before. When the Pan-Europeans had evaporated central Columbus, he and most of the USNA government had escaped just ahead of the attack, relocated by high-speed tube to Toronto, where they’d re-established the government and continued the war.

When the government had reclaimed and rebuilt Washington, D.C., they’d used disassemblers to bore out new tunnels and subterranean transit networks, creating a vast city beneath the city, some ten kilometers down. Called the ’proof, for bombproof, the subterranean facility was supposed to be safe from nuclear weapons up to a thousand megatons, to impacts by asteroids several hundred meters across, or to another nano-D attack like the one that had vaporized central Columbus.

The city was ringed by anti-space defenses, including high-velocity AMSO launchers, railguns, nano-D canisters, and high-powered beam weapon emplacements in Arlington, Georgetown, Silver Spring, Bladensburg, and the brand-new planetary defense facility at Spaceport Andrews.

And if anything came through that these defenses couldn’t handle, high-velocity mag-tubes could whisk key members of the government elsewhere—to Toronto, again … or to Denver or Mexico City or a dozen other fortified retreats.

The problem though, Koenig thought as the pod dropped through the hard vacuum of the tube, was that this time it wasn’t just the North-American capital city that was in danger, but the whole fucking planet. If the Rosette Consciousness wanted to wipe out Earth, then, given the advanced technology witnessed so far, they would be able to do so without much effort and no place would be safe.

But certain protocols had been put into place, and certain procedures had to be observed. If he put up a struggle, his own Secret Service people would simply anesthetize him and carry him off bodily.

That seemed needlessly confrontational, not to mention awkward. No, he would play along.

And pray that Wilkerson’s upgraded code was able to stop the approaching entity.

Ready Room, VFA-211

TC/USNA CVS America

Outer Asteroid Belt

2227 hours, TFT

“Do you think they’re going to send us out again?” Lieutenant Schaeffer asked. She sounded … not worried, exactly, but stressed. Concerned, maybe.

Meier gave a listless shrug. He was still dealing with the shockingly abrupt deaths of three of his squadron mates, and was having a lot of trouble coming to grips with what had happened.

They were seated in the squadron ready room, a large open space just above the fighter launch bays. Spin gravity here from the rotating hab section was about half a G, enough to allow them to have a couple of open cups of coffee on the table in front of them. One long wall showed local space—a shrunken sun and a light scattering of stars. Too few were visible to allow Meier to pick out any constellations.

Somewhere out there in that empty darkness was a planet-sized monster …

“They say we’re in the Asteroid Belt,” Schaeffer said. She seemed eager for conversation. “I thought the sky out here would be full of rocks.”

He gave her a hard look. You expected better from a fellow fighter pilot.

“Ah … another victim of the entertainment sims,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Asteroids a kilometer or more across are scattered real thin out here … something like two million kilometers between one asteroid and the next. Even counting rocks just ten meters across or more, the average distance between them is over six thousand kilometers. You could live your whole life on one and never see another rock in your sky, not even as a faint point of light.”

She smiled at him. “So … no daring flights through fields of tumbling asteroids?”

“That’s complete garbage. What I don’t get is how sim presenters have been getting away with that kind of crap since the twentieth century.”

“Well, it was just fiction …”

“They did it in documentaries too. I’ve seen some of them. Science programs where the presenters should have known.”

She laid a hand on his arm. “Yes, but how do you really feel about it, Jason?”

His voice had been getting loud. Things like that did irritate him, but his emotional state was letting it come out as anger.

Suddenly, though, he realized that Schaeffer had been deliberately prodding him, trying to get an emotional response. “You were trolling me,” he said, his tone sharp and accusing.

“Maybe a little,” she admitted. “You were so wrapped up in yourself … so intense. Brooding. It didn’t look healthy.”

“I suppose you’re right.” He looked away, taking in the other Headhunters seated in the room. Walther … Lakeland … they seemed steady enough. Esteban was okay. Dougherty looked nervous … but he was just a kid, another newbie, like Veronica. Kraig looked angry.

Damn, Meier thought. Was he the only one of the squadron’s survivors who felt this way?

“You’ve been thinking of the people we lost?”

“Yeah.”

“Kelly, Malone … who was the new one?”

“Porter.” He said the name with more anger than he’d intended. “Veronica Porter.”

“Were you two close?”

“No. I’d just met her.” He sighed. “You’d think I’d be used to it by now … the butcher’s bill, I mean. We all know the odds. Someone calculated that fighter squadrons lose on average between one and three pilots every time they go into combat. That’s eight percent casualties in your unit if you’re lucky. Twenty-five percent if you’re not. And that’s every fucking time you drop into hot battlespace!”

“Well, we did know what we were getting in for when we volunteered, right?”

“I don’t know about you, Lieutenant. But all they told me was about the glory.”

That, Meier thought as soon as he’d spoken the words, was not entirely true. His recruiter had told him it was dangerous when he’d been selected for fighter training and decided to volunteer.

Maybe he simply wasn’t cut out for this.

“Attention on deck!”

Commander Leystrom strode into the ready room, accompanied by Lieutenant Commander Brody, his adjutant. Schaeffer and Meier came to their feet, along with the other five Headhunters in the room. Three more pilots, a woman and two men, walked in behind them and took positions standing near the front.

“As you were,” Leystrom said. He gestured at the new pilots as the others resumed their seats. “I want you to meet three Pan-Euro fighter pilots. Leutnants Ulrike Hultqvist, Karl Maas, and Jean Araud. They were among the people off the Wotan we recovered after their carrier was destroyed. They’ve been assigned to VFA-211 to … ah … make up for our losses.”

Meier felt a sharp slap of anger. Damn it, you couldn’t just shoehorn new people into a combat squadron like that, not and expect them to fit in smoothly from the get-go. What the hell was America’s CAG thinking?

Leystrom continued, “I know I speak for the whole squadron when I say, ‘Welcome aboard.’”

The three gave a mumble of assent as they took seats.

“Normally, of course,” the commander went on, “we’d all want a period of joint training to integrate new personnel into the unit. We do not, however, have the luxury of time. The Rosetter is out there just a couple of AUs distant, and we are the only thing standing between them and Earth.”

A holographic field switched on at Leystrom’s thought, showing CGI graphics of America and the handful of ships with her, drifting opposite the enigmatic and highly protean alien vessel. Other ship icons were moving up in support … but then Meier remembered that the Rosetter was bigger, more massive than the planet Jupiter. How were they supposed to face a thing like that? It was insane.

The representation shifted to a real-time image from a battlespace drone just a few tens of thousands of kilometers from the monster. The alien device seemed to fill the entire front of the ready room. No longer spherical, it had unfolded somehow into a much larger series of nested shapes, more like a geometric form sculpted from a cloud of dark gas than anything solid. The central core of the thing was illuminated, but the shapes around that glowing core were so complex and so ordered that Meier was having trouble understanding what he was seeing. The patterns looked fractal in nature, with each set of curves and angles and projections repeated again and again at smaller and smaller levels. A tiny speck of gleaming silver debris tumbled past, hinting at the vast scale of the monster beyond.