Bright Light

“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.