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Dark Matter
Ian Douglas
The fifth book in the epic saga of humankind's war of transcendence…An enemy might just have to become an ally . . . in order to save humankindThe United States of North America is now engaged in a civil war with the Earth Confederation, which wants to yield to the demands of the alien Sh'daar, limit human technology, and become a part of the Sh'daar Galactic Collective. USNA President Koenig believes that surrendering to the Sh'daar will ultimately doom humankind.But when highly advanced, seemingly godlike aliens appear through an artificial wormhole in the Omega Centauri Cluster 16,000 light years from Earth, President Koenig is faced with a tremendous choice: continue fighting the Sh'daar . . . or ally with them against the newcomers in a final war that will settle the fate of more than one universe.
Copyright
Harper
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2014
Copyright © Ian Douglas 2014
Cover Art © Gregory Bridges
Ian Douglas 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: 9780007483778
Ebook Edition © May 2014 ISBN: 9780007483785
Version: 2016-11-17
Praise for IAN DOUGLAS
and his thrilling
STAR CARRIER SERIES!
“The action is full-blooded and almost nonstop, yet the well-developed background is surprisingly rich and logical. . . . As immersive as it is impressive.”
Kirkus, starred review for Deep Space
“Douglas knows his SF.”
Publishers Weekly
“Well researched and quite imaginative.”
CNN Online
DEEP SPACE was voted one of the Best Science Fiction/Fantasy Books of 2013 by Kirkus.
Dedication
As always,
throughout the multiverse,
worlds without end,
for Brea
Contents
Cover (#u7a8c0d5c-6f5e-5af4-9fc2-034650256667)
Title Page (#u24c585ec-eb09-525f-b5a8-6df560e8ea53)
Copyright (#u91042af4-5adb-5c86-b31f-bf315f5e855c)
Praise for Ian Douglas (#ua167d55c-00f0-5ad6-838d-1035d8b0bc8b)
Dedication (#u86fc6b63-da30-5a14-a964-39f021602f2a)
Prologue (#ub73610b6-38e6-52ee-a410-7f3e2844c8d0)
Chapter One (#ueabebc14-b35f-5f78-b56c-4e337f8cf57b)
Chapter Two (#u493164f8-45d3-5918-b81b-8e00a970cf24)
Chapter Three (#u626a94c9-3ff3-564e-ba88-d689037eb55a)
Chapter Four (#u8423803f-20a3-534f-af15-603794a1df10)
Chapter Five (#u206697e6-ab50-5d17-a738-551461668a80)
Chapter Six (#u0c0f4bed-1b07-5d90-bf9c-e45e96fe6b4a)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
By Ian Douglas (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue
They called themselves the Consciousness.
Following the faint but telltale leakage of gravity from one universe to another, they’d detected the circle of whirling masses as they opened a passageway between the ’branes, emerging in a four-dimensional space subtly different from other, known realities. They were working now to create a permanent gateway between universes, creating girders and connectors spanning light years, coaxing solid light from the vacuum energy itself, anchoring suns, mining starcores, imbedding the structural components within the fabric of spacetime itself.
At this point, the scope of the Consciousness spanned a number of universes. A metamind, a hive mentality, it was an emergent epiphenomenon arising from the interplay of some hundreds of quadrillions of individual minds, extending across separate realities and billions of years of time. The oldest individuals among them had outlived the universes of their birth, existing now in a kind of nomadic existence as they moved from reality to parallel reality.
The Consciousness was powerful to the point of truly godlike creativity, omnipotence, and omniscience. It was aware of events across vast scales in size and time, from quantum fluctuations in the vacuum energies that formed the base state of reality up to the gravitational interactions within galactic clusters. Their senses extended across multiple dimensions, allowing them to peer inside the cores of stars as they mined them, and they could manipulate time in subtle and surprising ways.
Unfortunately, some phenomena simply were . . . not too small, exactly, since they could perceive the dance of individual atoms, but too inconsequential, too unimportant to register clearly within the metamind’s awareness without a special act of focus.
Phenomena such as the squadron of USNA naval vessels now entering the construction field . . .
Chapter One
20 January 2425
Recon Flight Shadow-One
Omega Centauri
1010 hours, TFT
“And three . . . and two . . . and one . . . launch!”
Acceleration slammed Lieutenant Louis Walton back in his seat as his CP-240 Shadowstar hurtled down the long and narrow tunnel, riding the magnetic launch rail, vision dimming . . . and then he emerged into open space, the pressure of 7 gravities replaced in an instant by the blessed, stomach-dropping relief of zero-G. Astern, the vast gray disk of America’s forward shield cap fell away, dwindling to a star, then to invisibility in moments. He was traveling now at better than 600 kilometers per hour.
Ahead was twisted, enigmatic light . . . and sheerest wonder.
“America Primary Flight Control, this is Shadow One,” he called over his in-head. “I’m clear and in the open.”
“Copy, Shadow One,” a voice replied. “Come to one-five-one by two-seven-zero by zero-three-two. You be careful out there, okay?”
“That is a very large affirmative,” Walton replied. “You just happen to be talking to the ship library’s downloaded image of careful.”
“Lou,” the voice in Prifly said, “if that were true, you wouldn’t have volunteered for this run in the first place.”
True enough. But Walton wouldn’t have missed this for the world. For several worlds . . .
The panorama ahead was being fed by the Shadowstar’s imaging system directly into his brain. From his perspective, he was the reconnaissance fighter, hurtling into strangeness.
He was hurtling through the depths of a globular star cluster, a vast, teeming beehive of stars called Omega Centauri, some sixteen thousand years from Sol. But the cluster was . . . changed from what it once had been.
Across the whole, vast, star-crowded sky, hundreds of thousands of suns were gone, leaving dark streaks like daggers piercing the cluster’s heart. Stars had deliberately been merged with stars, creating a central blue giant blazing at the cluster’s core, filling a spherical region almost two light months across with hazy, blue light.
And stretching out from that central sun was a structure of some kind. Stellarchitecture, they’d dubbed it, back in the labyrinths of America’s intelligence department. An unimaginably vast tangle of beams and platforms and spheres and connectors and sweeping curves, some of the structures apparently solid, but the larger ones apparently consisting of blue mist. Following some of those beams with your eye was not a good idea. They were . . . bent, somehow, twisted in disturbing ways suggesting that dimensions other than the normal three spatial ones were being employed here.
Most disturbing of all was the fact that time was being twisted through strange dimensions as well. None of this had been here when the deep-space research survey vessel Endeavor had arrived in the Omega Centauri cluster four months earlier. Now, the sky was filled with structures that appeared to span light years . . . and yet, portions of stellarchitecture more than four light months across were plainly visible. The light from the far ends of those things simply couldn’t have traveled this far in the intervening time.
And yet, there it was, defying what Walton and America’s science department were pleased to call the inviolable laws of physics. There were beams, like gossamer threads glittering in the light of 10 million cluster stars, somehow anchored within the central sun and stretching out and out and out until they were masked by the cluster’s massed suns. Space and time both were not what they seemed here.
The effect was eerily and indescribably beautiful, an abstract painted in myriad shades and hues of blue and violet light, with deep, rich reds in those eye-watering places where structures vanished from normal spacetime.
“America CIC, this is Shadow One,” Walton said. “Handing off from PriFly.”
“Copy, Shadow One,” a different voice replied from America’s Combat Information Center. “Primary Flight Control confirms handoff to CIC. You are clear for maneuver.”
“Accelerating in three . . . two . . . one . . . engage!”
At 50,000 gravities, the Shadowstar hurtled deeper into the cluster.
USNA CVS America
The Black Rosette
