Bright Light. Ian Douglas

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ