Dark Matter. Ian Douglas

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СКАЧАТЬ cleared for approach and trap. C’mon in.”

      “Copy. Accelerating.”

      He didn’t trust himself to say more.

      USNA CVS America

      Omega Centauri

      1205 hours, TFT

      “So, we’re left knowing even less than we knew before,” Gray said. “Super-­powerful aliens are dismantling a star cluster . . . and when one of our recon ships gets too close they teleport it across fifty AUs without even breaking a sweat. Recommendations?”

      Gray was in America’s main briefing room with his command staff and department heads. Half were there physically; the rest had linked in from other parts of the ship. One entire bulkhead had been turned into a viewall, which was displaying video of Walton’s flyby of the Rosette. At the moment, it was showing the alien structures, looming vast and shadowy across the backdrop of stars.

      “What . . . what they did to our recon fighter,” Lieutenant Commander Philip Bryant said slowly, shaking his head, “is flat-­out impossible according to all of the laws of physics we understand.” He was the America’s chief stardrive engineer, and arguably the ship’s officer most conversant with her Alcubierre Drive and the essential malleability of empty space in the presence of powerful gravitational fields.

      “The sheer power . . .” That was America’s other senior engineering officer, Commander Richard Halverson, the newly promoted head of the ship’s engineering department, and an expert on power taps and vacuum energy.

      “Yeah. How the hell are we supposed to fight something like that?” Commander Dean Mallory was America’s chief tactical officer. “They could swat us like a bug if they wanted.”

      “I don’t think the admiral was suggesting we fight,” Captain Connie Fletcher said. She was America’s CAG, an old acronym identifying a carrier’s Commander Air Group from back in the days of wet-­Navy ships and aircraft. “That would be pretty pointless, right?”

      “It would be more like fucking suicide,” Commander Victor Blakeslee, America’s senior navigation officer, said, scowling. “Recommendations? Hell, my recommendation is that we chart a course for home and high-­tail it.”

      “Assuming they let us go,” the voice of Acting Captain Gutierrez added. She was on America’s bridge, but telepresencing the planning session through her in-­head. “It might not be that easy.”

      “We have no reason yet to assume hostile intent on the part of the Rosette Aliens.” Lieutenant Commander Samantha Kline was the head of America’s xenobiology department—­“X-­Dep,” for short. “They could have vaporized Lieutenant Walton. Instead, they bent space to drop him back here.”

      “I would remind you,” Halverson said slowly, “that those . . . those things out there did vaporize the Endeavor, the Herrera, and the Miller. If that’s not a hostile act, what the hell is?”

      “The vid returned by the HVK robot is . . . open to interpretation, sir,” Kline replied. “That might have been an accident. Or a mistake . . .”

      “A mistake by beings that powerful?” Fletcher said. “Beings that much like . . . like gods? That’s a pretty scary thought all by itself.”

      “They are powerful,” Gray said. He wanted to redirect the session away from the aliens’ godlike aspect, however. He didn’t want his staff demoralized before they even encountered the Rosette Aliens directly. “But they’re not gods. If they did make a mistake when they destroyed the Endeavor, that would pretty much prove it, don’t you think?”

      “More likely,” Dr. George Truitt said, “it simply means they don’t care. Keep in mind, ­people, that we could be dealing with a K-­3 civilization here.”

      Truitt was a civilian specialist assigned to America, and he was something of a wunderkind. He was a xenosophontologist, studying nonhuman minds and ways of thinking, and therefore worked in X-­Dep under LCDR Kline.

      Gray frowned at Truitt. In November, just two months ago, the man had been instrumental behind the scenes in devising a bit of offensive propaganda that had secured a Terran victory at Osiris—­70 Ophiuchi A II—­a colony world conquered by a Sh’daar client race called the Slan. By carefully analyzing communications with the Slan commander and what had been gleaned about their biology, Truitt and his xenosoph ­people had extrapolated a likely model of Slan psychology, one showing that they would be horrified at the idea of attacking their own community, an unthinkable act of barbarism . . . an act of animals. By beaming a message to the Slan suggesting that humans thought the same way Slan did, that humans actually shared the Slan collective-­based psychology, Gray had forced the technologically superior Slan fleet to break off and retreat . . . a singular, spectacular victory.

      And Truitt was the instrument of that victory.

      It was too bad, Gray thought, that Truitt was also an egoistic grandstander, pompous, and possessing of social graces approximately on a par with wolverines.

      “What the hell,” Mallory asked, “is a K-­3 civilization?”

      “Christ, you don’t know what Kardashev classification is?” Truitt said, glaring at Mallory. “I hope you understand tactics, Commander, better than you do technic sophontology.”

      “Kardashev was a Russian astronomer,” Gray put in, “who developed a means of classifying planetary or interstellar civilizations based on how much energy they use. A K-­3 civilization would use roughly as much energy as is emitted by all the stars of an entire galaxy.”

      “That is a gross oversimplification,” Truitt said. “In point of fact—­”

      “If you please, Doctor,” Gray said sharply, interrupting, “we’re not here to argue definitions or sophontology. The Rosette Aliens have demonstrated the ability to rework an entire globular cluster, millions of stars—­which, on the Kardashev scale, makes them at least a high K-­2, and quite possibly a K-­3. Human technology currently stands at . . . what is it, Doctor? K-­1.2?”

      “Approximately that,” Truitt said, “yes. But—­”

      “The point is that our industrious friends out there, as a civilization, routinely wield something like one hundred quintillion times more power than we can. I agree with Commander Blakeslee. There’s little we can do here, except establish automated monitoring stations.”

      “Again, assuming they let us leave,” Captain Guiterrez said. “We are deep, deep inside their operational area.”

      Gray opened a new channel within his in-­head circuitry, and the bulkhead opposite the view of the cluster’s heart flowed and shimmered and then lit up with a schematic of the star cluster. The stars themselves were ghosted; otherwise, points of interest at the very center, including the position of America’s task force, would have been completely hidden.

      With a thoughtclick, the view zoomed in on Omega Centauri’s heart. The entire cluster was a tightly packed ball of suns about 230 light years across, but the Black Rosette—­and the majority of the alien constructs—­was at the very center, and America and the other Earth ships were only 50 AUs away—­no distance at all in interstellar terms. One AU was defined as the distance between Earth and her sun—­150,000,000 kilometers, on average. A single light year was roughly equal to about 64,000 Astronomical Units.

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