Dark Matter. Ian Douglas

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      Chapter Three

      20 January 2425

      USNA CVS America

      Omega Centauri

      1750 hours, TFT

      The Rosette Aliens were letting them go.

      Gray scarcely allowed himself to believe it at first . . . but when a number of those bright silver eggs took up positions around the task force, a few thousand kilometers out and escorted them toward their Alcubierre jump point, effortlessly matching their acceleration, he had to admit that that was the case.

      “I just wish we’d been able to open a comm channel with them,” Gray said. He was on the flag bridge, now, sitting at his partially enclosed workstation above and behind the captain’s chair.

      “I think,” the CAG said quietly in his mind, “that we have been in communication with them.”

      “What do you mean?”

      “They turned our recon pilot around and dropped him back alongside the America,” Connie Fletcher said. “Without harming him . . . and that’s important. Kind of like shooing a curious kitten away from the power outlet.”

      “We began accelerating out-­system, and they paced us,” Acting Captain Gutierrez pointed out. “Seems like pretty clear communications to me. ‘Here’s your hat, what’s your hurry? Don’t let the door slam your ass on the way out.’ ”

      “I think you’re right. No specific response on the messages we sent them. I think it possible that they simply aren’t interested in us.”

      “Well, Admiral . . . a K-­3 civilization might not find a K-­1.2 all that interesting.”

      “Coming up on our jump point, sir,” the Helm reported. “Twenty seconds.”

      The view of the stars outside of the America was weirdly distorted by the carrier’s velocity, now just a hair less than the speed of light itself. The entire universe, the light of all the stars in the Omega Centauri cluster, had been squeezed into a bright ring of light forward. The seconds dwindled away . . .

      . . . and then America’s AI pulled the already tightly distorted space around the carrier in, creating a tight bubble that was not, strictly speaking, a part of normal space. Metaspace, the physicists called it . . . and the nonmathematical explanation declared that while a material object such as an atom or a star carrier could not travel faster than light—­or, indeed, even reach light speed—­there was nothing preventing the space within which it rested from doing so. The Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre had worked out the theory in 1994, and the first FTL transit had occurred less than a century and a half later.

      At maximum drive, now, America hurtled through meta­space for home.

      Gray willed himself to relax. He’d not realized how tense, how stressed he’d been at the prospect of confronting the Rosette Aliens. Sh’daar client species—­those encountered so far by Humankind, at any rate—­tended to be somewhat more advanced than humans. Higher technology translated as greater power, faster ships, and more deadly weaponry, and staying ahead of such an enemy, meeting him and outfighting him despite his technological lead, was a dangerous and uncertain game.

      The Rosette Aliens were far more advanced than any species yet encountered by Earth. A technological difference representing tens of thousands or even millions of years instead of a century or two could not be overcome by grit, cleverness, or determination.

      Gray leaned back in his command chair and opened a series of data links. He wanted to see what there was in America’s memory about Kardashev classifications.

      He was wondering if the Rosette Aliens might be induced to ally with Earth against the Sh’daar . . . or if Earth would one day have to fight them.

      America Data Files

      Extant Galactic Civilizations

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