Bright Light

What if the entity came to earth one day … maybe after he’d turned off his organic body and begun cavorting in a Paradise, Inc. heaven?

Or … shit. What if the maintenance workers just decided to walk off the job? What if someone pulled the plug?

He didn’t like the idea that his very existence would be utterly dependent on someone, anyone, else.

It might be a better idea in the long run, Gregory thought, to come to grips with the universe he was in now.

TC/USNA CVS Republic

SupraQuito Yards

Earth Synchorbit

1427 hours, TFT

“Bright Light Module One is on board,” the ship’s executive officer said. Commander Jonathan Rohlwing turned and gave Gray an unfathomable look. “Republic is ready in all respects for departure.”

“Personnel?”

“We still have twelve personnel ashore, but all are due back on board by sixteen hundred hours.”

“Very well.”

Was there a measure of resentment in Rohlwing’s voice, Gray wondered? Republic would have been Rohlwing’s command, presumably, had they not dragged Gray in off the street, dusted him off, and put him in the command seat.

Gray wouldn’t have blamed his exec if he did resent what had happened. This whole arrangement—kicking him out of the Navy, then bringing him back as a civilian CO—was ridiculous.

It wasn’t entirely without precedent, though. Centuries before, in the wet Navy, certain classes of supply and cargo ships had been civilian vessels with civilian skippers … but in an emergency the ships could be activated as military vessels under military command.

And yet they’d kept their civilian skippers.

But command of a ship, any ship, demanded absolute trust between crew and captain. That trust ran both ways, too. The ship’s XO had to trust his captain to make the right decisions and give the right commands. At the same time, Gray had to know that he could trust Rohlwing to follow his commands to the letter.

As always, building that two-way trust would take time.

Gray just hoped that they had that time.

USNA CVE Guadalcanal

Orbiting Heimdall

Kapteyn’s Star

1650 hours, TFT

The Guadalcanal had reached the rest of the small flotilla keeping watch within the Kapteyn’s Star system. Captain Taggart had linked through to Admiral Rasmussen and his staff on board the heavy cruiser Toronto in orbit around the ice giant Thrymheim, the system’s fourth planet.

For several hours, now, Guadalcanal had drifted in a slow orbit with the rest of the flotilla. On her external feeds, Taggart could see the other five ships of the group—the flagship Toronto, a North Chinese light cruiser Shanxi, and three destroyers. The ’Canal had long since fed the Toronto images of what they’d seen over Heimdall. Now the small squadron was watching and recording the light show taking place sunward, over five astronomical units distant within the inner core of the system. At this distance, almost 9 AUs, the tiny red sun was a sullen-ember pinpoint, one barely visible to the naked eye. The Rosette entity’s construction consisted of a surreal tangle of geometric shapes and lights, and it appeared to be unfolding out of itself, growing rapidly larger and more complex.

“It’s matching the patterns that were here before the battle,” Taggart told Rasmussen over the tactical link. “I think once those structures are built, they can turn them on or off whenever they please.”

“The structures are anchored within the spacetime matrix,” Dr. Howard Thornton of Toronto’s xenosoph department observed. “Captain Taggart is right. They store the pattern of those shapes inside 4-D space and summon them when they need them.”

“How the hell do they manage that?” Rasmussen demanded.

“If I could tell you that, Admiral,” Thornton said, “I would be from a K-2 civilization. Maybe K-3.”

Referring to the Kardashev Scale, what Thornton meant was that Humankind was nowhere near the technological level they would need to be to understand what was happening, let alone produce those results. Whatever the Rosette entity was, it was eons ahead of Humankind on the learning curve and was manipulating spacetime in ways that suggested an ability to suck up every erg produced by a star … and quite possibly considerably more.

Taggart again felt the stirrings of a deep, inward religious awe.

For years she’d been a member of her former husband’s church, the Ancient Alien Creationists. It had taken her several years to shake that belief set; Trevor Gray’s discussions with her had eventually helped convince her that the AAC’s image of advanced galactic aliens tinkering with the human genome was weak and hopelessly anthropocentric. Beings powerful enough to do that—rewiring spacetime to their own advantage—wouldn’t give any thought at all to a bunch of paleolithic hominids crouching in their caves. In fact, past experience with the Rosetters suggested that they didn’t even notice star-faring species at Humankind’s current levels of advancement … didn’t notice, or didn’t care.

That revelation was crushing in its implications. Humans, she thought, tended to believe they were pretty hot stuff … and meeting something like the Rosette Consciousness was devastating to the human ego.

“What the hell are they doing in there?” Rasmussen wondered aloud over the link. “And why?”

“They appear,” Thornton observed, “to be surrounding Kapteyn’s Star with scaffolding of solid light. And I seriously doubt that we are capable of understanding why …”

Taggart noticed something in the data readout appearing on her in-head display. “Admiral?”

“Yes, Captain Taggart.”

“We’re picking up movement, sir … lots of it. Looks like a cloud of fireflies something like an astronomical unit across—”

“My God …”

“—and it’s headed our way damned fast.”

TC/USNA CVS Republic

SupraQuito Yards

Earth Synchorbit

1707 hours, TFT

“The ship is ready in all respects for space, Captain.”

“Very well. Release grapples fore and aft.”

“Magnetic grapples released, sir.”

“Helm, engage thrusters. Take us astern, dead slow.”

“Thrusters, dead slow astern, aye, aye, sir.”

Gray felt the slight thump and a surge of acceleration as the Republic began backing out of the docking gantry. There was nothing for him to do at this point but watch. The ship’s AI was in control of all steering, power, and navigation functions, though human ratings and officers remained in the loop. The Republic’s artificial intelligence was far more capable than merely human brains, with far better sensory awareness of the ship’s surroundings.

“We are clear of the gantry, Captain.”

“Very well. You have the course.”

“Yes, sir. Aligned, laid in, and locked.”

“Accelerate.”

“Accelerate, aye, aye.”

The synchorbital complex off to port blurred and vanished as the Republic accelerated under gravitics. The waning crescent of the Earth rapidly dwindled in apparent size, together with Earth’s moon. In another few seconds Earth was merely a bright star gently drifting toward the sun.

Gray pulled up the reference on their destination within the Encyclopedia Galactica, and an in-head window filled with scrolling text.

Object: KIC 8462852

Alternate names: WTF Star, Tabby’s Star

Type: Main-sequence star; Spectral Type: F3 V/IV

Coordinates: RA: 20h 06m 15.457s Dec: +44° 27′ 24.61″;

Constellation: Cygnus

Mass: ~ 1.43 Sol; Radius: 1.58 Sol; Rotation: 0.8797 days;

Temperature: 6750° K; Luminosity: 5 x Sol;

Apparent Magnitude: 11.7; Absolute Magnitude: 3.08

Distance: 1480 ly

Age: ~ 4 billion years

Notes: First noted in 2009–2015 as a part of the data collected by the Kepler space telescope. An extremely unusual pattern of light fluctuations proved difficult to explain as a natural phenomenon and raised the possibility that intermittent dips in the star’s light output were the result of occultations by intelligently designed alien megastructures.

KIC 8462852 received the unofficial name “Tabby’s Star” after Tabetha S. Boyajian, head of the citizen scientist group that first called attention to the object. It was also called the “WTF star”—a humorous name drawn from the title of her paper: “Where’s the Flux?” At that time, “WTF” was a slang expression of surprise or disbelief …

There was a lot more, material added since America’s visit to the system weeks before. For over three centuries, astronomers had found comfort in finding natural explanations for the star’s oddball behavior that did not involve alien super-civilizations. The most popular theory combined the star’s high rate of spin causing gravitational darkening with the presence of an oddly tilted accretion disk—despite the fact that infrared studies of the system had never been able to detect an accretion disk’s warm presence. Other theories involved collisions of large planets with the star, causing an overall brightening that had been slowly dimming over the centuries.

The trouble was that none of those explanations fit all of the observations, and all were so coincidentally complex as to be unlikely in the extreme.

Gray found it amusing, actually. In 1960, Freeman Dyson, a mathematician and theoretical physicist, had suggested that any search for advanced civilizations in the galaxy be on the lookout for stars that unaccountably dimmed or winked out—indications of what became known as a Dyson swarm or Dyson sphere. These were hypothetical megastructures intended to capture all of a star’s radiation output by means either of a spherical cloud of solar collectors or a solid shell enclosing the star. By the early twenty-first century, Humankind had been thoroughly primed to discover signs of extraterrestrial intelligence … and yet when they’d actually spotted precisely what Dyson had predicted, they’d dismissed them as natural phenomenon.

Then the star-faring species of interstellar traders, the Agletsch, had strongly urged Konstantin to check out the star KIC 8462852. Gray had disobeyed orders to follow Konstantin’s directions and taken America to Tabby’s Star, where they’d discovered the ruins of an alien megastructure, and the surviving digital intelligence they called the Satori.

And now he was returning. They would visit the Satori at Tabby’s Star, then attempt to make contact with whatever was at Deneb, an unknown something that had destroyed much of the Satori infrastructure.

Whether or not the Denebans would be willing to help Humankind against the Rosette entity—or even communicate with them—was still very much an open question.

Forty minutes later, the Republic was boosting at seven thousand gravities, an acceleration unfelt because every atom of the ship was accelerating at the same rate within a gravitational field, essentially in free fall. They were moving at a sizeable percentage of the speed of light, and the sky ahead and aft was beginning to look strange as relativistic effects began to manifest.

“Captain Gray?” Lieutenant Ellen Walters, the duty sensor officer, called. “We’ve got something weird going on. Bearing two-eight-five minus one-five.”

Gray looked in the indicated direction, magnifying his in-head view. He saw … light.

“Xeno Department,” he called. “What do you make of those structures to port?”

“I’m not certain, Captain,” Dr. Vasilyeva replied. “It appears to be a Rosette light show.”

“That’s what I thought. Republic? Can you correct for relativistic aberration?”

“Correcting, Captain.”

Their high-velocity motion through space was bending incoming light beams, seeming to shift the images of stars and other objects forward, distorting them. At their current velocity, about six-tenths c, the effect wasn’t pronounced, but it was annoying. Republic’s AI applied a mathematical algorithm to the ship’s optical receivers, and the image snapped back to crystal clarity.

Beams of light appeared to be emerging from empty space, diverging slightly, like the entrance to a tunnel. A faintly luminous fog was emerging from the tunnel mouth, as geometric shapes carved from white and yellow light began to take form.

“Definitely Rosette phenomenon, Captain,” Vasilyeva said. “Are you going to change course for an intercept?”

Gray considered the question for only a second or so. “Negative.”

“Captain!” Commander Rohlwing said. His executive officer sounded shocked. “If that’s the Rosette entity … I mean … it’s not supposed to be here! Earth will need every ship to mount a defense!”

Gray closed his eyes. He was being presented with the same impossible choice twice within the space of a few weeks, and it freaking wasn’t fair!

“First,” he said, “a light space carrier does not have the sheer firepower to make a difference fighting that thing. Second … and more important, right now Earth’s only hope is for us to get to Deneb and get help. And that’s precisely what I intend to do.”

“But—”

“Comm! Transmit corrected images of what we’re seeing out there back to Earth and include a warning. Tell them what’s coming.”

“Aye, aye, Captain. Speed-of-light transmission time currently is eleven minutes.”

“Will it get to Earth before that … thing?”

“Yes, sir. Our message will beat it … By about eight minutes.”

“Then that’s the best we can do.”

The next dozen minutes passed in silence, as Gray and those members of the crew not actively engaged in operating the ship watched the unfolding patterns and shapes of light. They’d all seen much the same at Kapteyn’s Star, or heard about it from men and women who’d been there.

I wonder, Gray thought with some bitterness, if Earth will still be there when we return.

It was distinctly possible that even if the Denebans agreed to help them with some incredible high-tech weapon they could use against the Rosette, they’d get back to Earth only to find that they were too late …

Chapter Four

1 February 2426

New White House

Washington, D.C.

1802 hours, EST

“Incoming message, priority red one-one, Mr. President.”

“Thank you, Pierre,” Koenig replied. “Decode and play.”

“Yes, sir.” The voice was that of a new AI built into the New White House. It had been named after Pierre Charles L’Enfant, the French architect who’d designed the layout of the original Washington, D.C., in the late eighteenth century.

“Excuse me, Gene,” Koenig told the tall man with him in the Oval Office. “I need to take a call.”

“Of course, Mr. President.”

Leaning back in his chair, Koenig closed his eyes and opened an inner window. The transmission was from the Joint Chiefs, and had been relayed from the Republic, now an hour outbound. Though made grainy and low res by distance, Koenig could see the image well enough. Light exploded out of empty space, unfolding like a flower, opening and expanding. Moments later, a faint haze appeared to be streaming from the effect’s central core.

“That smoke or fog is, we believe, a cloud of what our people call fireflies,” Lawrence Vandenburg, his secretary of defense, said in his mind. “Not nanotechnology, exactly, but extremely tiny machines operating according to a set series of programmed instructions. They can be used to build extremely large and complex structures in open space … or they can be used as nanodisassembler-type weapons. The cloud emerged some forty astronomical units from the sun and is now on a direct course to Earth. At their current velocity, they will be here in another two and a half hours.”

“You need to see this, Gene,” Koenig said as the message ended. Admiral Gene Armitage was senior of his Joint Chiefs of Staff.

“I thought we might have more time, Mr. President,” Armitage said after digesting the transmission. “I thought we had an agreement …”

“We were never sure the Rosette entity even understood what a treaty or an agreement was,” Koenig replied, grim. “All we could be certain of was that the Omega Code made that thing sit up and take notice. It may have developed some way of counteracting the virus.”

“It probably did that a couple of nanoseconds after it was exposed,” Armitage said. “Advanced AIs work on an entirely different experience of time than do humans.”

“So why did it wait? It’s been over a month since we stopped it at Kapteyn’s Star.”

“I don’t know, sir. Maybe it just had other things to think about.”

“Deploy all available ships, Gene,” Koenig told him. “Including anything we have in the naval yards … damaged ships, fighters, the works. We need to stop that cloud from getting to Earth.”

“Yes, sir.” He hesitated. “What about the Republic?”

Koenig checked his inner clock. “Unless Gray decided to turn around when he recorded this, he’s already gone into Alcubierre Drive.” Koenig didn’t add that Gray’s orders were to get to Deneb at all costs. He would not be returning immediately.

Not that a single light carrier would add much in a stand-up fight against that, he thought, watching the vid once more.

He opened another channel. “Konstantin?”

There was no reply, and that was profoundly troubling. Konstantin was arguably the most powerful super-AI in the solar system, and Koenig depended on the artificial mind’s guidance … especially when faced with existential threats.

“Konstantin?”

Pierre responded. “Mr. President, Konstantin is no longer on-line.”

“What? Where the hell did he go?”

“I’m guessing, sir, but it seems likely that he became aware of the threat posed by the Rosette entity and has made himself difficult to detect.”

Great. Just freaking great. The most strategic powerful mind in Humankind’s arsenal had taken one look at the threat and jumped into a cyber-hole … then pulled the opening in after him.

“Send a transmission to Fort Meade,” Koenig told the White House AI. “And Crisium … and Geneva. We need the Gordian Slash … and we need it now.”

He just hoped they had something, and that it could be deployed in time.

VFA-211, Headhunters

TC/USNA CVS America

Earth Synchorbit

1913 hours, TFT

Lieutenant Jason Meier braced himself as his SG-420 Starblade dropped into its launch bay. “Headhunter Three, ready for drop,” he announced.

“Copy Hunter Three,” a voice said in-head. “Stand by. America is pulling clear of the gantry.”

What was her name? Fletcher, right. His new Commander Air Group, or CAG; she sounded near-c hot, and he was looking forward to meeting her, really meeting her and not just listening to her give a standard “welcome aboard” speech to the squadron. Yeah … her mental voice was all business, of course, but Meier thought he could detect some warmth there, and maybe a need for exactly what he could provide.

He was certainly looking forward to trying.

Jason Meier was still getting used to the changes in personnel since the Headhunters had been transferred over to the America several days before. VFA-211 originally had been attached to the Lexington, but that star carrier had suffered badly in the fight out at Kapteyn’s Star, and her fighter squadrons—what was left of them—had been transferred. Several of America’s own squadrons had been shuffled off to the Republic earlier, and Meier wondered if anyone in the Fleet had a clear idea of what was supposed to be going on.

He felt the gentle acceleration as the kilometer-long carrier pulled back from the gantry. His in-head showed a choice of views, both from America’s external vid cams and from the gantry structure itself.

God … the old girl is a mess, he thought. He had a particular affection for the carrier even though he hadn’t been attached to her for even twenty-four hours yet. It had been the America that had shown up at the last possible moment at Kapteyn’s Star and saved the collective ass of the Lexington and everyone on board her.

America, he thought, studying her as she pulled free of her docking slip, wasn’t in much better shape than the Lex, but at least she could still limp along under her own power. When their drives had failed on the way back to Sol, a small fleet of SAR tugs had come out and towed both America and the Lady Lex into the synchorbital port. There was some question, however, whether the Lex could even be repaired, or if she was going to end up being scrapped.

It was possible that the whole question was moot. The entity that had wrecked both ships at Kapteyn’s Star had just popped up in the outer Sol System, and reportedly was headed straight for Earth. Every ship that could be thrown in the thing’s path was being mustered.

The trouble was that the muster list of Earth’s warships had been badly depleted lately … by the fight at Kapteyn’s Star, by the long-standing war with the Sh’daar Empire, and by the savage little civil war that had torn the Earth Confederation apart. The USNA Navy was desperately short of ships.

If indeed, any number of the ships of Earth’s various navies stood any chance at all against an enemy as technologically advanced, as overwhelmingly powerful as the Rosette entity. Hell, much of what they’d been seen doing—manipulating space and time in ways completely beyond human understanding—didn’t even seem to count as technology.

As a well-known writer and scientific philosopher of several centuries earlier had put it, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

“VFA-211,” the sexy voice said, “stand by for immediate launch. By the numbers …”

The squadron began sounding off. “Hunter One, ready for drop.”

“Hunter Two, ready.”

“Headhunter Three,” Meier announced, “ready to go!”

One by one, the rest of the pilots reported their readiness. There were twelve ships in the squadron. Three of those were replacements newly arrived from Earth.

“All squadrons,” Fletcher called. “You’re clear for boost at five thousand gravities. Two minutes to drop …”

“Well,” Lieutenant Lakeland, Hunter Seven, said, “we’re going somewhere in a hell of a hurry!”

“Yeah, but what the hell are we supposed to do when we get out there?” Hunter Eight, one of the newbies, asked. Her name was Lieutenant Veronica Porter, and she was someone else Meier wanted to get to know better.

“Don’t you worry about that, Eight,” Meier said. “The bastards’ll see us coming in at near-c, and they’ll turn tail and run so fast that God’ll arrest them for breaking the laws of physics!”

“Knock it off, Meier,” Commander Victor Leystrom, the squadron’s CO, said. “Try to behave yourself.”

“Hey, I always behave myself, Commander!”

But he knew what Leystrom meant—he had a … reputation both within the squadron and back on the Lex: ladies’ man, playboy, the stereotypical hot fighter jock with a nova-hot tailhook. And he did his best to uphold that rep with bravado and confident flirting, though even he admitted that the details of his sex life tended to be somewhat exaggerated. There simply weren’t enough hours in the day—or in the night, for that matter—to rack up the scores he liked to claim.