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Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-one

Chapter Twenty-two

Chapter Twenty-three

Chapter Twenty-four

Chapter Twenty-five

Epilogue

Keep Reading …

By Ian Douglas

About the Publisher

Prologue

The Consciousness had known of Earth and of the starfaring civilization centered there for a long time. Indeed, given that it spanned vast gulfs of time as well as space, it was as if it had always known.

In the heart of the teeming sphere of 10 million ancient suns known to the humans as Omega Centauri, at the central rosette of six massive black holes orbiting their common center in a patently artificial arrangement, the Consciousness brooded on the intelligent beings it had found in this new, painfully young universe.

Intelligent was such a relative concept.

This was bolstered by the fact that the Consciousness had … tasted a number of them, sampling the minute ships and other structures within this volume of space.

Most of the minds it had sampled were of pathetically slow and limited capabilities. A few—a very few—were of higher orders of intelligence, though none came close to the Consciousness in terms of depth or scope of Mind.

Methodically, the Consciousness consumed those worth the effort.

The rest it deleted.

And with a slowly increasing vigor, it explored more deeply into this corner of the new universe. It had identified a sullen red ember of a star, called Kapteyn’s Star by the minds it had assimilated, with a world engineered by beings uploaded into digital form, extremely ancient beings called the Baondyeddi, the Adjugredudhra, and the Groth Hoj. These species, parts of a corporate polity referred to by various sources as the Sh’daar, were in hiding from some unknown threat … quite possibly from the Consciousness itself, though the digital refugees didn’t seem to know exactly what it was they feared.

Despite their attempts to make themselves undetectable—including the slowing of their awareness of time down to seconds on each century, the Consciousness had found them … and it had devoured them, absorbing trillions of minds into its own teeming hive, giving them order and a sense of purpose that had been lacking before.

And in the process it learned of the N’gai Cluster … and of the human presence much closer at hand.

And on the human homeworld, just twelve light years distant from Kapteyn’s Star, the watching beings of that planet anticipated the arrival of the Consciousness over Earth with an increasing and existential dread.

Chapter One

30 January 2426

Battery Park

New York City

1545 hours, EST

“Get the hell out of my head!”

“I submit that we will have to talk at some point,” the voice in his head told him. It sounded faintly amused.

Trevor Gray, formerly of the USNA Navy, scowled. “Why?” he replied, blunt and challenging. “Damn it, Konstantin, you’ve wrecked my life. You know that, don’t you?”

“It was necessary for you to leave naval service. Vital, in fact.”

“Bullshit. You no longer own me. And I don’t think we have a thing to say to one another.”

Gray prowled the transparent observation deck extending out over the choppy waters of New York Harbor. At his back, the newly grown towers of what once had been the Manhatt Ruins stabbed skyward, gleaming glass and silver in the winter sun. The place had … changed during the past year, changed more than he’d ever imagined possible. The spot where he was standing had been underwater a few months ago. Now it was clean and shiny, with a scattering of civilians who looked like tourists.

He could sense Konstantin, the powerful AI entity based at Tsiolkovsky, on the far side of the moon, watching him closely from the vantage point of his own in-head circuitry. That took a little getting used to. Konstantin’s principal hardware might be on the moon, but its—his—consciousness could be anywhere within the Global Net on Earth, in low earth orbit—LEO—or in cislunar space. And for sure, a tiny fraction of the super-AI was here in Manhatt, interacting with Gray through his in-head circuitry.

“I need you,” Konstantin told him, “to meet with Elena Vasilyeva …”

“Damn it, Konstantin, you know how I feel about the Pan-Europeans.”

“The war is over, Captain,” Konstantin told him, as though explaining why to a four-year-old. “In any case, Ms. Vasilyeva is Russian. They were on our side, remember?”

“Sorry,” Gray said, his mental voice sharp. “It’s kind of hard to just forget about Columbus, y’know?”

“Which the Russians had nothing to do with, you may recall,” Konstantin said. “In any case, no one is asking you to forget about Columbus.”

Gray turned and scowled up at the new towers of Manhattan, his shoulders hunched against the chill, late-January wind off the water. He did not, in fact, hate the Europeans … not exactly. The destruction of the USNA capital at Columbus had almost certainly been an act by rogue elements within the Genevan military. Pan-European attempts to seize territory along the USNA east coast had been strategic opportunism, pure and simple, and the true causus belli had been their conviction that Humankind had to accept Sh’daar demands and restrict their fast-developing technologies.

And Konstantin was right. With the signing of the Treaty of London, the war was over. Even the alien Sh’daar were friends, now … of a sort. The recent discovery that they’d been under the influence of intelligent colonies of bacteria had finally enabled Humankind to begin to understand just what they wanted … and what they truly were.

No, Gray might not trust the Pan-Euros, but neither did he hate them. His anger right now was reserved for the AI that had arranged to have him drummed out of the Navy. At Konstantin’s urging, he’d taken the star carrier America to the long-time stellar mystery of KIC 8462852—a distant, F3V sun better known as “Tabby’s Star.” What America had brought back, an alien e-virus called the Omega Code, had been of tremendous importance … but his fourteen-hundred-light-year detour had been in direct and blatant disregard of orders. Naval officers, even admirals, could not simply ignore the dictates of military command procedure, even when ordered to do so by super-AIs. The court-martial board had directed that Gray be reduced in rank to captain, and that he retire from the Navy.

Only recently had Gray learned that it had been Konstantin who’d recommended to the board that he be summarily cashiered.

With friends like that …

“I’m bringing in a robot shuttle,” Konstantin told him. “Will you meet with Ms. Vasilyeva?”

“Why? More to the point, why me?”

“The Pan-Euros want to meet you face-to-face. Ms. Vasilyeva has requested that her team get to speak with you first. You are … something of a legend, Captain. Even among those who once were the enemy. You have the reputation of a brilliant tactician, and some of them, I believe, are a bit in awe of you.”

Gray made a sour face at the obvious attempt at flattery. “Sure. Whatever …”

“Ms. Vasilyeva’s xeno team has some new assets that should make first contact with the Denebans more immediately productive.”

“If you say so.” A new thought occurred to him. “But why do we have to use the Pan-Euros at all? What’s wrong with Doc Truitt? When it comes to understanding alien civilizations, he’s the best. He’s told me that on several occasions.”

George Truitt had been the senior xenosophontological expert on board the America. He was testy, rude, and difficult to work with, but he did know his stuff.

“Dr. Truitt has returned to Crisium Base, where he will be working on interpreting the data from the Tabby’s Star Dyson swarm. His work there is absolutely essential. I assure you that Dr. Vasilyeva is as qualified as he is in the field … and considerably easier to work with.”

Gray cocked an eyebrow at that. How did the AI know whether or not it was easy for one set of humans to work with another?

“There’s something more.”

“What’s that?”

“The identity of the ship you will be using. It may be of interest to you.”

“Not America,” Gray said. And stifled the sharp pang at the thought of her. America, along with her sister ship, Lexington, had been badly savaged a month ago out at Kapteyn’s Star. Both carriers had made it back to Earth orbit, but they were in bad, bad shape.

“That is correct. America will be undergoing extensive repairs at the SupraQuito yards. Your vessel will be the Republic.”

His eyes widened at that. “The … Republic?”

People always talked about how damned small the Navy was. If you served long enough, you kept running into the same shipmates, the same vessels, the same commanding officers. This seemed to prove that ancient adage.

“Yes. She’s being taken out of mothballs and provisioned for the expedition. I believe you know her?”

“Hell, I was her CAG! I was her ACAG from oh-nine to eleven … then CAG from eleven to fourteen!”

“I know. Might that help you feel better about this assignment?”

“You know, I damn near cried when they retired her.”

“She was obsolete and overdue for retirement. As the Sh’daar War and the Confederation Civil War both wound down, she was taken off the line. However, the upgrades she will be receiving should again make her quite a formidable vessel.”

“Damn you, Konstantin.” But he relented. “Okay. But I still don’t know what you expect me to do or say.”

“I’ll be there to guide you, Captain.”

That wasn’t exactly an encouraging thought.

He was about to retort in kind when a bright star appeared in the dusk over the water of New York Harbor, rapidly approaching. Dropping lower, it resolved itself into a red-and-silver Sentinel 5000 autonomous flier. Its low-level AI pilot settled it gently on the observation deck and lifted the gull-wing door.

“So where are we going?” Gray asked as he ducked through into the passenger compartment. It was roomy and tastefully sleek inside—the luxury model. The robot pilot was invisibly tucked away somewhere forward. The dome roof gave him a full three-sixty view, and a thoughtclick would turn parts of the deck underfoot transparent as well.

“Geneva,” Konstantin told him.

Of course.

The door closed silently and the robotic transport rose into the sky on quietly humming grav-impellers. To the southwest he could see Lady Liberty, still on her pedestal after 540 years. Her right arm, which had broken off and fallen into the harbor at some point during the city’s decay, was back in place, the copper flame of her torch gleaming with the last touch of the setting sun. After centuries of neglect she once again represented the spirit of freedom and democracy in the North-American union.

But for how long that might ensue was anybody’s guess. North America had dodged two nasty bullets in the Sh’daar War and in the conflict with Pan-Europe.

As bad as they had been, though, Gray seriously wondered if it could survive the quiet rise of its own super-AI minds.

The flier swung about, still gaining altitude, and passed above the tallest towers of Lower Manhatt. As it did, the nagging question finally surfaced for Gray.

“I still don’t understand,” he told the super-AI partially resident within his head, “why you wanted me out of the Navy. It was my whole life …”

“I understand your feelings, Captain,” Konstantin said, using his honorary retirement rank—which felt like a needle digging into the wound. “But I—and you—encountered certain limitations in what we could do when you were part of the military hierarchy. In order to make contact with the Denebans, you will need a degree of freedom and free will impossible for a naval flag officer.”

“Bullshit. The president—”

“President Koenig has his own problems,” Konstantin explained, “and his own agendas. His decisions are closely circumscribed by those around him, and by the requirements of his office. I require a true free agent. Why are you, of all people, so wedded to your position within the military line of command?”

“Maybe because I belonged.”

Still, it was a good question, and one Gray had been wrestling with for a long time.

Gray had grown up in the Manhatt Ruins, a Prim making a marginal living working a small rooftop farm right over there … perched within the crumbling rooftop wreckage of the TriBeCa Tower, a couple of hundred meters above the flooded avenues of the city.

Damn … he couldn’t even locate the labyrinthine tower any longer. With nano-engineering, new buildings could be grown, and old ones completely made over into new structures in a matter of hours.

Made it easier to forget the past, he supposed.

More than three centuries ago, rising sea levels and the resultant social unrest had led to large swaths of what had been the coastal areas of the former United States of America being abandoned. The so-called Peripheries had been cut off from the technologies and from the social and governmental services of the new United States of North America. They’d become lawless frontiers too expensive to maintain, too difficult to control.

When Angela, his wife, had had a stroke, he’d been forced to get her to a medical center within the USNA proper. Angela had been healed … though either the treatment or the stroke itself had … changed her, dissolving her part of the emotional bond between them.

Gray had gotten over it … well, for the most part, at any rate. It had taken a long time and blossoming relationships with other people, but he’d finally done it. Sometimes he went for days now without even thinking of Angela.

And it had only taken him twenty-six years to get there …

In a world of such rapid changes, Gray was an outlier.

Overall, though, Gray had approved the unexpected course change in his life. In a quarter of a century, he’d worked his way up the ladder of rank, eventually commanding the star carrier America, and then serving as flag officer for the entire America battlegroup. He’d found a place for himself. He’d found respect—no mean feat for a former Prim in the Risty-dominated ranks of naval officers. Risties, derived from aristocrats, represented the worldview of a majority of USNA citizens and especially of naval officers. Primitives, lacking the high-tech cerebral implants and social e-connections of full citizens, were seen somehow as less than fully human.

It made Gray feel good that—even if it was just a possibility—his rise through the ranks, his accomplishments as a naval officer, even his victory over the aliens at Kapteyn’s Star all had been due to his fighting that old social stigma of Prim.

But now Konstantin had arranged to make him a civilian again. Of a sort, that is. Because he was still being swept up into bigger schemes.

It wasn’t like he could go back to the TriBeCa farm, though. No, the North-American government was taking the Peripheries back. Washington, D.C., had been fought over, drained, and rebuilt; swamplands from the Virginia Piedmont to Savannah were being reclaimed; here in Old New York City the Locust Point and Verrazano Narrows dams had been completed, and the water levels encroaching on Manhattan were slowly dropping.

Under steady assault by swarms of architectural nanoassemblers, the Ruins were ruins no more, as white towers grew from the sea’s retreating caress. For the past year, teams of neurobiotechnicians had been moving through the city, offering the inhabitants the chance to shed their status as Prims; soon, the very idea of Prims would be a thing of the past.

Just like me.

He studied the white towers from the sky … their lack of vegetation and obvious decay. Their clean sterility. Their bright newness in the lights of the city coming on to dispel the dark of early evening in winter.

He shook his head. There was no place for him any longer in the Navy and there certainly wasn’t a place for him down there among those newly grown skyscrapers. He felt out of place … and out of touch.

“Konstantin?” He still didn’t want to talk to the artificial intelligence, but he’d become too reliant on having his questions answered. Usually, that was handled by his own in-head RAM, but he was genuinely curious about what the AI would say.

“Yes?”

“What’s happening to them? The people like I was, down there in the Ruins?”

“Most have already been relocated.”

“Where?”

“New New York. Atlantica and Oceana. The New City around the Columbus Crater. Wherever they want to go, really. Quite a few have volunteered for off-world colonies. Mars. Chiron. New Earth.”

“‘Volunteered?’ No relocation camps?” He’d heard stories …

“There are relocation camps for the Refusers. However, I assure you that they lack for nothing.”

Refusers.

It was actually the translation of a Sh’daar term for those who’d refused to accept the Sh’daar Transcendence—their long-ago version of the Technological Singularity. It was also used, sometimes, to describe certain humans or human groups who rejected some aspects of modern technology. There were human religions, Gray knew, that rejected manipulation of the human genome, or medical life-extension technology.

In this case, Konstantin’s use of the word referred to those Prims who would not take cerebral implants, for whatever reason, preferring what they thought of as “living naturally.” Some would be afraid of change … or simply wanted to hang on to what they already had in the face of the unknown.

Gray didn’t agree with so extreme an ideology, but, having been there, he certainly understood where it came from. And it rankled him to hear about them so easily dismissed.

“Why do you ask?” Konstantin wanted to know.

“Sometimes I still identify more strongly with the other Prims than I do with full citizens.”

“Full citizen is an archaic term, Captain. They all are being happily and productively assimilated into the overall culture.”

Yeah, right. Happily assimilated was a contradiction in terms.

The phrasing wasn’t what truly bothered him, though. What Gray carefully guarded from the voice in his head was the fear that AIs, like Konstantin itself, were increasingly herding Humankind along narrowing paths that led to the gods alone knew where, paths understood and shaped by the AIs and utterly beyond the intellectual or emotional ken of organic humans. Beyond what made a human, well, human. Gray had worked with Konstantin many times and still didn’t fully trust a machine intelligence that, almost by definition, he was unable to fully understand.

He was only now realizing that he trusted Konstantin far less than he trusted the Pan-Europeans. And the realization bothered him.

“Flight time to Geneva,” the robot announced in Gray’s head, “fifteen minutes.”

The flier accelerated, leaving the gleaming towers of the new Manhattan vanishing below the horizon astern.

New White House

Washington, D.C.

1602 hours, EST

“Captain Gray is on his way,” Konstantin said quietly in President Alexander Koenig’s thoughts. “As you directed.”

Koenig was seated at his desk in the newly grown White House, located approximately on the site of the original. For several centuries, Washington, D.C., had been submerged, its buildings and monuments in ruins, its grounds flooded and engulfed by mangrove swamps. As with the Manhatt Ruins, dams and flood walls had been nanotechnically grown across the tidal estuary to the southeast so that the swamps could be drained. The reclamation was far enough along that the seat of the USNA government had only weeks before been moved from Toronto back to its historic seat in the District of Columbia.

Koenig sat back in his chair, looking over the reconstruction. The work was ongoing and expensive … but progress was being made.

Now, other kinds of progress needed to be made.

“Good. Did he put up much of a fuss?”

“Not really. He is suspicious of the Pan-Europeans, of course, and, as expected, he trusts neither my motives nor yours. He does not like being manipulated.”

“Hardly surprising. You pulled a damned dirty trick on him, you know.”

“Yes, I do. But if the threat to Earth is as severe as I believe it now is, we cannot afford to have him tied down by the traditional chain of command.”

“Maybe not. But at least we could have told the poor son-of-a-bitch …”

“Mr. President, this is something we must not leave to chance … or to human will and fallibility.”

Koenig scowled. “Sometimes, Konstantin,” he said slowly, “I get the feeling that you don’t trust humans.”

Geneva

Pan-European Union

2217 hours, GMT+1

It was raining and dark as the flier shrieked in over Burgundy, dropping swiftly from its cruising altitude of forty thousand meters, its outer surface reconfiguring from hypersonic mode to landing. “Going from sperm mode to turkey mode” was how fighter pilots described it, as the ship morphed from a sleek teardrop to a flattened, domed box with wings for landing. A former Navy pilot, Gray wondered if he would have to edit those memories sometime soon. They were a part of him, sure … but they were of damned little use now beyond pure nostalgia.

The lights of Geneva Spaceport glared up ahead, with the European capital’s urban sprawl delineating the black emptiness of Lake Geneva beyond. They touched down on a commercial pad, where an embarkation tube attached itself to the flier as the gravs were still spooling down.

Elena Vasilyeva, a tall woman in black with colorful abstract animations writhing over her face and hands, was there on the passenger concourse to meet him. “Captain Gray?” she said, extending a hand. “It was good of you to come on such short notice.”

It’s not like I had a whole lot of choice, he thought, but he kept it to himself and shook her hand. She was speaking Russian, but he heard the words in English as his in-head software translated them in real time.

“No problem,” he replied. “A pleasure. I’m sorry you had to stay at work so late in order to meet me.”

“It … what is the expression? It goes with the territory. This way, if you please.”

They traveled by mag-tube to the Ad Astra Confederation Government Complex, and a large meeting room a couple of hundred meters up, near the top of the tower. The space’s floor-to-ceiling windows looked out over the aptly named Plaza of Light and its titanic monument, Popolopolis’s statue Ascent of Man.

A number of other people were already present in the room, including several European military officers. Gray stopped at the threshold. “I was given to understand that this would be a civilian operation, Ms. Vasilyeva.”

“It is, Captain Gray,” a European Spaceforce admiral told him. “Operation Cygni, a joint European-American scientific and first-contact expedition to the star Deneb. However, as you must be aware, there are serious military and governmental implications to this mission.”

“Admiral Duchamp is correct,” an AI voice said in Gray’s thoughts. “In any event, we all wished to meet the man who would be commanding the expedition.”

“You could have done that in virtual reality,” he said.

In fact, the real reason for his transatlantic jaunt this afternoon had been bothering him quite a bit. With VR, people could meet in cyberspace, within AI-created realms with such resolution and fidelity to detail that it was quite impossible to tell illusion from reality.

“Perhaps,” the AI told him, “but we would not have known whether we were meeting the avatar or the actual person.”

“Nikolai is quite protective of us,” Duchamp told him. “He wanted us to get a good feel for the man who will be leading Operation Cygni.”

“ ‘Nikolai?’”

“For Nikolai Copernicus,” Vasilyeva explained. “An artificial intelligence housed here in Geneva analogous to your Konstantin.”

“A pleasure to meet you, Nikolai.”

“I am delighted to make your acquaintance. Until now I knew you only through back channels with Konstantin, and through intelligence reports and strategic analyses. To be frank, some of our people feared that you are a … I believe the Americanism is ‘cowboy.’ Shooting first, asking questions later.”

“And is that how you see me now?”

“Oh, most certainly not, Captain,” Duchamp told him. “We have all seen the reports of your encounters at Tabby’s Star. And many of us have been wondering why your senior staff would have retired you. It seems a poor use of a valuable asset.”

“Having met you, Captain,” Nikolai said, “and having spoken with you directly, I can unreservedly recommend that Operation Cygni proceed as it is currently organized, with our xenosophontological team under Captain Gray’s direct command.”

“So how about it, Konstantin?” Gray used a private channel to communicate with the AI without being overheard by the others. “I haven’t heard of this AI before.”

“Nikolai has only come on-line in the past few weeks,” Konstantin told him.

“A baby, huh? Can he be trusted?”

“As much as I can be trusted.”

Had that been sarcasm, Gray wondered? Or humor? Or a subtle rebuke? He found it difficult to understand what a super-AI was feeling—if feeling was the proper term—when he spoke with one.

“That’s not saying a great deal.”

Konstantin ignored the jibe. Gray wasn’t even certain that it was possible to insult the AI. “Nikolai,” Konstantin told him, “is several orders of magnitude faster, more powerful, and more compact than I. The Europeans wish to include a copy of him on the expedition to Deneb.”

“I’m not sure that’s such a good idea,” Gray said, transmitting on the group’s shared channel again. “The Omega virus, remember?”

“Nikolai was designed in part to be immune to Omega,” a sophontologist told him, “as well as to other potential e-threats.”

Gray wondered how any of them could be so certain of that, though. The Omega virus had been an alien software packet smuggled from Deneb back to Tabby’s Star … and it had apparently been responsible for the destruction of the Tabby’s Star civilization. Brought back to human space, it had been employed against the Rosette Aliens at Kapteyn’s Star, and evidently had been responsible for stopping the monumentally powerful invaders …

… at least for now. The Rosetters hadn’t been destroyed in the encounter by any means. As far as the xenosophontologists were concerned, they’d simply been forced to halt their advance toward Earth and actually notice the humans defiantly standing in their way.

“A copy,” Gray repeated. “Where? I mean, the Republic is going to have pretty limited running space for a full AI.”

“In this,” one of the civilian sophontologists said. She moved her hand in the air, summoning a hologram. “We call this the Helleslicht Modul Eins.”

Gray’s translator software told him the meaning of the German phrase: Bright Light Module One. The 3-D diagram floating in front of the woman was egg-shaped and, according to the listed dimensions, some three meters long and massing five metric tons.

“Dr. Marsh is a member of our xenosophontological team,” Vasilyeva told him. “But her specialty is advanced AI.”

“I see.”

“The HM-1’s internal matrix,” Marsh explained, “is essentially computronium—solid computing matter—with quantum circuitry of sufficient complexity and power to support Nikolai with plenty of room to spare.”