Dark Matter (Star Carrier, Book 5) (4 page)

The words hit Koenig like a hammer blow. “Christ! The Sh’daar?
Here?
”

“It may be a good idea,” Konstantin said, “to attempt the destruction of your
human
enemies before having to face something considerably more exotic . . . and dangerous.”

And Koenig could only nod in dumb agreement.

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

Classification: Green-Delta

K
A
RDASHEV CLASSIFICATION:
First proposed by astronomer Nikolai Kardashev in 1964 as a means of classifying hypothetical galactic civilizations in terms of the amount of energy they use. In its original form, it stated that a Type I civilization utilizes all of the available energy resources of its home planet; while a Type II uses the energy of its entire star system, and a Type III uses the resources of an entire galaxy. Lacking useful fine detail, this early scale was later refined and expanded.

Currently, galactic civilizations, both observed and hypothetical, can be assigned a more precise Kardashev number using the formula K = log
10
MW
/10, where K is the Kardashev level, and
MW
is the energy, in megawatts, used by the civilization in one year.

Type 0:
Established as a baseline, a K-0 civilization utilizes roughly 1 million watts (1 MW) of energy. Energy and raw materials are extracted from crude, organic-based sources such as wood or fossil fuels. Earth’s civilization during the late twentieth century when the Kardashev scale was first proposed, utilizing roughly 15 terawatts globally, would have been defined as approximately K-0.71.

Type 1:
A civilization utilizing all energy available on a planetary scale. For Humankind, this would be an energy capability equivalent to Earth’s insolation, the radiation it receives from the sun, or around 10
16
watts. It is capable of interplanetary and possibly limited interstellar travel and colonization, of planetary engineering, and can utilize a variety of energy sources, including but not limited to fission, fusion, antimatter, and zero-point energy. Earth’s interstellar civilization in 2425 utilizes an estimated 10
18
watts, and therefore has a Kardashev level of approximately 1.2.

Type 2:
Sol has a luminosity of about 4 × 10
26
watts, and this would be the energy usage typical of a Type 2 civilization. The ancient ur-Sh’daar, who manipulated entire stars to create hyperdimensional gateways, are estimated to have utilized around 10
34
watts, and would have been considered to be Kardashev 2.7 at the time they entered their technological singularity 876 million years ago. Such a civilization would be capable of interstellar and possibly local intergalactic travel, as well as stellarforming projects such as Dyson spheres, Dyson swarms, and star mining.

Type 3:
The Milky Way galaxy has a total luminosity of about 4 × 10
37
watts. While capturing the totality of a galaxy’s radiation output is problematic, a civilization generating and utilizing energy on this scale would be considered to be Type 3. The ancient civilization or civilizations variously known as the Builders, the Starborn, or the Stargods, who are believed to have been capable of time travel and of large-scale stellarforming, are almost certainly at least Type 3.0. Such cultures would be capable of extragalactic travel and to perform stellar engineering on a galactic scale.

Type 4:
This is the designation for a purely speculative category of cultures able to use energies on the scale of galactic superclusters, or approximately 10
42
watts.

Type 5:
Also speculative, a K-5 civilization would utilize energy equivalent to the output of the visible universe, or very roughly 10
49
watts.

Type 6:
Even more speculative. Type 6 civilizations would span a number of parallel universes, and might engage in “ ’brane forming” activities such as creating or manipulating entire universes. Since this scale clearly surpasses concepts based on current scientific understanding, no data on energy usage or predictions as to a Type 6 culture’s technological capabilities are possible.

When the Kardashev scale was first introduced, the underlying concept suggested that galactic civilizations might literally use all of the energy available from their local star or galaxy. The Dyson sphere, proposed by Freeman Dyson four years earlier, might represent an attempt to trap all available stellar energy, allowing Earth to detect a K-2 civilization by modifications to its light output, or by recognizing the radiated infrared emissions of that civilization’s industrial processes. The development of zero-point energy obviates the need to efficiently trap the star’s light, however, since the energy drawn from hard vacuum represents a far more abundant source of power than stellar fusion. Nevertheless, the overall amount of energy utilized by the civilization, can still be quantified as the amount available from a world, a star, or a galaxy, no matter what the actual source of that energy might be.

Obviously, the breakdown presented here is extremely rough—a guide only—and can make no predictions of the specifics of a given advanced culture’s technologies, or of its motivations, philosophies, or attitudes toward other species.

Where, Gray wondered as he finished the download and closed the channel, did the modern Sh’daar fall on this scale? The data specifically mentioned the ur-Sh’daar, the empire or collective of mutually alien species that had inhabited a small, irregular galaxy devoured by the Milky Way 876 million years ago. At that time, shortly before the smaller galaxy had been torn apart by intergalactic tidal forces and the empire disrupted, the ur-Sh’daar had entered its version of what was commonly called the Technological Singularity. Also known as the Vinge Singularity, after the mathematician and author Vernor Vinge, who first popularized the idea in the late twentieth century, the singularity was broadly seen as that point in a civilization’s development where organic intelligence merged with artificial intelligence in ways that utterly transformed the meanings of words like
life
and
intelligence
. For humans, the so-called GRIN technologies were seen as the drivers of this change: Genetics, Robotics, Information systems, and Nanotechnology.

Twenty years ago, Gray and
America
’s battlegroup, under the command of Admiral Alexander Koenig, had used one of the enigmatic TRGA cylinders to cross a very great deal of both space and time to reach the doomed galaxy—known to its inhabitants as the N’gai Cloud. There, they’d learned about the
Schjaa Hok
, the Transcending or Time of Change, when the highly advanced species of the ur-Sh’daar had entered a period of transcendence, vanishing from the ken of minds still firmly anchored in what they thought of as Reality. Gray had seen downloaded records of that event almost 900 million years in the past, and was still shaken by it. Of particular interest was the fact that not all members of that long-ago civilization had transcended. Called
Refusers
—those who had refused the augmentation and the advances in genetics and computer enhancement of an artificially directed evolution—the remnant species had rebuilt a shattered civilization from scratch . . . the civilization Humankind knew now as the Sh’daar.

Traumatized as a collective of intelligent species by the Time of Change, the Sh’daar had eventually recovered, spreading not only into the much larger galaxy that was devouring the N’gai Cloud, but ultimately through time as well, at least in a limited sense. Within the current epoch of the Milky Way, they’d established themselves as a dominant, apparently electronic civilization that had first appeared a few million years ago, creating a network of client races, the
va Sh’daar
. They seemed dedicated to the active suppression of higher technologies among their clients—in particular the GRIN drivers of the singularity that had wrecked their culture ages before. Newly encountered species were given the opportunity to join the Sh’daar Collective freely. If the offer was rejected, the new species were forced; Humankind had received the Sh’daar Ultimatum, as it was known, in 2367, through the recently contacted Agletsch. A steady, grinding series of wars had been waged with various
va Sh’daar
races for the following thirty-eight years.

Then, twenty years ago, the Sh’daar were beaten . . . or, at least, so it had appeared.
America
’s battlegroup had passed through a TRGA cylinder and emerged at the heart of the N’gai Cloud 876 million years in the past—a temporal end run that seemed to have panicked the Sh’daar more than the possibility of a new technic singularity. The resulting truce engineered by Admiral Koenig had promised an end to hostilities, and had actually held for two decades. But recently, Sh’daar client species had been testing human resolve once again. The Confederation insisted that Humankind could not long hold out against superior alien technology and numbers; better to surrender
now
, Geneva insisted, before Earth was obliterated.

The difference in cultural philosophies between Old World and New, differences between two alternative and mutually contradictory views of Humankind’s future in the galaxy, had, along with other more mundane problems, resulted in the current civil war back home.

“The Alcubierre bubble is stable,” Captain Gutierrez reported, jerking Gray’s full awareness back to
America
’s flag bridge. “We are currently ’cubing at five point three. We should reach the local TRGA in eight hours.”

“Very well,” Gray replied, and he smiled. ’
Cubing
was naval slang for traveling under Alcubierre Drive. The number was how many light years
America
was now crossing in a day.

The Sh’daar, with their distinct advantages in technology over what humans were capable of right now, had obviously missed an important point. That series of wars between their clients and Humankind had put considerable pressure on the Confederation for more than half a century . . . but what the Sh’daar seemed to have missed was the fact that human technology tended to advance
much
more rapidly during times of war than during peace. Intelligence believed that they were avoiding launching an all-out attack that might easily drive humanity into extinction; they wanted another pliant and cooperative
va Sh’daar
client, not a glassed-over cinder that once had been an inhabited world. Obviously, a galactic culture capable of merging old stars to create new would have no trouble at all annihilating Sol if they so chose. Forcing a stubborn
Homo sapiens
to accept Sh’daar dictates on permissible levels of technology, evidently, was a lot harder.