Authors: Ian Douglas
B009NFP2OW EBOK (30 page)
The Muslim demand would bear careful thinking about, however. The White Covenant had been enacted three and a half centuries ago, in 2074. That had been a chaotic and violent era of Earth’s history, one of global warfare between the Islamic world and the West. While a billion Muslims had been willing to live in peace with other religions, hundreds of millions more, ground down by poverty and illiteracy and the tyranny of local states, had grown up in breeding grounds for the more obnoxious forms of Islamic fundamentalism, of the sort that rioted and burned buildings and even burned whole cities over some perceived insult, or at the urging of some crackpot imam. The wars of the twenty-first century had been horrific, and hundreds of millions had died.
At the end, Islamic worship was permitted on Earth
only
under the provisions of the White Covenant, which declared that a person’s religious beliefs were his own, and that proselytizing—or using threats or warfare to force conversions—violated the basic rights of man. Those who disagreed had been forced to emigrate—to Mufrid, out at Eta Boötis, among other worlds.
Islam had acquiesced to the White Covenant only after being soundly defeated by the Western Alliance, and had never truly accepted its provisions. It was, after all, their duty under the holy Quran to bring
all
of Humankind under the banner of Allah, His Prophet, and the Sharia, the religious law and moral code of Islam.
Could Koenig, in good conscience, agree to such a thing? Assuming he could win, of course.
“I trust my decision meets with your approval, President Koenig,” Konstantin said. “The situation seemed desperate, and required desperate measures.”
“Let’s hold on the Islamic Theocracy question,” Koenig said. “But if the Chinese are willing to help us, hell, yeah, they can join our club. We should’ve let them in centuries ago.”
“Had we done so, we might find ourselves facing them as enemies, rather than admitting them as allies,” Konstantin said. “Ah . . . the first shots have been fired.”
On the screen, nothing much appeared to be happening, though the fighters accelerated suddenly and left the protective shelter of their vast consort. Moments later, however, someone in the command center cheered.
“Direct hit on the
Napoleon
!” a man yelled. “Hits on the
Mastrale
and the
Köln
!”
“
Napoleon
is heavily damaged and breaking off,” someone else called out. “Hot damn, the Hegies have ’em on the run!”
“Where did the Chinese come from?” Pamela Sharpe asked. “Why are they helping
us
?”
“Seems we’ve been doing a little back-room negotiating,” Koenig said to the room. “Maybe Beijing wants us to forgive and forget Wormwood.”
Back-room, as in the back side of the moon. Koenig still wasn’t sure what he thought of Konstantin’s sudden independence of thought, but at the moment he was willing to take any help he could get. He’d already noticed Konstantin’s use of the term “our faction.” Could AIs take sides in a human political struggle?
Evidently, this one could. And had.
And Koenig was very, very glad of the fact.
The civil war wasn’t over by any means. But Konstantin had bought the USNA the precious time that it needed.
And maybe that would be enough.
18 January 2425
TC/USNA CVS
America
The Black Rosette,
Omega Centauri
16,000 light years from Earth
1420 hours, TFT
Admiral Trevor “Sandy” Gray stared into a vista of incomprehensible and complex wonder. Whatever it was that had emerged from the Black Rosette, whatever it was that had destroyed
Endeavor
, was incomparably beautiful.
Two months had passed since CBG-14’s return from 70 Ophiuchi. There’d been two tumultuous, eventful weeks after their emergence at the 40-AU limit of the Sol System, followed by forty-four days of quiet and introspective seclusion within the tightly wrapped spacetime bubble of Alcubierre Drive, and that had brought them . . . here.
“It’s incredible!” Laurie Taggart said.
They were standing side by side in one of
America
’s officer lounges, a quiet compartment with comfortable furniture, low lighting, and a gently curving, deck-to-overhead viewall almost 15 meters wide.
“It’s all of that,” Gray agreed. Words seemed such poor, such poverty-stricken things in the face of such beauty.
The two of them were comfortably nude after a swim in the rec-center pool. Others in the lounge, a handful of ship’s officers, were dressed or not, from uniform to utilities to off-duty civvies to social nudity, depending on preference. Military regs had little to say about fashion statements during off-duty hours.
The ship—the entire battlegroup—was still on high alert, but after twenty-four hours of watching that . . . that
thing
out there, Gray had decided to leave the bridge in Commander Gutierrez’s capable hands and take some much-needed downtime with his weapons officer.
You could not stay keyed to the highest possible emotional and mental pitch all the time. So far, there’d been no indication that the . . . call them the
Builders
. . . thing, or things, outside had deliberately destroyed the
Endeavor
, or, indeed, that there was any threat at all.
America
and her battlegroup had arrived, were hanging motionless now in space, observing . . . and trying to decide what their next step should be.
The Builders had, so far, taken exactly zero notice of their presence.
“This might be what it takes to end the war back home,” Taggart observed. “If that doesn’t get Humankind to pull together, to come together as one united species, I don’t know what will.”
“Maybe. But they’re still human, after all. Don’t expect miracles.”
When CBG-40 had arrived at Earth, it was to find the Confederation sundered, a civil war in progress. The USNA capital had been destroyed in what could only be described as an atrocity, a war crime on an unfathomable scale. Geneva so far had refused to admit that they’d given the order. The nano-D strike on the city had been the act of a renegade squadron commander, now dead in the fiery immolation of the
Montcalm
a few moments after the destruction of Columbus. USNA forces had beaten off invasion attempts at several points along the Periphery, and captured Bruno Base on the moon.
And elsewhere on Earth, the horror of Columbus had forced the Confederation loyalists back on the defensive. Russia and North India both had seceded from the Confederation and announced alliances with the USNA. But as if to balance the equation, Mexico and Honduras had seceded from the USNA. There was bitter fighting now along the Texas and California borders.
How it all would resolve no one could tell. Much depended on how the various colony worlds would choose.
Once that issue was resolved, perhaps a Marine assault force could be dispatched to Osiris. The fates of colonists lost twenty years ago, however, definitely took a backseat to events on Earth, here and now.
Somewhere in the chaos, President Koenig had found the time to summon Gray to the temporary capital beneath the city of Toronto, promote him to rear admiral, and confirm his command of CBG-40. That command was stripped down a bit, now. America’s battlegroup now consisted of only
America
, one cruiser, the
Edmonton
, three destroyers, and the provisioning ship
Shenandoah
. And almost as soon as his command had been confirmed by the USNA Senate and the Hexagon, new orders had come through.
The battlegroup was being deployed to Omega Centauri, to observe and report on the “Thing” that had emerged from the Black Rosette four months before, and destroyed the RSV
Endeavor
.
Gray hadn’t decided yet whether the deployment was intended as punishment, or simply as a means of getting him out of the way. While the Senate had been effusive in its praises of his actions at both Ophiuchis, 36 and 70, the Hexagon was somewhat less than enthusiastic. Gray
had
disobeyed a direct order to return to Earth after the fighting at Arianrhod.
“
I
understand,” Koenig had told him after the promotion ceremony. The president had shrugged. “When you’re out on the ass-end of nowhere, you have to do what you think is right at the time. But unless it’s done by the book, the brass won’t like it. You know that.”
Gray did indeed.
And now he really
was
on the ass-end of nowhere, sixteen thousand light years from home, confronted by . . .
that
.
The visuals transmitted by the
Endeavor
during its last few seconds of existence hadn’t shown much except for an intense light emerging from the Rosette. Presumably, whatever had come through from the other side had set up shop here in the heart of the Omega Centauri star cluster and begun disassembling stars.
Hundreds of thousands of stars had been taken apart, leaving vast, dark streaks through the glowing heart of the globular cluster. Black holes—other than those making up the fast-rotating Rosette—had been brought together. Stars had been merged with stars, creating a central beacon fifty times Sol’s mass and illuminating the cluster’s central core with searing blue light, an intense hazy glow fifty light days across.
And out from that central sun.
It was hard to avoid the thought that what they were seeing was an enormous, deliberate structure of some kind, an unimaginably vast construct of curving beams and platforms and spheres and connectors of pale blue mist. Close measurement of those shapes had revealed something disturbing. They were
bent
, twisted in eye-hurting ways that did not make sense by the rules and regs of ordinary geometry.
Somehow, that bizarre and alien construction involved not only normal space, but higher dimensions as well. It was anchored by stars and within the depths of the central sun, and extended outward into otherness, extending—impossibly—throughout the entire cluster, across perhaps two hundred light years. And yet . . . the light from anything farther out than a couple of light months would not have reached this spot where the battlegroup observed. By rights, they should be able to see only a fraction of a light year.
But not only space, but time as well had been warped in this place. Beams a hundred light years long reached into vastness and vanished into some space that was not space, some time that was not time.
The overall effect was indescribably lovely, in gentle hues of blue and violet, with deep and subtle ruby reds in places where structures vanished from the ken of normal spacetime.
It was beautiful and it was awe-inspiring.
It was also unintelligible to human reason and understanding.
What, exactly, was it?
“The alien gods,” Taggart said, her voice small and far away.
“I’m not sure I can buy that,” Gray replied. “I mean . . . beings so powerful they can do
that
. What the hell would they need with humans, anyway? They land on Earth, teach people to plant crops or build pyramids . . . why? Those beams are light years long, and they’ve reworked time so we can see it all. Beings like that . . . I’m not sure they would even notice the Earth.”
“I don’t know,” Taggart said. “I don’t know. I don’t even know what I’m looking at.” Tears glistened on her face. Was it happiness at seeing evidence of the gods she worshipped, Gray wondered? Or terror at this unimaginable expression of the ultimate Void, the Black Unknown?
For Gray, Laurie Taggart’s ancient alien gods had often seemed . . . petty, somehow. Jehovah was a space alien, dropping nukes on Sodom and Gomorrah, or tinkering with human genetics.
Ridiculous
.
And yet . . .
Gray was thinking now of another mystery that had filtered down across the galaxy, footnotes from a thousand alien civilizations within the Sh’daar Collective.
“I wonder,” he whispered.
“Wonder what?” Taggart asked.
“I wonder if these are the Starborn?”
The term would work until something better came along . . . until they learned more.
But for now, the glowing bridges, buttresses, and arcs of the Builders’ stellarforming remained impenetrably enigmatic.
And humans could only watch . . .
And wonder.
I
AN
D
OUGLAS
is one of several pseudonyms for author William H. Keith, Jr. As Ian Douglas he writes an SF/military series called the Heritage Trilogy, and its sequels, the Legacy Trilogy and the Inheritance Trilogy, in which the U.S. Marine Corps is sent to battle alien species.
www.whkeith.com
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