Netlink (36 page)

Chapter 23

One hundred thirty light years from Sol, the sun that men had long known variously as Theta Serpentis, as 63 Serpentis, or as Alya, the Serpent’s Star, was in fact a widespread double, its A7 and A5 components orbiting one another at a distance of nine hundred astronomical units—about five light days. Both suns were attended by planets. The sixth world of the A5 star was home to the one DalRiss colony, ShraRish. The fifth world of the slightly cooler A7 star was known as GhegnuRish, the DalRiss homeworld, and home too to the first planetary Naga to be successfully communicated with by humans.

Both stars had been on the main sequence for about a billion years—roughly the expected lifespan for stars of their mass. Soon, within a few hundred thousands or millions of years, perhaps, the more massive, more brightly burning A5 sun would reach the point where it had burned most of its accessible hydrogen and needed to begin burning helium instead; the new reaction, hotter than the old, would upset the delicate equilibrium between thermal energy and gravity, and the star would balloon into a red giant. It was this imminent star death—imminent in cosmological terms, at any rate—that had led the DalRiss to begin evacuating their system. For the DalRiss, it was clear that Life had reached a dead end on the worlds of the Alyan suns, that if they were to continue participating in the Great Dance, they would have to do so beneath the light of another sun.

By this time, of course, the majority of the DalRiss population had already migrated elsewhere, eager to find other dancers in the Cosmos of Life. But there still remained some tens of billions of the Riss, together with their Dals and other specially grown symbionts, individuals who for one reason or another had elected to remain on the homeworld, or who had not yet boarded the waiting cityships for the great voyage outward. Too, there were several more recently arrived ships, stragglers among the eighty that had set off from human space twenty-five years before.

To say that the Riss respected life would be to anthropomorphize sentiments in a way alien to Riss thought. Rather, they perceived life as humans perceive the totality of the world around them, as an omnipresent dimension of interrelated parts and processes, the raw material of Riss civilization, the end point and purpose of an evolving universe. Life and evolution were participant and music to the Great Dance of the Cosmos; indeed, the entire purpose of the universe was to bring forth life, to turn inanimate matter into glorious, self-replicating, metabolizing organism.

Though the predicted death of the Alyan suns was widely described as a “nova,” that description was not technically accurate. The red giant phases would cook the inner worlds, searing Alya B-V and Alya A-VI and rendering them lifeless cinders that eventually would be consumed by their bloated primaries. A true nova began as a double star with the two components much closer to each other in their mutual orbitings, say a few hundred thousands or millions of kilometers. In such a system, when one star aged to the point where it began expanding into its red giant phase, much of the outflow of stellar atmosphere was swept up by the companion. More and more of the mass of one star would pile up on the other, until a nuclear flash point was reached—a literal flash point, when the smothered sun detonated in a blaze hundreds of thousands of times brighter than its former state.

Sometimes there would be only the single explosion, and the white-dwarf remnant of the younger star would continue circling the older—which frequently seemed rejuvenated for a time, possibly with a fresh influx of hydrogen as death-gift of its companion. Often, though, the explosion of one star triggered the explosion of the second as thermal balances were irrevocably thrown out of kilter, and the end result was a pair of white dwarfs circling one another, as at Nova Aquila.

With the natural unfolding of stellar evolution, then, neither Alya A nor Alya B could be expected to light the skies of Earth someday with a nova’s brilliance. But—as Dev had discovered at Nova Aquila—not all of the novae scattered along the Galaxy’s Orion Arm were natural.

The swarm of machine-ships materialized out of otherspace in a glittering plastic and metallic spray. They numbered in the tens of millions, these machines, and all were part of the local expression of the Web’s collective consciousness. Isolated from the rest of the Web by distances inconceivable, it was an associative of communicative machine nodes, none of which was intelligent or self-aware in its own right but all of which were tightly linked with other nodes by radio, microwave, and laser to form a far-flung and keenly tuned mind. The total number of Web machine units within this one cluster was much less than Nakamura’s Number, but that particular footnote of arcane biomathematical law applied to a kind of transcendence, where the intelligence was far more than the sum of its hundred billion-odd parts. This association had intelligence of a sort—enough to do the job they’d been programmed to do.

The machines’ exit point had been calculated with precision by the Central Web, based on information ripped from the heart of a DalRiss ship before it died. None of the machines blindly sprayed into the target system was expected to return to the Galactic Core; none felt anything like disappointment or protest at ill-use. They had, after all, been designed and built expressly for this purpose. A variety of DalRiss cityships and even a few human vessels were on hand to note the sudden appearance of the horde. None was in a position to intercept its members, however, as the Web Associative, wheeling together like an immense flock of birds or insects, swung into a course that would plunge them into Alya B.

The Starminers’ senses detected the worlds of both ShraRish and GhegnuRish, but since DalRiss civilization had evolved along strictly biological lines rather than mechanical or industrial, they took no note of the cities growing on their surfaces. Machines were their sole measure of intelligence or worth… and even then only machines of specific intelligence and purpose could be clearly recognized as part of the Web’s gestalt consciousness. Indeed, organic life of any kind, while recognized as self-replicating and self-organizing ongoing chemical processes, occupied no higher a niche in the Web’s concept of an ordered universe than did the bacteria living within in a city built by Man.

Ignoring the cityships and the worlds alike, ignoring the incomprehensible signals at various radio and laser wavelengths, the Starminers plunged into the photosphere of Alya B, while the smaller Guardians and Swarmers and Eaters danced above the searing tongues of vast, stellar prominences. Composed of alloys and fields of magnetic force designed to resist pressures of billions of kilograms per square centimeter and temperatures of hundreds of millions of degrees Kelvin, the Starminers plunged deeper and yet deeper into the star’s ultra-dense core. There, they initiated the process that would destabilize the star, opening a rift in space and time—a rift at first microscopically small, but joined by means of a thread-slender wormhole to one of the hellfurnaces at the Galactic Core, a place in which they gathered the resources of an entire galaxy and reshaped them in matter and in energy to their own purposes.

The rift widened… becoming a crack in space. Energy appeared inside the star, the energies associated with the star-death radiance of an erupting quasar leaking from that microscopic prick in space and time and flooding into the stellar core.

Normally it would have taken millennia for that buildup of energy to work its way up through layer upon layer of the star’s inner heart, but the continued influx of energy at the center continued to press outward, relentless, ballooning, irresistible. A star, any star, is a constant compromise between the tendency to collapse under its own gravity and the tendency to fly apart into space, an ongoing fusion explosion restrained by its own mass from expanding further.

And the Starminers had just irreversibly revoked the contract of that compromise, pouring a steady flood of energy into the core that even the tremendous, crushing mass of Alya B could not long contain. In scant hours, then, Alya B began growing brighter in the green-tinted GhegnuRish sky.

DalRiss natural organs for perceiving light accomplished little more than simple recognition of light and dark, allowing them to establish the difference between day and night. Only those few individuals who happened to be symbiotically linked with Perceivers, then, could look up and note that their star’s face had become somewhat blotchy. Though it was as radiant across its entire disk as ever, some small portions of the star’s surface had grown brighter by far in scant seconds; as with sunspots, which appear dark only because of the comparison with the rest of a star’s surface, the bright patches made the rest of Alya B turn dim.

But the bright patches spread, and soon the entire sky was a searing ocean of white flame… and the DalRiss who happened to be outside and placed to see the phenomenon were already dying.

Atmosphere, superheated, exploded outward in swirling windstorms. Organic material caressed by that deadly light burst into flame, or shriveled and blackened where it died. Before long, the heat had reached the planetary Naga, which extended throughout the world’s crust, a living, thinking, communicating network. At first, instinctively, it drew life from the sudden radiance falling on the world’s day side. Soon, though, the heat became so intense that the Naga was retreating from that hemisphere, seeking cooler refuge deep within the comforting, sheltering rock.

Ten hours after the first intimation of disaster, the upper few hundred meters of rock on GhegnuRish had already become molten, a planet-wide ocean of crusted-over lava and crumbling continents of white-hot rock. Beneath the molten rock, the Naga was everywhere beginning to disassociate into separate, subintelligent fragments.

Then the shock wave of the exploding star reached the planet, stripping away what was left of the searing atmosphere and crust alike in a white hot hurricane of particles—protons, hot plasma, hard radiation. By the time GhegnuRish had completed another rotation, its diameter had dwindled by nearly twenty percent, and what was left was a glowing, molten sphere rapidly boiling away into space.

Five days later, the light of Alya B’s detonation reached its companion sun, Alya A, and the fifth world, ShraRish.

Millennia before, the DalRiss had abandoned their home-world to the Naga that occupied it, after a long and bitter fight. ShraRish, their sole colony, now was more thickly populated by the immense, squat, starfish organisms that served as DalRiss cities than their homeworld. For twenty-five human years now, those cities had been abandoning the Alyan system, choosing instead to seek other partners in the Great Dance among the stars, but the remaining cities still numbered in the tens of thousands.

Traveling just behind the flash and dazzle of dying GhegnuRish, the Web’s scouts drifted in at just beneath the speed of light, decelerating suddenly at thousands of gravities, a maneuver impossible to any organic, cellular-based life form. Again, the Starminers plunged into the star’s depths.

And within another few days, Alya A, like its brother, was flaring into the deadly, blossoming brilliance of a nova. Most of the DalRiss and human ships orbiting one or the other of the two doomed worlds were able to escape.

But ten billion DalRiss who’d chosen to remain on their worlds of their birth perished in the dual funeral pyres of their suns.

Chapter 24

No plan of operations can look with any certainty beyond the first meeting with the major forces of the enemy. The commander is compelled to reach decisions on the basis of situations which cannot be predicted.

—H
ELMUTH
V
ON
M
OLTKE

nineteenth century
C
.
E
.

Until the Aquilan Expeditionary Force reached the staging area at the Nebula, all of the messages passing back and forth across the new I2C network had been strictly routine… daily reports on mission status, on personnel, equipment, and supplies, navigational and communications checks, nothing out of the ordinary save for the fact of faster-than-light communication itself. The arrival point was carefully swept by flights of warstriders reconfigured in their warflyer mode—there was some concern that the machines that had followed Dev Cameron and the DalRiss out from Nova Aquila might still be around—but the patrols turned up nothing. That was not surprising, of course. The North American-Penguin nebula complex was vast, encompassing many thousands of cubic light years, so even if the Web machines were still operational and able to pick up the AEF’s arrival, they wouldn’t be able to contest it unless they possessed their own faster-than-light capability independent of the Device. And, apparently, that wasn’t the case.

Not long after the fleet had materialized in the soft, blue glow of the nebula, however, the first I2C reports came in telling of trouble in another, more distant quarter, of disaster in the Alyan system. Ships—human and DalRiss—that had been able to jump clear in time had carried word to the Shichiju of millions of alien machines appearing out of empty space and attacking the Alyan suns… word of stars exploding, of worlds gone molten, empty of life.

The news was still being digested throughout the fleet. Few of the humans, at any rate, felt powerful attachments to the destroyed alien worlds, but it was all too easy to imagine the same thing happening to 26 Draconis, or 70 Ophiuchi, or 36 Ophiuchi.

Or Sol.

Dev had contacted Vic in linkage aboard the
Karyu,
passing on the interesting piece of news that the vice admiral commanding the AEF had just received an emergency broadcast direct from the Tenno Kyuden, the Palace of Heaven in Earth Synchorbit. The content of the message had been coded and Dev had been unable to break the code without alerting security programs traveling with it, but it was easy enough to guess what the contents must be. Within ten minutes, a ViRcomm meeting had been scheduled for all ship commanders in the combined fleet.