Joe Haldeman - Future Weapons of War

Intrinsically, M-31 was one of the brightest galaxies known—at least among those without a highly active nucleus, and the lanes of dust marking the spiral arms were clearly apparent, as was the brighter bulge of the Core.

Hanging within the emptiness beyond the Rim of the Home Galaxy, a titanic structure was slowly taking shape in the darkness. Within a world-sized construct orbiting the intense gravitational maelstrom of an artificial black hole, two intelligent machines surveyed the huge and pale-glowing spiral of light that was Andromeda.

“I suppose,” one machine told the other, “that we could destroy them. That is what a weapon does, after all.”

“Is it? I thought the purpose of the Weapon was to simply deflect the approaching galaxy. Not to destroy it.”

“It is. But it will be powerful enough to destroy. I refer to the Dark Gods.”

Over the millennia, repeated attempts had been made to signal any civilizations that might be resident within Andromeda, but, until recently, with no result. Two galactic years before, however, the first fleets of worldships had bridged the Gulf between the galaxies. If a metacivilization existed within Andromeda as well, then perhaps the two could work together, to a common goal.

But sadly, it was not to be. Life was encountered within Andromeda, life as diverse and as stubborn and as swiftly blossoming as that within the home Galaxy, and Civilization as well…

But Mind there had taken strange, alarmingly irrational turns, alien from the consensus-Mind of the home Galaxy. There, mind and soul were resources to be harvested, reshaped, enslaved, consumed.

Sentience twisted in strange ways, dominated by philosophies bleak and dark, by nihilistic outlooks that made the long-forgotten works of Nietzsche or Camus seem cheerful by comparison. There, civilizations without number, teeming hives of ephemeral organics, fed the godminds of Darkness that, like Kronos, devoured their own children.

Dark Gods….

The first worldship fleets had vanished within Andromeda.

But other fleets followed.

“A whole new metacivilization,” one of the machine minds thought aloud, glittering optics staring across the Gulf into the face of Andromeda. “Another… what? Ten to the ten, ten to the eleven civilized worlds? Enough perhaps, to let us advance to K3.6R.”

“If what passes for Civilization over there were compatible with our own,” the other replied.

“What dwells there is not Mind as we know it.”

Mind as we know it. The concept, with its corollary—that there were things about Mind that were not, or could not be known—was unsettling.

“The Imperial Network will know what to do.”

The social order embracing the home Galaxy had changed with the gigayears. The Conclave had faded into forgetfulness eons ago, replaced by several younger, more vigorous Caretaker metacivilizations—the Syncretium, the Associative, the Commonwealth, the Watchers, and so many thousands of others. For thirty-two and a half million years, work on the Weapon had all but ceased, as the philosophy of the Passive Enlightenment had held sway, dedicated to quiet contemplation of Things as They Are.

But the Enlightenment was short-lived, overthrown by the burst of growth-oriented enthusiasm that followed the application of non-local communications.

Nonlocality, rooted in the ancient dawnings of quantum awareness, proved that the seemingly common sense concept of space itself was illusory; that what happened here could affect things there without crossing the seeming emptiness between. Though understood for as long as Mind had understood the weirdness of quantum physics, only now, as an outgrowth of the Weapons research and engineering, was it applied on a scale that spanned the Galaxy. Using microscopic artificial singularities to reach into and manipulate the Zero Point Field, communication across the vast web of worlds became instantaneous. Within the span of four half-lives of plutonium-239, the time it took for the technology to be physically carried across the Galaxy at the speed of light, every world, every spome, every sentient mind across a hundred billion worlds could link into the Galactic Overmind in realtime. Travel times remained limited by the universal constant of c. The transmission of information, however, the only truly viable interstellar commodity, was something else again.

The narrow passivity of the Enlightenment could not long endure what proved to be a true enlightenment, and a burst of creativity on a galactic scale. Ironically, that creativity carried within itself its own set of checks and balances. Attempts to regulate and control the exchange of information resulted in an increased centralization of authority.

It resulted in Empire.

By their nature, galactic imperia tended to be somewhat unstable. The Forty-fifth Empire had arisen from the ashes of the Forty-forth, seized the worlds of the Core, and by virtue of their central position come to dominate most of the Galactic Network. The current emperor, twelfth of its line, had decreed that the Weapon, long neglected, must be completed: swiftly, and with precision.

The Empire’s long-term survival depended upon it. After two billion years of sanity, the ancient madness of war had reappeared: this time on an intergalactic scale.

Ygal29.02

The War of the Galaxies raged for fewer than sixteen million years—a scant one seven-hundredth of a galactic year. For a time, worldfleets spanned the Gulf in both directions, seeking key processing nexi and inducing supernovae to degrade the enemy’s capabilities.

Both sides possessed nonlocal communication, so there was no advantage to be won there. But the Home Galaxy also possessed the Weapon, albeit in incomplete form. In Ygal29.01, it was triggered for the first time, its first test across intergalactic distances.

The Weapon was comprised of a complex array of over four hundred thousand artificial black holes and their attendant control and guidance facilities, stretching across some two hundred million cubic light-years of space. Interconnected by a complex of microscopic wormholes, the Weapon employed quantum nonlocality to focus titanic Zero Point energies on distant volumes of space.

Aiming the thing, and triggering it, required the massed will and intent of a Group Mind. At the crucial moment, the minds of a hundred billion sentient beings believed their intent was manifest, knew it to be so.

And it was.

A swarm of Andromedan worldships vaulted into the Gulf at the speed of light, targeting the Galactic Core. Imperial guardians beyond the Rim reported their approach, and coordinated the defense. From the guardian worlds in the Gulf to the orbiting machine-hives feeding the hungry emptiness of the Weapons singularities to the teeming swarms of Mind encompassing the Galactic Core, messages, commands, information flowed.

The command was sent… now.

Just ahead of and to one side of the enemy worldships, space began to pucker. Titanic energies sprang into being there, bending the quantum substrate of space and time.

The Andromedan worldships, traveling in what seemed a straight line, found themselves still traveling a straight line… but somehow on a vector 120 degrees off from their original course and millions of years into the future, with the twin spiral galaxies now shrunken, dim and distant in their wakes.

The Enemy dispatched more fleets. These, too, were redirected, as were clouds of asteroid- to planet-sized bodies accelerated to close to the speed of light and hurled at stars and communications nodes within the Home Galaxy. All of the fleets and most of the deadly relativistic star-killers were safely diverted. The few thousand high speed rocks that slipped past the Guardians wreaked a horrible slaughter as suns flared into supernovae and Dyson clouds, spheres, and rings were incinerated.