Ian Douglas - Dark Matter

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.

When forced to fight, however, Humankind was always tinkering, trying to come up with a better hand ax . . . a better spear . . . a better high-­energy laser. The Alcubierre Drive was a case in point. Theoretically, there was no upper limit to a starship’s pseudovelocity, but in practical terms everything depended on how much energy a starship could generate and direct to the artificial singularities that served to pull space in on itself. When Columbia, the first human starship, had ’cubed to Alpha Centauri in 2138, she’d managed the passage in six and a half months . . . a pseudovelocity of 0.095 light years per day. Until recently, most naval vessels had managed an Alcubierre rate of around 1.8 light years per day, though high-­velocity message couriers could manage better than 5 light years per day.

Late in 2424, new developments in the quantum power taps used on board starships had greatly boosted the energy available for FTL transitions, drastically cutting travel times between the stars. Moving as swiftly as the old HAMP-­20 Sleipnir-­class mail packets, and by taking advantage of the shortcut afforded by the TRGA gate at Texaghu Resh, America and her entourage could cross the 16,000 light years from Omega Centauri to Sol in just forty-­four days.

Of course, the march of technological advancement involved other measures of progress than mere speed, and implementing some of those changes—­the introduction of new and more powerful weapons, for instance—­could take time. Engineering was not the same as mere technological understanding. The important thing was that human military technology was in an all-­out race, now, to develop faster ships and more potent weapons before the Sh’daar could overwhelm Earth’s interstellar polity.

It was, he thought, the one bright side of the human tragedy of war. In-­head circuitry had begun as high-­tech communications devices for elite troops—­Marines and Special Forces. Global Net had evolved from the old Internet, itself an outgrowth of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, or DARPANET. Singularity generators, used now both to generate zero-­point energy and to warp space for high-­velocity travel, had started off as microscopic black holes projected into enemy ships or structures as a weapon.

Gray just wished that Humankind could get occasional stretches of peace in which to enjoy the non-­military benefits of those advances.

But that golden era, if it was even possible in the first place, would have to wait a while longer. The Sh’daar . . . the Confederation . . . and now, just possibly, if things went very wrong, the Rosette Aliens . . .

Humankind was going to have some scrambling to do to catch up.

And if they failed, the consequences might well be the final peace, the peace that would come with the extinction of the human species.

York Plaza

Toronto

United States of North America

1953 hours, EST

President Koenig, too, had been thinking about the threat presented by the Sh’daar. Just how had humans been able to hold off the onslaught of the Sh’daar client species for so long, despite the fact that human technology couldn’t match that of the H’rulka, the Turusch, the Slan, or any of the other enemies encountered so far?

And he thought that he just might know the answer.

“You guys are busted,” he said, his voice mild. He took a sip from his drink. “I think I know why your masters can’t get their act together.”