Ian Douglas - Bright Light

“Unknown, Captain. It appears to be clouds of micromachines similar to those you call fireflies, numbering in the trillions.”

“What are they doing?”

“Coming in this general direction.”

“Shit …”

The Olympia AI continued watching for several moments. “Captain, I would suggest you sound general quarters.”

“I was just arriving at the same conclusion.”

A second later, Olympia ’s internal passageways rang with the shrill clanging of the alarm. Not that it much mattered—the swarm was on them before most of the crew was able to take their positions. Yet the lead elements of the cloud swept past the ship at a range of several hundred kilometers, and it soon became clear that the cloud’s target was not the Olympia .

“So where are they going in such a damned hurry?” Mosely wondered aloud, thinking the danger had passed.

And then a shudder ran through the drifting mountain, followed by several savage shocks.

“Limpy!” Mosely called. “We’ve been hit!” The starfield outside began drifting. “We’re rotating!”

“We haven’t been hit, Captain. We have been caught in an extremely powerful gravitational stream.”

“What the hell is a ‘gravitational stream’?”

“A narrow, tubular volume of space has been distorted in such a way as to create rapid movement toward the Rosette. We have been caught by the fringes of the effect and are being swept along.”

“Toward the Rosette …”

“That is correct, Captain. Unless we can break free, we will pass through the central lumen of the hexagon in another forty-three seconds.”

The Olympia possessed gravitational drive engines, but the ship was slow and underpowered for a vessel of its size and mass. Mosely was shouting orders, trying to engage the drive and bring the ship clear, but the AI had already determined that there simply was not enough power for the ship to break free, not in the time remaining.

Olympia ’s capture did not appear to be a hostile act; indeed, it seemed to be completely accidental. The column of gravitationally warped space enveloped the vast swarm streaming through space toward the Rosette. It seemed likely that the devices themselves were generating the warp as a means of propulsion, and that their destination was somewhere on the other side of the Rosette gateway through spacetime.

Regardless of the reason, Olympia was being dragged along with it.

With emotionless efficiency, Limpy compressed a complete record of recent events into a laser comm message and fired it into space. There were other vessels drifting in the heart of Omega Centauri that would get the record back to Earth.

Ahead, the blurred ring of distortion created by the rapidly circling singularities expanded, filling the sky. Brilliant hues of light—light trapped within the gravitational anomaly—created a radiant halo effect that resembled a titanic, unblinking eye. At the very center of the distortion, within the eye’s pupil, a starfield had appeared. Limpy did a rapid scan and assessment and discovered that the starfield matched nothing in his own memory.

And then Olympia fell through the eye and vanished from local spacetime.

SupraQuito Space Elevator

In Transit

1635 hours, TFT

Gray was glad that he always traveled light. After his interview in Geneva, he’d been taken to a hotel for an uncomfortable night’s sleep, and then he attended a six-hour briefing covering things of which he was already well aware: the wrecked high-technic civilization at Tabby’s Star, the discovery of the Omega Code, and the fact … no, the presumption that a highly advanced civilization existed at the brilliant blue-white star Deneb some 173 light years from Tabby’s Star.

Because he’d been the one to uncover most of this information, Gray sat bored and cross-armed through most of it. He was able to correct a presenter at one point, however. There was a possible motive for the Denebans to attack the Satori, the civilization at Tabby’s Star. The Satori had encircled their sun with gravitational thrusters and been accelerating their entire civilization, star, Dyson swarm, and all, in the direction of Deneb. Why was still unknown … but the Denebans evidently hadn’t taken kindly to pushy neighbors.

It would be well, he told the large audience gathered in the Ad Astra center’s amphitheater, to keep that in mind when they approached Deneb for the first time.

Later that afternoon, he, Vasilyeva, and a dozen of her xenosoph people had boarded another, considerably larger, grav flier for the very nearly 10,000-kilometer flight to Quito, in the Unión de América del Sur.

From there, a brief tube ride had taken them to the base of the first of Earth’s three space elevators, anchored to a mountaintop perched directly astride Earth’s equator. The group had then boarded a special express skycar for the trip up to SupraQuito.

Express meant an acceleration of one G—which, added to the one G of Earth’s surface gravity, meant that the passengers were under two gravities for the first part of their trip. The magnetic skycar was impeccably appointed, however, with luxurious reclining seats designed to keep the passengers as comfortable as possible despite the sensation of another person sitting on their chests. Decks, bulkheads, and overhead projected views of their surroundings—in particular the gloriously beautiful vista of the cloud-wrapped Earth falling away below them.

Not that any of them had any particular interest in watching the Earth. Gray was focused on his breathing as they shot faster and faster into the sky above Quito, magnetically accelerated along the taut Earth-to-heaven cable.

The sensation of crushing weight lessened bit by bit as the skycar rose higher. Thirty-two minutes after leaving the elevator port, they were traveling at 19.5 kilometers per second and they were at the halfway point, almost 19,000 kilometers above the mountaintop. Acceleration ceased, and the passenger compartment rotated through 180 degrees, until the vast blue-and-white expanse of the Earth below swung around and took up a new position above them. They were now decelerating at one gravity, though it felt like considerably less because the Earth now was working against that acceleration rather than adding to it.

“I thought we would be in zero-G once we were in space!” one of the scientists grumbled. His name was Dr. Liu and Gray had been told he was on loan from the Shanghai Institute of Advanced Technology.

“Only if you’re in orbit,” Gray told him. “If you’re in free fall, you’re basically falling around the Earth … but you’re never outside of the reach of its gravity. This part of the space elevator isn’t in orbit, and if you were to open a hatch and step outside right now you’d fall all the way back down to Ecuador.”

“It’s different up at geosynch,” Vasilyeva added gently. “We’ll be in free fall there.”

Liu grunted, and Gray fell silent, feeling a small disquiet. He would have thought that any scientifically literate person would know that, and not make such a rookie goof.

Expertise in one scientific area, evidently, didn’t qualify the person as an expert in others. Space, however, was a place where ignorance could get you killed.

He wondered how savvy the rest of this crowd was when it came to basic orbital mechanics.

One hour and five minutes after leaving Earth, the skycar decelerated into SupraQuito Synchorbital Station, and a five-minute tube run brought them to the yards.

Gray sat in the tube capsule looking up through the overhead transparency at a labyrinth of struts and railguides, and orbital structures, gantries, and dockyard facilities slowly moving past against the backdrop of space. Ahead, docked within her gantry, the USNA CVL Republic looked just as Gray remembered her.