Ian Douglas - Bright Light

Harper Voyager

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers 2018

Copyright © William H. Keith, Jr. 2018

Cover illustration © Gregory Bridges

Cover layout design © HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2018

William H. Keith, Jr. asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008121129

Ebook Edition © October 2018 ISBN: 9780008121136

Version: 2018-10-24

As always …

for Brea

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-one

Chapter Twenty-two

Chapter Twenty-three

Chapter Twenty-four

Chapter Twenty-five

Epilogue

Keep Reading …

By Ian Douglas

About the Publisher

The Consciousness had known of Earth and of the starfaring civilization centered there for a long time. Indeed, given that it spanned vast gulfs of time as well as space, it was as if it had always known.

In the heart of the teeming sphere of 10 million ancient suns known to the humans as Omega Centauri, at the central rosette of six massive black holes orbiting their common center in a patently artificial arrangement, the Consciousness brooded on the intelligent beings it had found in this new, painfully young universe.

Intelligent was such a relative concept.

This was bolstered by the fact that the Consciousness had … tasted a number of them, sampling the minute ships and other structures within this volume of space.

Most of the minds it had sampled were of pathetically slow and limited capabilities. A few—a very few—were of higher orders of intelligence, though none came close to the Consciousness in terms of depth or scope of Mind.

Methodically, the Consciousness consumed those worth the effort.

The rest it deleted.

And with a slowly increasing vigor, it explored more deeply into this corner of the new universe. It had identified a sullen red ember of a star, called Kapteyn’s Star by the minds it had assimilated, with a world engineered by beings uploaded into digital form, extremely ancient beings called the Baondyeddi, the Adjugredudhra, and the Groth Hoj. These species, parts of a corporate polity referred to by various sources as the Sh’daar, were in hiding from some unknown threat … quite possibly from the Consciousness itself, though the digital refugees didn’t seem to know exactly what it was they feared.

Despite their attempts to make themselves undetectable—including the slowing of their awareness of time down to seconds on each century, the Consciousness had found them … and it had devoured them, absorbing trillions of minds into its own teeming hive, giving them order and a sense of purpose that had been lacking before.

And in the process it learned of the N’gai Cluster … and of the human presence much closer at hand.

And on the human homeworld, just twelve light years distant from Kapteyn’s Star, the watching beings of that planet anticipated the arrival of the Consciousness over Earth with an increasing and existential dread.

30 January 2426

Battery Park

New York City

1545 hours, EST

“Get the hell out of my head!”

“I submit that we will have to talk at some point,” the voice in his head told him. It sounded faintly amused.

Trevor Gray, formerly of the USNA Navy, scowled. “Why?” he replied, blunt and challenging. “Damn it, Konstantin, you’ve wrecked my life. You know that, don’t you?”

“It was necessary for you to leave naval service. Vital, in fact.”

“Bullshit. You no longer own me. And I don’t think we have a thing to say to one another.”

Gray prowled the transparent observation deck extending out over the choppy waters of New York Harbor. At his back, the newly grown towers of what once had been the Manhatt Ruins stabbed skyward, gleaming glass and silver in the winter sun. The place had … changed during the past year, changed more than he’d ever imagined possible. The spot where he was standing had been underwater a few months ago. Now it was clean and shiny, with a scattering of civilians who looked like tourists.