Ian Douglas - Dark Mind

“Possibly,” Schmidt replied. “That’s what we’re here to find out. Adler Flight … shift to stealth mode and arm weapons.”

The black surfaces of the fighters rippled and shifted as the craft adjusted their outer shapes from winged to teardrops. While not optically invisible, their hull nanoflage absorbed nearly every whisper of incoming radar pulse, every bit of light. Their environmental systems shifted into high gear as well, storing the rising internal heat rather than radiating it as infrared.

The five Pan-European fighters skimmed in beneath Bifrost’s system of broad, brilliant rings, each circle eerily reminiscent of the concentric grooves of an old-fashioned twentieth-century phonograph record. Kapteyn’s Star, the local red dwarf sun, was a bright red pinpoint shining through the rings, wan and distant. Three and a half astronomical units from the giant Bifrost, it contributed little light and less heat.

“ Himmelschloss ,” Schmidt called. “Do you copy?” The message was tight beamed and shielded, but Schmidt knew they would have to switch to radio silence soon.

Still nothing but static. Himmelschloss —“Sky Castle”—was the Pan-European monitor that had brought them here, to the Kapteyn’s system, now following a few hundred thousand kilometers astern and shielded from Heimdall by the vast, sullen, and storm-shrouded bulk of Bifrost.

“If it’s ghosts, Marty,” Leutnant Herko Dobrindt said over a private com channel, “we’re not going to be able to fight them. Not with these antiques.”

Schmidt had just been thinking the same thing. KRG-17 Raschadler fighters were a Franco-German design twenty years out of date and well past their prime. They were still effective space fighters—not as maneuverable as the latest North-American fighters, perhaps, but they carried the latest weaponry. Schmidt doubted, however, that even the most up-to-date KRG-40 Raumsturm would have a chance against those …

Whatever those flying things were.

An orange crescent appeared ahead, beyond the broad plane of the giant’s rings. The world was Heimdall, a moon the size of Earth, kept warm this far from its diminutive sun by tidal stresses with Bifrost. The surface temperature now was a few degrees below the freezing point of water. At one time, though, a billion years earlier—so the scientists had told them—Heimdall had been warm and Earthlike …

Heimdall, like its sun, was very old.

“I’m picking up ghosts up there,” Leutnant Gerd Heller announced. “My God, look at them all!”

“Record everything,” Schmidt ordered. “ Everything .”

Bifrost appeared to be enveloped in a hazy, filmy light. At first, Schmidt assumed he was seeing the world’s aurorae—Heimdall’s strong magnetic field interacted wildly with the charged-particle storms swirling about Bifrost, and the world’s icy surface often was bathed in a lambent, electric glow—but a closer inspection showed that the glow was in fact caused by planet-girdling clouds: a haze of apparent dust motes at this range, but consisting of some trillions of discrete objects ranging from millimeters wide up to several meters or more across.

And … there was something more. A lot more. Dimly glimpsed, so faint that Schmidt thought that they must be a trick of his eyes, there were shapes. Huge shapes dwarfing Heimdall, dwarfing even massive Bifrost. From his vantage point, skimming along beneath Bifrost’s rings, it seemed as though Heimdall was suspended within a vast and far-flung web so insubstantial, so gossamer, it was difficult to tell if it was there at all.

And yet it was filling all of space ahead …

“Kapteyn Orbital,” Dobrindt said. “It’s gone !”

“We knew that,” Schmidt said.

“I mean there’s not even any trace of wreckage or debris. Something that big couldn’t have just vanished!”

No it couldn’t , Schmidt thought.

The station, a Stanford Torus housing more than 12,000 people, had been the principal base of the Kapteyn’s research colony, a Confederation facility built to study the enigmatic ruins on the moon it circled. Shortly after the arrival of the Rosette Aliens, six months ago, the base had been destroyed.

Or, at least, it had disappeared without a trace. Some still hoped it had simply been transported elsewhere.

Which meant the hopes for finding 12,000 Confederation personnel alive were fast dwindling. The heavy monitor Himmelschloss had deployed to the Kapteyn system to investigate.

Schmidt’s fighter jolted hard. His instrumentation showed what seemed to be ripples in spacetime, moving out from Bifrost. The static was growing stronger, too, as were the bizarre light effects, like aurorae engulfing all five fighters.

“Okay, Adler Flight,” Schmidt called. “This is where we part company. Maintain radio silence. I’ll … see you on the other side.”

“Good luck, Marty,” Dobrindt replied. “Going silent …”

The other four craft, nearly invisible even at this range, slowed, then dropped astern. Schmidt’s fighter continued drifting ahead, everything shut down now except for life support—struggling to control the fast-rising onboard temperatures—and passive scanners. No one knew if the alien ghosts would be able to track the fighter or not … or if they even cared. They appeared to be completely aloof to mere humans. But better safe than sorry.

Schmidt had volunteered for this, back on board the Himmelschloss during their voyage out from Earth. His chances seemed a lot more slender now, here in the blackness as he hurtled toward the light-enveloped moon ahead. The vast bulk of Bifrost dwindled steadily astern and he emerged from the shadow of the rings into wan, reddish starlight. His sensors could no longer detect the other Adler Flight ships, lost now in the radiation and magnetic fields encompassing the gas giant.

Schmidt felt alone—alone and lost in a way he’d never felt before, even when his partner of twenty-some years had left him a decade before.

I’m not going to survive this , he thought. But it was no good dwelling on that . Quickly, he thoughtclicked a series of in-head icons, compressing all of the data he’d acquired so far into a nanosecond burst. Fired in a tightly coherent pulse aft toward the other fighters, it might not be picked up or recognized by the aliens ahead … but who the hell knew what they were capable of?

Time passed. Once each minute he dispatched another nanosecond radio burst. All the while, the array of shifting lights, the weirdly interpenetrating patterns, the mysterious structures and shapes all spread until they filled the sky, with the moon at the glowing heart of the phenomenon. He magnified the images, zeroing in on the activity both on the surface and in orbit. Kapteyn Orbital was definitely gone; not even dust remained.

Twelve thousand researchers …

As the dark and silent teardrop streaked across Heimdall’s sky, the ghosts appeared to have taken notice. Schmidt was first aware of them as a stream of glowing motes rising from Heimdall’s surface, and he thought of a cloud of fireflies.

And there was something else moving out from the light-shrouded moon. Something huge .

“ Mein Gott … ”

He heard the cloud pelting the external hull of his ship, felt the jolt as they began dissolving the nanomatrix.

He was screaming as the hull of his fighter began to dissolve under the swarming assault.

26 October 2425

Watergate Convention Center

Washington, D.C.

United States of North America

2015 hours, EST

The diplomatic reception was in full swing, with well over a thousand physical attendees standing about in knots of color and formal dress. Others were present virtually, their holographs showing only a faint translucency to give away the fact that they were projections of people from all across the Earth and, in many cases, beyond.