communicate with them—was still very much an open question.
Forty minutes later, the Republic was boosting at seven thousand gravities, an acceleration unfelt because every atom of the ship was accelerating at the same rate within a gravitational field, essentially in free fall. They were moving at a sizeable percentage of the speed of light, and the sky ahead and aft was beginning to look strange as relativistic effects began to manifest.
“Captain Gray?” Lieutenant Ellen Walters, the duty sensor officer, called. “We’ve got something weird going on. Bearing two-eight-five minus one-five.”
Gray looked in the indicated direction, magnifying his in-head view. He saw … light.
“Xeno Department,” he called. “What do you make of those structures to port?”
“I’m not certain, Captain,” Dr. Vasilyeva replied. “It appears to be a Rosette light show.”
“That’s what I thought. Republic? Can you correct for relativistic aberration?”
“Correcting, Captain.”
Their high-velocity motion through space was bending incoming light beams, seeming to shift the images of stars and other objects forward, distorting them. At their current velocity, about six-tenths c, the effect wasn’t pronounced, but it was annoying. Republic’s AI applied a mathematical algorithm to the ship’s optical receivers, and the image snapped back to crystal clarity.
Beams of light appeared to be emerging from empty space, diverging slightly, like the entrance to a tunnel. A faintly luminous fog was emerging from the tunnel mouth, as geometric shapes carved from white and yellow light began to take form.
“Definitely Rosette phenomenon, Captain,” Vasilyeva said. “Are you going to change course for an intercept?”
Gray considered the question for only a second or so. “Negative.”
“Captain!” Commander Rohlwing said. His executive officer sounded shocked. “If that’s the Rosette entity … I mean … it’s not supposed to be here! Earth will need every ship to mount a defense!”
Gray closed his eyes. He was being presented with the same impossible choice twice within the space of a few weeks, and it freaking wasn’t fair!
“First,” he said, “a light space carrier does not have the sheer firepower to make a difference fighting that thing. Second … and more important, right now Earth’s only hope is for us to get to Deneb and get help. And that’s precisely what I intend to do.”
“But—”
“Comm! Transmit corrected images of what we’re seeing out there back to Earth and include a warning. Tell them what’s coming.”
“Aye, aye, Captain. Speed-of-light transmission time currently is eleven minutes.”
“Will it get to Earth before that … thing?”
“Yes, sir. Our message will beat it … By about eight minutes.”
“Then that’s the best we can do.”
The next dozen minutes passed in silence, as Gray and those members of the crew not actively engaged in operating the ship watched the unfolding patterns and shapes of light. They’d all seen much the same at Kapteyn’s Star, or heard about it from men and women who’d been there.
I wonder, Gray thought with some bitterness, if Earth will still be there when we return.
It was distinctly possible that even if the Denebans agreed to help them with some incredible high-tech weapon they could use against the Rosette, they’d get back to Earth only to find that they were too late …
1 February 2426
New White House
Washington, D.C.
1802 hours, EST
“Incoming message, priority red one-one, Mr. President.”
“Thank you, Pierre,” Koenig replied. “Decode and play.”
“Yes, sir.” The voice was that of a new AI built into the New White House. It had been named after Pierre Charles L’Enfant, the French architect who’d designed the layout of the original Washington, D.C., in the late eighteenth century.
“Excuse me, Gene,” Koenig told the tall man with him in the Oval Office. “I need to take a call.”
“Of course, Mr. President.”
Leaning back in his chair, Koenig closed his eyes and opened an inner window. The transmission was from the Joint Chiefs, and had been relayed from the Republic, now an hour outbound. Though made grainy and low res by distance, Koenig could see the image well enough. Light exploded out of empty space, unfolding like a flower, opening and expanding. Moments later, a faint haze appeared to be streaming from the effect’s central core.
“That smoke or fog is, we believe, a cloud of what our people call fireflies,” Lawrence Vandenburg, his secretary of defense, said in his mind. “Not nanotechnology, exactly, but extremely tiny machines operating according to a set series of programmed instructions. They can be used to build extremely large and complex structures in open space … or they can be used as nanodisassembler-type weapons. The cloud emerged some forty astronomical units from the sun and is now on a direct course to Earth. At their current velocity, they will be here in another two and a half hours.”
“You need to see this, Gene,” Koenig said as the message ended. Admiral Gene Armitage was senior of his Joint Chiefs of Staff.
“I thought we might have more time, Mr. President,” Armitage said after digesting the transmission. “I thought we had an agreement …”
“We were never sure the Rosette entity even understood what a treaty or an agreement was,” Koenig replied, grim. “All we could be certain of was that the Omega Code made that thing sit up and take notice. It may have developed some way of counteracting the virus.”
“It probably did that a couple of nanoseconds after it was exposed,” Armitage said. “Advanced AIs work on an entirely different experience of time than do humans.”
“So why did it wait? It’s been over a month since we stopped it at Kapteyn’s Star.”
“I don’t know, sir. Maybe it just had other things to think about.”
“Deploy all available ships, Gene,” Koenig told him. “Including anything we have in the naval yards … damaged ships, fighters, the works. We need to stop that cloud from getting to Earth.”
“Yes, sir.” He hesitated. “What about the Republic?”
Koenig checked his inner clock. “Unless Gray decided to turn around when he recorded this, he’s already gone into Alcubierre
