“I know . . . but things could have gone so wrong.” He took her in his arms again. “I will never do that to you again.”
“You’ll do what you need to do, Alex.” She hugged him close. “And I’ll be here to help.”
USNA CVS America
CIC
N’gai Cluster
1650 hours, FST
“Take us ahead, point seven-five c,” Gray said. “Grav sensors, keep a sharp lookout. Full spread, maximum sensitivity.”
“Aye, aye, Admiral,” Mackey replied from the bridge. “Nothing on the sensors yet.”
As America accelerated, pushing closer to the speed of light, the view of space ahead took on an increasingly surreal look, the starsaft and around them crowding forward into a kind of glowing doughnut centered on the empty blackness directly ahead. The effectwas caused by the ship plowing through incoming photons at relativistic speeds, until even starlight coming from astern wastwisted into geometries that seemed to put it in front.
America and her consorts were spread out across nearly 10 million kilometers, the better to pick up the faint whispers of gravitationalwaves over as large a volume of space as possible. Their search routine called for jumping to Alcubierre Drive every hourand moving ahead several hundred astronomical units. Between their FTL runs, they plowed through normal space at relativisticspeed . . . listening. The plan offered them the best hope of covering the most ground in the least time.
They were still in for a very long hunt.
It was frustrating trying to predict what the Sh’daar migration fleet might be doing. Things would be a lot easier if thealien fleet was spread out over a huge volume of space, the lumbering space habitats trailing far astern of the faster andmore nimble naval vessels. Indeed, Gray felt fairly sure, in a gut-instinct kind of way, that they would be scattered, possibly across ten thousand light years.
But he also suspected that the really large Sh’daar vessels, those traveling strictly at sublight speeds, would be clumpedtightly together for mutual protection, and that meant a tiny target in a vast expanse of empty space. They only needed tosearch three light years for the slow-movers—that was as far as they could have moved in three years, after all, travelingat near-c—but the word only in that context was deceptive. Even a fleet of hundreds of massive McKendree cylinders, Banks orbitals, and Bishop ringswould be vanishingly small in a cone-shaped volume three light years long and of unknown breadth.
But they had to try.
“Negative on all scans, Admiral,” Mackey told him.
“Very well. Coordinate with the other ships, then initiate another FTL run.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
Of course, they’d known they would have trouble finding the alien migration before America had even left Earth. But planners had expected the Sh’daar to be using beacons of some sort, or more powerful grav drives—somethingthat would make them stand out across the light years. Those planners had not anticipated the Sh’daar desire to stay hidden,to slip beneath the notice of the Consciousness.
Or the efficiency with which they’d been able to make themselves disappear.
Reluctantly, Gray turned his mind once more to Truitt’s proposal. The idea scared him, scared him badly, but the xenosophontologistwas right. If they couldn’t find the Sh’daar by conventional means, poking along and listening for their gravity wave emissions,Truitt’s little brainstorm might well be the only workable option.
Leaning back in his seat, Gray closed his eyes and summoned up Konstantin.
“This idea of Truitt’s,” he said in-head. “How would it work?”
“You’ve done it before,” Konstantin replied. “Essentially, it’s a form of the Bright Light group consciousness.”
“I understand that. But how would we do it?”
“We would start by nanoconstructing a number of Bright Light modules,” Konstantin replied. “A very large number—several hundredat the very least, and several thousand would be better. We scatter them across a large volume of space and allow them toestablish a communications network among themselves. We have volunteers from the fleet upload onto the electronic networkcreated and instruct them to search for evidence of the Sh’daar fleet.”
Gray made a sour face. “You make it sound so easy.”
“The idea is fairly simple in principle,” the SAI told him. “It will be complex to execute logistically.”
“But I don’t understand what it buys us,” Gray said. “This network, we can’t spread it across light years. The time lag—”
“Would be prohibitive, I know. A module placed one light year out would require a full year to establish contact with us.But what we need essentially is a very, very large VLBI, one with multiple baselines on the order of astronomical units long.”
“VLBI?”
“Very Long Baseline Interferometry.”
“Ah. Right.”
Gray knew the term, though it had been years since he’d heard it discussed. For centuries, relatively small telescopes, bothradio and optical, had been linked together in a way that combined the images from many small instruments to create a muchlarger virtual one, one with a diameter equal to the largest baseline between discrete units. Three centuries before, fifteenspace telescopes, each of 100-meter diameter, had been positioned in deep space in a pattern almost an astronomical unit across.When the incoming optical signals were combined, astronomers had been able to image the surfaces of planets and moons withwhat amounted to a single virtual mirror one AU across. The surface of Chiron, at Alpha Centauri A, had been mapped in detailthat way.
In principle, Truitt’s idea was based on this, but the individual networked units wouldn’t be gathering light. They wouldbe the supporting framework of a far-flung network of minds, human and AI, that would merge to create a single, emergent consciousness—aMind of incredible scope and power.
Three years ago, Gray had been part of such a super-Mind, during the final confrontation with the Consciousness. Guided anddirected by Konstantin, Gray and some thousands of other human and AI intellects had merged to become . . . something greater.Inconceivably greater. That merger had been necessary to make direct contact with an alien Mind so vast it literally did not recognize human minds as distinct and intelligent units. They had used hundreds of Bright Light modules as the framework for their shared
