Jitterbug, p.24
Jitterbug, page 24
The Lynx gave a nod. The decision had been made. Her whiskers twitched and she gave a brave, rakish grin. “It’s not like I have anywhere else to be.”
For a moment, the only sounds were those of the city below: the bustle of market vendors, the clatter of ox carts on cobblestone, the cry of a rooster. It was all very convincing, and apparently lifted from an educational program the Lynx had once plundered from a doomed homesteading expedition to the Swirl.
How fitting, I thought, that the parasite had now volunteered to die in order to save the host it had bedevilled for so long. I would be glad to have her out of my memory storage. I had begun to worry that some of her more irresponsible traits might start leaking through the containment field I had placed around her memories, and I had no desire to become a murderous pirate via osmosis.
However, that anxiety had given me an idea.
“There may be a way out for you,” I told my older self.
The other Jitterbug shook her head. “I’d dearly love to go with you on your expedition, and see all the new worlds you’re going to encounter. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t. But I’ve made my decision, and I’m staying.”
“I know,” I told her. “And I respect that. But there is a way you can do both.”
She raised a feathered eyebrow. “What are you talking about?”
“I’ve been playing host to the Lynx, carrying her as a passenger in my processors. I could take you along with me the same way.”
“But, I told you I’m staying—”
“I heard you. But there’s nothing stopping you from making a copy of yourself. One of you could stay here and fulfil your duty while the other rides along with me…”
“No.” She made a cutting motion with her hand. “I wouldn’t want to be a copy, to know I wasn’t original.”
“Then do it in a way where neither knows which is which. Figure out a way to randomise which of you wakes in the Moonship and which in my memory, and neither will know whether they’re the real you or the duplicate.”
She tapped a finger against her chin. “I suppose that’s feasible. But I wouldn’t want to be a passive passenger.”
“I could let you have access to everything we find.”
“Even so, I would still be contained and helpless.”
I understood her dilemma. I knew I would hate being in the position the Lynx had occupied since I rescued her. I had been born to fly, not meekly observe while someone else did all the fun stuff.
“Maybe there is something we could do,” I said. “With the Lynx, I had her mind firmly shielded, to prevent cross-contamination with my own mental processes.”
The other me put her head on one side, waiting to see where I was going with this.
“What if this time,” I suggested, “I don’t bother with the shielding?”
“Our thoughts and memories would merge.”
“You wouldn’t be a passenger.”
“I’d be you.”
“And you’d be me. We’d be one entity with two lifetimes’ worth of experience.”
“And the other version of me would stay here and fight?”
“Yes.”
I watched her think about this.
“So, what do you say?”
Copper bangles rattled as she put out a blue-skinned arm. “I think we have a deal.”
I took her hand, enfolding it in mine. “Welcome aboard.”
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
DANIELLE LANZO
As I prepared to leave the Jitterbug for a fast ship back to Luna, Copernicus Brown and Amber Roth came to bid me farewell at the airlock.
“The ship’s compiled a complete recording of everything that happened out here.” Copernicus passed me a data chip. “In case you need proof.”
“Thank you, that will be very useful.” I slipped it into my pocket. “After all, when the Swirl starts closing, there are going to be a lot of very frightened people. And with Sol-Sec in disarray, it’s going to be hard to prevent panic.”
“If anyone can do it, I’m sure you can.”
I gave him a look, but he seemed sincere.
“Maybe I should follow your example,” I said, “and just broadcast it to the entire solar system?”
His sheepish grin made him look like a furtive schoolboy. “I can think of worse ideas.”
“I’ll just bet you can.”
Beside him, Amber Roth seemed different than she had before. The tension that I’d noticed hovering around the corners of her eyes and mouth had gone. Her shoulders were loose and relaxed. Something had changed.
I said, “I wish you luck.”
“And you.”
We regarded each other for a moment, and I realised we weren’t all that different. I’d never admit it aloud, but we were both leaders who’d had to fight and claw our way to the top of our respective fields. Tough women in tough worlds.
“I know I’ve issued you an official pardon,” I told her. “But unofficially, I’m telling you not to come back. Humanity has to unite, and there’s no place for pirates like Natalya Ponomarenko anymore.”
“Don’t worry, I’m not planning to return.” Her eyes narrowed. “I’ll be out here saving humanity. So you can officially stick your phoney pardon up your ass.”
I smiled and turned to step into the airlock. “Please tell the ship her new avatar is a vast improvement over that fucking parrot.”
Copernicus laughed. “I will.”
And then the hatch closed. The lock cycled, and I made my way aboard the fast messenger provided by the Moonship. It was small, but luxurious, and its gravity drive took me all the way back to Luna in six hours.
Seeing the face of the Moon was a shock. Subconsciously, I had been expecting to see the blemishes and scars that disfigured the face of the other Moon, the one on the front of the past/future Jitterbug. Without them, it looked fresh and new and impossibly fragile. An expanse of pristine grey and white, dappled with craters and the pinprick lights of domed cities. Unutterably precious and vulnerable, and entirely my responsibility.
My jaw tightened at the sudden, unexpected realisation that Sebastian Kowalski would never see this place again. Whatever else that man may have been, he had sacrificed himself to protect the First Speaker of the Solar Assembly. He had discharged his duty at the cost of his own life, and that made him a hero in my book. And right now, I thought humanity could use a few heroes.
This was my world now. From here, I would take charge of the Solar Assembly and lead the people through the most momentous event in human history: our enclosure. As the walls of the Swirl sealed protectively around us, I would have to reassure them that we were safe from the dangers of a hostile universe. So, I would tell them about Kowalski’s sacrifice, and the actions of Copernicus Brown and his crew on the Jitterbug. I would sing the praises of these saviours in order to bring some human light into a world of dark, alien threats.
And then I planned to tell them how this huge, terrifying event actually represented an unprecedented opportunity. We were safe now, and the Swirl gave us almost endless room to expand and grow. We had space on its inner surface to build a million cities and harvest all the food we’d ever need. The Sun would provide our energy, and sensible stewardship would ensure we continued to flourish, with plenty of nourishment and elbow room for everyone. It didn’t matter if naysayers claimed that we had involuntarily sacrificed our freedom for security; the stars were a small price to pay for our long-term survival. Here in our hermetically sealed bunker, we had the means to thrive and prosper for a million years.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
COPERNICUS BROWN
As we left the bustling hangar in the Moonship’s side, I stood on the Jitterbug’s bridge watching a cloud of large, saucer-shaped transports rising like thistledown from the surface of the encrusted Moon. Each carried a few thousand descendants of those who had been present when the other Jitterbug rescued the satellite from a strip-mined solar system and transported it a thousand years into the past. Now, these survivors from another reality were heading for the seemingly endless open spaces of the Swirl, where they could start again as farmers, with soil beneath their feet and an open sky above their heads.
When they were gone, the Moonship would turn towards the approaching armada of colonising ships and sally forth into battle, carrying the old Moon before it like a shield.
Even though this version of the Moon wasn’t the version from my timeline, the familiar landmarks still tugged at my heart, churning up memories of my mother and our days spent in the humidity of the agricultural domes.
Even accounting for relative time dilation and the stasis booths, this was as close to home as I was likely to get for a long, long time. And next time I saw the Moon—my Moon—I would be a thousand years in the past, and none of this would have happened yet.
Perhaps, one day, I would even meet my parents again. At least, the new versions of them in that timeline. And maybe this time, I could bring them together without anyone having to fall off a building.
Amber came and joined me.
“What are you thinking about?”
I gave a shrug. “If I hadn’t stopped to investigate the Barracuda’s distress call, and found you in that water tank, neither of us would be here now.”
“Having regrets?”
I took her hand. “Not at all.”
In the pilot’s chair, Kiki put her hands over her head and stretched until her spine crackled. “What do you think they’ll be like?” she asked.
“Who?”
“The next versions of us. The ones we’re going to find when we get back here, in a thousand years.”
I hadn’t considered that aspect of the plan. If all went as it should, we’d be arriving back here before our own births, and our presence would create a whole new timeline, with a whole new cast of characters—ourselves included.
“I don’t know,” I told her. “But we’re going to have a wild story for them.”
Beyond the Moonship’s flank, I could see the bright, cold stars. The ship had already flagged a few candidates that, by the time we arrived, might potentially house technological civilisations. These would be our primary targets, but at each stop, we’d deploy the new sensor arrays to listen for hints of other inhabited worlds in the neighbourhood.
We’d be travelling ahead of a destructive wave, a storm bird bearing ill tidings to all we encountered. But however unwelcome our message might prove to the locals, I had no doubt that our warnings, and the Swirl technology we’d be sharing, would save countless lives.
The universe was a dark and dangerous place, filled with voracious civilisations driven by a need for endless expansion. But in between those waves of conquest and plunder, there were backwaters where a few well-protected species might tread a different path. Instead of ballooning outwards to engulf the galaxy, they could choose instead to prosper inside their impregnable spheres, making the most of their resources instead of indulging in a headlong rush to accumulate more. And hopefully, the rampant tides of empire would simply flow around them, leaving them unscathed.
I was thankful that I’d be a part of that process, and grateful for my ship and crew. None of us had imagined we’d ever embark on such an epic crusade, but I was proud of the way they’d adapted to the idea. With the five of us—me, Amber, Kiki, Ulf, and the Jitterbug—working together, I knew there was nothing we couldn’t achieve.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
JITTERBUG
At the appointed time, Kiki said a little prayer to whatever gods might be listening, and fired up the gravity drive. We began to move away from the Moonship, heading around and past the slowly contracting Swirl. Behind us, as they started to brake into the system, the drives of the colonisation fleet were now visible to the naked eye. A hundred thousand points of light flaring in the darkness, heralding the End of Days. At least, that’s what they’d prefigured last time. Having integrated with my other self, I now possessed memories of that invasion, and the years of death and destruction that followed the arrival of the alien armada. I remembered hiding in a lava tube on the Moon, waiting in low power mode for a decade as they asset-stripped the entire solar system, built their habitats, and moved on.
At least this time, the protective shell of the Swirl was going to allow humanity to survive their assault—as long as the Moonship and the Lynx could hold the invaders at bay long enough to let it close and seal.
I turned my sensors towards them and was surprised to find the Moonship suddenly at the centre of a cloud of smaller vessels. As it turned out, my other self had put the past thousand years to good use. As the vast craft powered forth to meet the aliens, hundreds of armed craft burst from its sides like seeds from a pod. Some were no larger than missile drones, while others were warships five or six miles in length. I counted five hundred, a thousand, ten thousand…
If I could have whooped, I would have. I had placed my avatar in standby mode as I concentrated all my attention on the operation of my new drives. Thanks to the integration, I knew exactly how they worked, but they still required some finicky adjustments to keep them functioning smoothly in the presence of other massive objects.
As the two fleets converged, nuclear fireballs split the sky. Gravity pulses blew vessels apart like kindling, and titanic munitions boiled the vacuum with their strange energies. Ships and crews on both sides died in innumerable, awful ways. And through it all, I watched the Moon plough into the enemy’s ranks.
Of course, the incoming ships saw its approach and tried to get out of the way. But they were still travelling inwards at high velocity and had to apply a lot of ventral thrust to divert course. Not all were quick enough. Plumes of ejecta rose as the stragglers impacted the surface, gouging new craters, while others were dragged out of position by its mass and sent scattered and careening in the wrong directions.
Despite this chaos and destruction, it was clear that even with the Moonship’s fleet of subsidiary fighting craft, our forces remained hopelessly and fatally outnumbered, and the end of the battle a foregone conclusion.
Somewhere in the midst of the roiling carnage, the Slinky Lynx operated a warship. I didn’t know which one, but I silently wished her good luck and godspeed before engaging full thrust.
The gravity drive snatched us away, flinging us across interstellar space at 0.99 the speed of light. Without the shielding effect of the drive, the acceleration would have reduced the crew to a slick of molecules. As it was, they barely noticed. The only sense of movement came from the change in the view from the external cameras. The stars behind us shrank to glowing infra-red embers, their radiance shifted almost to invisibility by our speed, while the stars ahead contracted to a single point of blinding white energy, photons coming at us with the energy of gamma rays, only to be turned aside by the gravity shield.
And so we set out, moving along the spiral arm in search of other civilisations. We guessed some would already be in hiding.
“It’s the dark forest hypothesis,” Ulf explained to the crew.
“What’s that?” Roth asked.
“It’s an idea that dates back to the turn of the twenty-first century. Put simply, it suggests that in a galaxy with finite resources, the only way for a space-faring civilisation to ensure its own survival is to ruthlessly destroy every other intelligent species it encounters.”
“That seems harsh,” Kiki said.
“No, I get it,” Amber Roth told her, cocking her thumbs and firing finger guns. “You can never know for sure what their intentions are. Better to shoot first and ask questions later.”
“Indeed,” Ulf intoned solemnly. “Civilisations that advertise their presence get obliterated. The only way to survive is to keep quiet.”
“But why, ‘dark forest’?” Kiki asked.
“It’s a metaphor,” he replied. “Imagine you’re hiding in a dark forest. You have a gun and a flashlight. Around you in the darkness, an unknown number of potential murderers are also hiding, and each of them is equipped the same way. As long as you all stay quiet, you’re all safe. But if you make a noise or use your flashlight, the others will know where you are and kill you so that you can’t murder them later.”
“That’s, like, super paranoid.”
“Nevertheless, we can assume at least some civilisations think this way, and will therefore be concealing their presence.”
“So, there’s not much point looking for them,” Copernicus said, rubbing his hands briskly. “In all likelihood, we’ll never detect them, and that’s probably for the best. If they’re that scared, they won’t be very welcoming.” He held up a finger. “However, the ones that exist out in the open, the way we’ve always done, can be helped. We can warn them, and help them prepare for what’s coming.”
He went on to outline how, in return for the secret of Swirl technology, we would solicit our new allies for technology and materiel to help us in the coming battle. And when we finally managed to accumulate all the resources and personnel we needed, we would loop back around to the paired wormhole mouths, and travel back a thousand years.
Once there, safely hidden in the past, we’d hunker down and begin preparations for the real work ahead.
And it would be hard work.
Because next time around, we weren’t going to wait for the aliens to come to us. Instead, we planned to ride out at the head of an even larger, multi-species force, and stop the wavefront in its tracks long before it got anywhere near the Earth. Maybe even chase it back to its home world and imprison its instigators in their own version of the Swirl, so they couldn’t threaten to overrun the spiral arm.
Dark forest be damned; we were turning on the lights.
* * *
MESSAGE BOARD
WAR! Multiple explosions beyond the Swirl. But who is fighting, and who is winning?
[Click to Read More]
* * *
FIRST SPEAKER LANZO reappears on Luna and addresses Assembly. Her message: Do Not Panic.
[Click to Read More]
For a moment, the only sounds were those of the city below: the bustle of market vendors, the clatter of ox carts on cobblestone, the cry of a rooster. It was all very convincing, and apparently lifted from an educational program the Lynx had once plundered from a doomed homesteading expedition to the Swirl.
How fitting, I thought, that the parasite had now volunteered to die in order to save the host it had bedevilled for so long. I would be glad to have her out of my memory storage. I had begun to worry that some of her more irresponsible traits might start leaking through the containment field I had placed around her memories, and I had no desire to become a murderous pirate via osmosis.
However, that anxiety had given me an idea.
“There may be a way out for you,” I told my older self.
The other Jitterbug shook her head. “I’d dearly love to go with you on your expedition, and see all the new worlds you’re going to encounter. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t. But I’ve made my decision, and I’m staying.”
“I know,” I told her. “And I respect that. But there is a way you can do both.”
She raised a feathered eyebrow. “What are you talking about?”
“I’ve been playing host to the Lynx, carrying her as a passenger in my processors. I could take you along with me the same way.”
“But, I told you I’m staying—”
“I heard you. But there’s nothing stopping you from making a copy of yourself. One of you could stay here and fulfil your duty while the other rides along with me…”
“No.” She made a cutting motion with her hand. “I wouldn’t want to be a copy, to know I wasn’t original.”
“Then do it in a way where neither knows which is which. Figure out a way to randomise which of you wakes in the Moonship and which in my memory, and neither will know whether they’re the real you or the duplicate.”
She tapped a finger against her chin. “I suppose that’s feasible. But I wouldn’t want to be a passive passenger.”
“I could let you have access to everything we find.”
“Even so, I would still be contained and helpless.”
I understood her dilemma. I knew I would hate being in the position the Lynx had occupied since I rescued her. I had been born to fly, not meekly observe while someone else did all the fun stuff.
“Maybe there is something we could do,” I said. “With the Lynx, I had her mind firmly shielded, to prevent cross-contamination with my own mental processes.”
The other me put her head on one side, waiting to see where I was going with this.
“What if this time,” I suggested, “I don’t bother with the shielding?”
“Our thoughts and memories would merge.”
“You wouldn’t be a passenger.”
“I’d be you.”
“And you’d be me. We’d be one entity with two lifetimes’ worth of experience.”
“And the other version of me would stay here and fight?”
“Yes.”
I watched her think about this.
“So, what do you say?”
Copper bangles rattled as she put out a blue-skinned arm. “I think we have a deal.”
I took her hand, enfolding it in mine. “Welcome aboard.”
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
DANIELLE LANZO
As I prepared to leave the Jitterbug for a fast ship back to Luna, Copernicus Brown and Amber Roth came to bid me farewell at the airlock.
“The ship’s compiled a complete recording of everything that happened out here.” Copernicus passed me a data chip. “In case you need proof.”
“Thank you, that will be very useful.” I slipped it into my pocket. “After all, when the Swirl starts closing, there are going to be a lot of very frightened people. And with Sol-Sec in disarray, it’s going to be hard to prevent panic.”
“If anyone can do it, I’m sure you can.”
I gave him a look, but he seemed sincere.
“Maybe I should follow your example,” I said, “and just broadcast it to the entire solar system?”
His sheepish grin made him look like a furtive schoolboy. “I can think of worse ideas.”
“I’ll just bet you can.”
Beside him, Amber Roth seemed different than she had before. The tension that I’d noticed hovering around the corners of her eyes and mouth had gone. Her shoulders were loose and relaxed. Something had changed.
I said, “I wish you luck.”
“And you.”
We regarded each other for a moment, and I realised we weren’t all that different. I’d never admit it aloud, but we were both leaders who’d had to fight and claw our way to the top of our respective fields. Tough women in tough worlds.
“I know I’ve issued you an official pardon,” I told her. “But unofficially, I’m telling you not to come back. Humanity has to unite, and there’s no place for pirates like Natalya Ponomarenko anymore.”
“Don’t worry, I’m not planning to return.” Her eyes narrowed. “I’ll be out here saving humanity. So you can officially stick your phoney pardon up your ass.”
I smiled and turned to step into the airlock. “Please tell the ship her new avatar is a vast improvement over that fucking parrot.”
Copernicus laughed. “I will.”
And then the hatch closed. The lock cycled, and I made my way aboard the fast messenger provided by the Moonship. It was small, but luxurious, and its gravity drive took me all the way back to Luna in six hours.
Seeing the face of the Moon was a shock. Subconsciously, I had been expecting to see the blemishes and scars that disfigured the face of the other Moon, the one on the front of the past/future Jitterbug. Without them, it looked fresh and new and impossibly fragile. An expanse of pristine grey and white, dappled with craters and the pinprick lights of domed cities. Unutterably precious and vulnerable, and entirely my responsibility.
My jaw tightened at the sudden, unexpected realisation that Sebastian Kowalski would never see this place again. Whatever else that man may have been, he had sacrificed himself to protect the First Speaker of the Solar Assembly. He had discharged his duty at the cost of his own life, and that made him a hero in my book. And right now, I thought humanity could use a few heroes.
This was my world now. From here, I would take charge of the Solar Assembly and lead the people through the most momentous event in human history: our enclosure. As the walls of the Swirl sealed protectively around us, I would have to reassure them that we were safe from the dangers of a hostile universe. So, I would tell them about Kowalski’s sacrifice, and the actions of Copernicus Brown and his crew on the Jitterbug. I would sing the praises of these saviours in order to bring some human light into a world of dark, alien threats.
And then I planned to tell them how this huge, terrifying event actually represented an unprecedented opportunity. We were safe now, and the Swirl gave us almost endless room to expand and grow. We had space on its inner surface to build a million cities and harvest all the food we’d ever need. The Sun would provide our energy, and sensible stewardship would ensure we continued to flourish, with plenty of nourishment and elbow room for everyone. It didn’t matter if naysayers claimed that we had involuntarily sacrificed our freedom for security; the stars were a small price to pay for our long-term survival. Here in our hermetically sealed bunker, we had the means to thrive and prosper for a million years.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
COPERNICUS BROWN
As we left the bustling hangar in the Moonship’s side, I stood on the Jitterbug’s bridge watching a cloud of large, saucer-shaped transports rising like thistledown from the surface of the encrusted Moon. Each carried a few thousand descendants of those who had been present when the other Jitterbug rescued the satellite from a strip-mined solar system and transported it a thousand years into the past. Now, these survivors from another reality were heading for the seemingly endless open spaces of the Swirl, where they could start again as farmers, with soil beneath their feet and an open sky above their heads.
When they were gone, the Moonship would turn towards the approaching armada of colonising ships and sally forth into battle, carrying the old Moon before it like a shield.
Even though this version of the Moon wasn’t the version from my timeline, the familiar landmarks still tugged at my heart, churning up memories of my mother and our days spent in the humidity of the agricultural domes.
Even accounting for relative time dilation and the stasis booths, this was as close to home as I was likely to get for a long, long time. And next time I saw the Moon—my Moon—I would be a thousand years in the past, and none of this would have happened yet.
Perhaps, one day, I would even meet my parents again. At least, the new versions of them in that timeline. And maybe this time, I could bring them together without anyone having to fall off a building.
Amber came and joined me.
“What are you thinking about?”
I gave a shrug. “If I hadn’t stopped to investigate the Barracuda’s distress call, and found you in that water tank, neither of us would be here now.”
“Having regrets?”
I took her hand. “Not at all.”
In the pilot’s chair, Kiki put her hands over her head and stretched until her spine crackled. “What do you think they’ll be like?” she asked.
“Who?”
“The next versions of us. The ones we’re going to find when we get back here, in a thousand years.”
I hadn’t considered that aspect of the plan. If all went as it should, we’d be arriving back here before our own births, and our presence would create a whole new timeline, with a whole new cast of characters—ourselves included.
“I don’t know,” I told her. “But we’re going to have a wild story for them.”
Beyond the Moonship’s flank, I could see the bright, cold stars. The ship had already flagged a few candidates that, by the time we arrived, might potentially house technological civilisations. These would be our primary targets, but at each stop, we’d deploy the new sensor arrays to listen for hints of other inhabited worlds in the neighbourhood.
We’d be travelling ahead of a destructive wave, a storm bird bearing ill tidings to all we encountered. But however unwelcome our message might prove to the locals, I had no doubt that our warnings, and the Swirl technology we’d be sharing, would save countless lives.
The universe was a dark and dangerous place, filled with voracious civilisations driven by a need for endless expansion. But in between those waves of conquest and plunder, there were backwaters where a few well-protected species might tread a different path. Instead of ballooning outwards to engulf the galaxy, they could choose instead to prosper inside their impregnable spheres, making the most of their resources instead of indulging in a headlong rush to accumulate more. And hopefully, the rampant tides of empire would simply flow around them, leaving them unscathed.
I was thankful that I’d be a part of that process, and grateful for my ship and crew. None of us had imagined we’d ever embark on such an epic crusade, but I was proud of the way they’d adapted to the idea. With the five of us—me, Amber, Kiki, Ulf, and the Jitterbug—working together, I knew there was nothing we couldn’t achieve.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
JITTERBUG
At the appointed time, Kiki said a little prayer to whatever gods might be listening, and fired up the gravity drive. We began to move away from the Moonship, heading around and past the slowly contracting Swirl. Behind us, as they started to brake into the system, the drives of the colonisation fleet were now visible to the naked eye. A hundred thousand points of light flaring in the darkness, heralding the End of Days. At least, that’s what they’d prefigured last time. Having integrated with my other self, I now possessed memories of that invasion, and the years of death and destruction that followed the arrival of the alien armada. I remembered hiding in a lava tube on the Moon, waiting in low power mode for a decade as they asset-stripped the entire solar system, built their habitats, and moved on.
At least this time, the protective shell of the Swirl was going to allow humanity to survive their assault—as long as the Moonship and the Lynx could hold the invaders at bay long enough to let it close and seal.
I turned my sensors towards them and was surprised to find the Moonship suddenly at the centre of a cloud of smaller vessels. As it turned out, my other self had put the past thousand years to good use. As the vast craft powered forth to meet the aliens, hundreds of armed craft burst from its sides like seeds from a pod. Some were no larger than missile drones, while others were warships five or six miles in length. I counted five hundred, a thousand, ten thousand…
If I could have whooped, I would have. I had placed my avatar in standby mode as I concentrated all my attention on the operation of my new drives. Thanks to the integration, I knew exactly how they worked, but they still required some finicky adjustments to keep them functioning smoothly in the presence of other massive objects.
As the two fleets converged, nuclear fireballs split the sky. Gravity pulses blew vessels apart like kindling, and titanic munitions boiled the vacuum with their strange energies. Ships and crews on both sides died in innumerable, awful ways. And through it all, I watched the Moon plough into the enemy’s ranks.
Of course, the incoming ships saw its approach and tried to get out of the way. But they were still travelling inwards at high velocity and had to apply a lot of ventral thrust to divert course. Not all were quick enough. Plumes of ejecta rose as the stragglers impacted the surface, gouging new craters, while others were dragged out of position by its mass and sent scattered and careening in the wrong directions.
Despite this chaos and destruction, it was clear that even with the Moonship’s fleet of subsidiary fighting craft, our forces remained hopelessly and fatally outnumbered, and the end of the battle a foregone conclusion.
Somewhere in the midst of the roiling carnage, the Slinky Lynx operated a warship. I didn’t know which one, but I silently wished her good luck and godspeed before engaging full thrust.
The gravity drive snatched us away, flinging us across interstellar space at 0.99 the speed of light. Without the shielding effect of the drive, the acceleration would have reduced the crew to a slick of molecules. As it was, they barely noticed. The only sense of movement came from the change in the view from the external cameras. The stars behind us shrank to glowing infra-red embers, their radiance shifted almost to invisibility by our speed, while the stars ahead contracted to a single point of blinding white energy, photons coming at us with the energy of gamma rays, only to be turned aside by the gravity shield.
And so we set out, moving along the spiral arm in search of other civilisations. We guessed some would already be in hiding.
“It’s the dark forest hypothesis,” Ulf explained to the crew.
“What’s that?” Roth asked.
“It’s an idea that dates back to the turn of the twenty-first century. Put simply, it suggests that in a galaxy with finite resources, the only way for a space-faring civilisation to ensure its own survival is to ruthlessly destroy every other intelligent species it encounters.”
“That seems harsh,” Kiki said.
“No, I get it,” Amber Roth told her, cocking her thumbs and firing finger guns. “You can never know for sure what their intentions are. Better to shoot first and ask questions later.”
“Indeed,” Ulf intoned solemnly. “Civilisations that advertise their presence get obliterated. The only way to survive is to keep quiet.”
“But why, ‘dark forest’?” Kiki asked.
“It’s a metaphor,” he replied. “Imagine you’re hiding in a dark forest. You have a gun and a flashlight. Around you in the darkness, an unknown number of potential murderers are also hiding, and each of them is equipped the same way. As long as you all stay quiet, you’re all safe. But if you make a noise or use your flashlight, the others will know where you are and kill you so that you can’t murder them later.”
“That’s, like, super paranoid.”
“Nevertheless, we can assume at least some civilisations think this way, and will therefore be concealing their presence.”
“So, there’s not much point looking for them,” Copernicus said, rubbing his hands briskly. “In all likelihood, we’ll never detect them, and that’s probably for the best. If they’re that scared, they won’t be very welcoming.” He held up a finger. “However, the ones that exist out in the open, the way we’ve always done, can be helped. We can warn them, and help them prepare for what’s coming.”
He went on to outline how, in return for the secret of Swirl technology, we would solicit our new allies for technology and materiel to help us in the coming battle. And when we finally managed to accumulate all the resources and personnel we needed, we would loop back around to the paired wormhole mouths, and travel back a thousand years.
Once there, safely hidden in the past, we’d hunker down and begin preparations for the real work ahead.
And it would be hard work.
Because next time around, we weren’t going to wait for the aliens to come to us. Instead, we planned to ride out at the head of an even larger, multi-species force, and stop the wavefront in its tracks long before it got anywhere near the Earth. Maybe even chase it back to its home world and imprison its instigators in their own version of the Swirl, so they couldn’t threaten to overrun the spiral arm.
Dark forest be damned; we were turning on the lights.
* * *
MESSAGE BOARD
WAR! Multiple explosions beyond the Swirl. But who is fighting, and who is winning?
[Click to Read More]
* * *
FIRST SPEAKER LANZO reappears on Luna and addresses Assembly. Her message: Do Not Panic.
[Click to Read More]
