“Nothing in sight,” the captain of the StAsaph replied. “I guess they’ve stopped sending ships away from their own star. At least in this direction.”
“Looks that way. Antonia, have you got anything?”
“Not a damn thing,” Antonia Clark said from the bridge of the Langharne. “It’s clean out here.”
“All right, we’ll proceed as agreed. Antonia, tag along with us until we’re ten AUs from the old barrier location. Stay in hyperspace and gather as much information as you can. Any hostile activity directed at us or you, and you are to get straight back to the Commonwealth.”
“Understood.” During the mission planning sessions back on Anshun she had spent days arguing that her scoutship should be the one accompanying the Conway, but there was no trace of resentment in her voice now.
“Tu Lee, take us in,” Wilson ordered. “Anna, sensors on passive mode, please.”
“Already switched over, sir.”
Wilson tried not to roll his eyes.
The scoutships closed on Dyson Alpha. Their mission profile was simple enough; Conway and StAsaph were to enter the inner system, scanning for any sign of wormhole activity. If they found one, they were to approach the source, drop out of hyperspace, and attempt to open communications. If there was no sign of the Dyson aliens experimenting with wormholes, they would fly to Alpha Major and try an open communications there.
They were still a quarter of a light-year out from the star when Anna said, “We’re registering quantum fluctuations consistent with wormhole activity.”
“From this far out?” Tunde Sutton queried.
“Yes, whatever they’ve built, it’s goddamn powerful.”
MorningLightMountain began working on the problem as soon as its new Bose memories had revealed the theory and practical application of wormholes. It took just a few hundred immotile units to determine and quantify the fundamental principles, assisted by the Bose memory’s basic knowledge of human physics and mathematics. The equations fitted easily enough into its own understanding of quantum physics, simply extending the knowledge in a fashion it wouldn’t necessarily have thought of for itself. After that came the more challenging task of designing the hardware. Of that, the Bose memories had little information.
After a month, during which over a thousand immotile units had combined to analyze the new problem and several advanced industrial manufacturing areas had been switched to producing components for the project, the first crude wormhole generator was up and running. MorningLightMountain used it to open a small communications linkage to its biggest settlement at the large gas giant. There, MorningLightMountain23,957, which supervised the settlement, was connected directly back into the original immotile group in real-time. Over the next few weeks, a series of small wormholes were opened to MorningLightMountain’s other settlements, joining more and more remote subsidiaries to the main group cluster of immotiles back on the homeworld, meshing them all together into a single gigantic grouping.
At this point, all the spaceship production facilities MorningLightMountain possessed across the star system were switched to manufacturing components for larger wormhole generators. As more and more wormholes were opened, linking planets, moonlets, and distant asteroid settlements, the spaceships became redundant. It dismantled them and incorporated their resources into the new transport system. New power stations were deployed around the sun, vast rotating structures protected by force fields, that siphoned up the energy and transferred it (via wormhole) to the second gas giant where the greatest wormhole of all was being constructed, the one that would reach across interstellar space.
It took the full mental capacity of twelve thousand immotile brains to govern the interstellar wormhole; there were so many components to supervise, so many intricate applications of energy to control within the machinery. MorningLightMountain amalgamated the immotile specifically to form the command group; they had no other function, they didn’t take part in MorningLightMountain’s unified thought processes. Even then, with so much brain power devoted to the device’s operation, it had to use more electronic processors than it ever had before to maintain the ancillary equipment.
The interstellar wormhole had been operating for three weeks when several supplementary orbiting quantum wave detectors picked up the distortion points of approaching starships. They were smaller than the previous human starship, the Second Chance, but they were flying from the direction of the Commonwealth. They were also a lot faster.
>ships mission / explain<
I don’t know for certain. I expect a further attempt to establish communication. They’ll certainly want to know what happened to me and Verbeke.
>confrontation probability / extrapolate<
They don’t want a fight. The ships will be heavily shielded, though. They saw several ship battles while they were here before. They’ll know what level of defense they need this time.
>response / explain<
Oh, well, with my great tactical expertise…
>tactical knowledge / memory<
There was none. The Bose memories were lying—no, not lying, beingsarcastic.
>sarcasm / explain<
It’s a human personality trait. Culturally related, you either got it or you don’t. I often used it to swat uppity students. I don’t think it applies to your culture, you’re more likely to use a nuke.
Not for the first time, MorningLightMountain considered simply erasing the Bose memories. It often considered the alien thoughts to be a form of insanity. Despite them being securely caged within a single immotile unit, there was noticeable leakage. Strange ideas and concepts often occurred these days—a different way of looking at things. After all, there was, it had to concede, a certain illogicality about releasing so much pollution across its homeworld, allowing so many motiles—parts of itself—to die in sickening fashion from disease and poison. It was killing itself for the now, not planning properly for tomorrow. It wasn’t sure how the notion of sickening had crept into its thoughts.
Such innovative thoughts might lead it into becoming alienPrime, contaminated from within. Though it knew its Prime rationality was still dominant, after all it was a misapplication of resources to let so many motiles waste away. So for now it tolerated the Bose memories, knowing that soon it would no longer require them.
The three human starships slowed their approach, then flew forward again. One came to a halt just beyond where the barrier used to be, remaining within the wormhole it was generating. The other two headed in for the second gas giant, where MorningLightMountain had built the interstellar wormhole. It began to prepare nearby ships for interception.
One of the human ships emerged from its wormhole amid a burst of blue radiation. It was five million kilometers from the interstellar wormhole. Electromagnetic beams swept out, probing space around it, while its wormhole generator emitted pulses of distortion, which the Bose memories identified as hysradar. High-cohesion force fields enveloped the human ship, deflecting most of MorningLightMountain’s sensor scans. They would be tough to break, it acknowledged. But not impossible.
Sixteen ships were dispatched at high acceleration to interdict the enemy. Within seconds of their fusion drives coming on, the human ship directed microwave and laser beams toward them. This time MorningLightMountain understood the binary pulses, the simple mathematical constants, pixel matrices with basic images and symbols, periodic tables. It directed a communications maser back at the human ship.
The Bose memories were marshaled to initiate contact, appropriate “speech” sequences selected.
“Hi, guys, it’s Dudley Bose calling home. You took your sweet time getting back here, didn’t you? But by God I am sure glad to see you.”
The human lasers switched off. A single microwave beam remained focused on the ship that had sent the message.