Dark Mind - Ian Douglas

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they …” He stopped, looked up, gestured at the alien sky. “… where they can move stars around just to create a titanic objet d’art?”

      “The Six Suns are probably a transportation system, like the TRGAs,” McKennon said. “Those rotating stellar masses twist spacetime, and open a gate to … I guess to somewhere else. Maybe somewhen else, too. We have no idea what it does. But I know what you’re saying. Whoever built the thing did it so … so casually. Like it was nothing for them to set six stars orbiting around a common center of gravity.”

      “Uh-oh,” Gray said. “Looks like the Glothr just linked in.”

      The image of one of the Glothr, presumably their equivalent of an ambassador, had just materialized off to the right side of the virtual classroom. Three meters tall and very roughly resembling a terrestrial jellyfish, the being stood on a writhing mass of tentacles, with a filmy mantle at the top, like a parasol. Much of the being was transparent or translucent; you could see the brain within a circle of twenty-four jet-black eyes. Its body, a column intermittently glimpsed behind the tentacle mass, was transparent, encasing its translucent internal organs.

      Gray was glad that the writhing tangle of tentacles usually hid the being’s interior from view. Those tentacles—the thicker ones used for locomotion, the thinner ones for manipulation—tended to be translucent near their bases, but shaded into opaque grays and browns. The translucent parts shimmered with rainbow colors, like a shifting, oily sheen, and clusters of blue and green lights gleamed and winked within the glassy depths of the body. The Glothr, Gray knew, communicated with others of its kind by changing color. Translation to a spoken language could be a real bear … but one of the numerous Agletsch trade languages had been designed for beings that communicated visually. You just needed a computer to handle the actual color-to-speech part.

      “That’s a Glothr?” McKennon asked. She seemed intrigued. But then, in her line of work, she would be.

      “Yeah. That’s the Agletsch name for them, anyway. We ran into them something like twelve million years in the future.”

      “You mean twelve million years after 2425?”

      “That’s right.”

      “We need a special grammar to handle time travel.”

      “We certainly will need one.”

      She laughed. “Okay. I downloaded one preliminary report, but I haven’t had a chance to follow through on them, yet,” McKennon said. “What are they like?”

      He thought about the Glothr.

      Twelve million years in the future—counting Gray’s home time as the present—a rogue world had given rise to a spectacularly advanced technic civilization. Sunless—adrift in emptiness with no star to call its own—the world named Invictus by humans was frigidly cold, at least on the surface, and eternally dark. Five times the mass of Earth, its surface chemistry was similar to that of Titan, based on liquid methane and ethane; a radioactive core kept a vast and lightless ocean liquid beneath many kilometers of ice as hard and as solid as rock.

      And that’s pretty much all they knew. They were still a complete enigma, so far as Gray was concerned. They were apparently connected, in some way not yet understood, to the Sh’daar of Earth Tprime, though they’d come from 12 million years further up the line. When Gray had managed to make peaceful contact with the Glothr out beyond the edge of the galaxy in future deep time, there’d been hope that perhaps the Glothr could communicate with the Sh’daar of the remote past, and end their attempts to tame and assimilate Humankind. The oddly shaped ship that had brought this Glothr to the Sh’daar capital, the Nameless, was a Glothr time-bender ship, brought back across the eons to attempt just that. Gray didn’t know for sure, but he was pretty sure that Konstantin had been the one who’d thought of the idea.

      “Hard to understand,” was all Gray could say at last. “They’re not at all like us. They’re actually colonial beings, kind of like the Portuguese man-of-war in Earth’s tropics. Lots of different organisms working together. And whatever they have for emotion … well, it doesn’t come through the translators very well.”

      “The report I saw said they’re from a Steppenwolf.”

      Steppenwolf world was a slang term for a rogue planet, one without a star … a lone wolf wandering the galactic steppes.

      “That’s right. Invictus. It must have been flung out of its original star system billions of years ago, and has been wandering on its own ever since.”

      “Huh. Daar N’gah is a rogue.”

      “I saw when we entered orbit. I understand the Sh’daar—well, we would say terraformed—basically created it. They made the planet habitable using quantum power taps, or something like them.”

      “That’s right. I don’t see a direct connection between the two, though. Daar N’gah was dead and frozen until the Sh’daar—or possibly the ur-Sh’daar—reworked it.”

      “Well, they would have had lots to choose from.” Gray chuckled. “They’re estimating that there are more Steppenwolf worlds floating around in the galaxy than there are stars.”

      “Yup. Four hundred billion plus. Apparently, every planetary system spits out a bunch of rogues early on, when the planets are starting to settle down into neat orbits. Most rogues are frozen and dead, of course …”

      “But given the right conditions,” Gray said, “with enough internal warmth to allow liquid oceans and carbon chemistry for a few billion years, some of those billions are certain to evolve life, like Invictus.”

      She nodded. “Or permit large-scale colonization, like Daar N’gah.”

      Their conversation moved on to other things as more and more attendees, both human and not, appeared within the simulation. Newly arrived humans materialized on the benches. Others stood on flat areas between the benches … or the imagery was rewritten to eliminate sections of the benches entirely.

      Gray and McKennon began discussing the Sh’daar of Tprime as compared with those of T-0.876gy … what President Koenig had once called late Sh’daar as opposed to early Sh’daar. After fifty-eight years of intermittent warfare, humans still weren’t sure if the various species arrayed against them—the Turusch and the H’rulka and the Slan and all the rest—were themselves Sh’daar or were merely manipulated by the Sh’daar. It seemed a small distinction, but it was a damned important one. How committed were, say, the Turusch to forcing Humankind to give up their beloved advanced technologies? Could they be convinced to turn against their alien masters from out of deep time?

      And as they talked, Gray studied the woman with growing interest … and felt a pang of … what? Loneliness? Wistfulness? Possibly … guilt?

      For a couple of years, now, Gray had enjoyed a close relationship with Laurie Taggart, America’s weapons officer … but Laurie had been offered a chance to advance her career, as exec on board the new battle carrier Lexington. It was an excellent opportunity for her; in a couple more years, she might have a chance at her own command.

      But it left Gray missing her—and Angela—more than ever. Damn, damn, damn …

      He considered asking if McKennon wanted to come over to America for dinner later … then sharply cut the thought off. He would be returning to Tprime soon, while she stayed here, 876 million years in the past. That was a hell of a burden to put on any relationship.

      An Agletsch materialized in the room just a few meters from where Gray and McKennon were sitting, intruding on Gray’s increasingly unhappy thoughts. Her ID tag, which popped up in Gray’s mind alongside her image, identified her as Aar’mithdisch, one of the spidery, four-eyed Agletsch liaisons who’d come in on board the Glothr vessel. He knew it was a her; Agletsch males were small, leechlike creatures that adhered to the female’s body, like male anglerfish on Earth. After a time, they actually became a part of the female’s

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