LITMIR.BIZ

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      That revelation was crushing in its implications. Humans, she thought, tended to believe they were pretty hot stuff … and meeting something like the Rosette Consciousness was devastating to the human ego.

      “What the hell are they doing in there?” Rasmussen wondered aloud over the link. “And why?”

      “They appear,” Thornton observed, “to be surrounding Kapteyn’s Star with scaffolding of solid light. And I seriously doubt that we are capable of understanding why …”

      Taggart noticed something in the data readout appearing on her in-head display. “Admiral?”

      “Yes, Captain Taggart.”

      “We’re picking up movement, sir … lots of it. Looks like a cloud of fireflies something like an astronomical unit across—”

      “My God …”

      “—and it’s headed our way damned fast.”

      TC/USNA CVS Republic

       SupraQuito Yards

       Earth Synchorbit

       1707 hours, TFT

      “The ship is ready in all respects for space, Captain.”

      “Very well. Release grapples fore and aft.”

      “Magnetic grapples released, sir.”

      “Helm, engage thrusters. Take us astern, dead slow.”

      “Thrusters, dead slow astern, aye, aye, sir.”

      Gray felt the slight thump and a surge of acceleration as the Republic began backing out of the docking gantry. There was nothing for him to do at this point but watch. The ship’s AI was in control of all steering, power, and navigation functions, though human ratings and officers remained in the loop. The Republic’s artificial intelligence was far more capable than merely human brains, with far better sensory awareness of the ship’s surroundings.

      “We are clear of the gantry, Captain.”

      “Very well. You have the course.”

      “Yes, sir. Aligned, laid in, and locked.”

      “Accelerate.”

      “Accelerate, aye, aye.”

      The synchorbital complex off to port blurred and vanished as the Republic accelerated under gravitics. The waning crescent of the Earth rapidly dwindled in apparent size, together with Earth’s moon. In another few seconds Earth was merely a bright star gently drifting toward the sun.

      Gray pulled up the reference on their destination within the Encyclopedia Galactica, and an in-head window filled with scrolling text.

      Object: KIC 8462852

      Alternate names: WTF Star, Tabby’s Star

      Type: Main-sequence star; Spectral Type: F3 V/IV

      Coordinates: RA: 20h 06m 15.457s Dec: +44° 27′ 24.61″;

      Constellation: Cygnus

      Mass: ~ 1.43 Sol; Radius: 1.58 Sol; Rotation: 0.8797 days;

      Temperature: 6750° K; Luminosity: 5 x Sol;

      Apparent Magnitude: 11.7; Absolute Magnitude: 3.08

      Distance: 1480 ly

      Age: ~ 4 billion years

      Notes: First noted in 2009–2015 as a part of the data collected by the Kepler space telescope. An extremely unusual pattern of light fluctuations proved difficult to explain as a natural phenomenon and raised the possibility that intermittent dips in the star’s light output were the result of occultations by intelligently designed alien megastructures.

      KIC 8462852 received the unofficial name “Tabby’s Star” after Tabetha S. Boyajian, head of the citizen scientist group that first called attention to the object. It was also called the “WTF star”—a humorous name drawn from the title of her paper: “Where’s the Flux?” At that time, “WTF” was a slang expression of surprise or disbelief …

      There was a lot more, material added since America’s visit to the system weeks before. For over three centuries, astronomers had found comfort in finding natural explanations for the star’s oddball behavior that did not involve alien super-civilizations. The most popular theory combined the star’s high rate of spin causing gravitational darkening with the presence of an oddly tilted accretion disk—despite the fact that infrared studies of the system had never been able to detect an accretion disk’s warm presence. Other theories involved collisions of large planets with the star, causing an overall brightening that had been slowly dimming over the centuries.

      The trouble was that none of those explanations fit all of the observations, and all were so coincidentally complex as to be unlikely in the extreme.

      Gray found it amusing, actually. In 1960, Freeman Dyson, a mathematician and theoretical physicist, had suggested that any search for advanced civilizations in the galaxy be on the lookout for stars that unaccountably dimmed or winked out—indications of what became known as a Dyson swarm or Dyson sphere. These were hypothetical megastructures intended to capture all of a star’s radiation output by means either of a spherical cloud of solar collectors or a solid shell enclosing the star. By the early twenty-first century, Humankind had been thoroughly primed to discover signs of extraterrestrial intelligence … and yet when they’d actually spotted precisely what Dyson had predicted, they’d dismissed them as natural phenomenon.

      Then the star-faring species of interstellar traders, the Agletsch, had strongly urged Konstantin to check out the star KIC 8462852. Gray had disobeyed orders to follow Konstantin’s directions and taken America to Tabby’s Star, where they’d discovered the ruins of an alien megastructure, and the surviving digital intelligence they called the Satori.

      And now he was returning. They would visit the Satori at Tabby’s Star, then attempt to make contact with whatever was at Deneb, an unknown something that had destroyed much of the Satori infrastructure.

      Whether or not the Denebans would be willing to help Humankind against the Rosette entity—or even 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

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