LITMIR.BIZ

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Daly! Hold your fire. In a few minutes I expect that cloud to begin contracting toward its center. When it does, I want you to slam as many nano-D warheads into that center as you can!”

      “Aye, aye, Captain!”

      She leaned forward, staring into the CGI panorama ahead. She could see white points of light moving swiftly out from the fighters, warheads swinging out and to the sides. Blinding flashes marked the detonations, and, sure enough, the cloud began to contract. Thermonuclear blasts were ravaging the outer edges of the alien swarm, and the individual microcraft responded by moving toward the center.

      “Very well, Mr. Daly. Fire! And continue firing!”

      “Firing …”

      Two more warheads packed with nanotech disassemblers slammed out of America’s bow. And two more … and two more …

       VFA-211, Headhunters

       Outer Asteroid Belt

       2059 hours, TFT

      Meier and the rest of the Headhunters—those who were left, at any rate—continued to fall back toward the America, now just ten thousand kilometers distant. The Ghost Riders had already been taken aboard. The Black Knights were retreating alongside the Headhunters, all semblance of an ordered flight formation lost in the melee in front of the alien cloud.

      He triggered his last pair of Kraits, sending them streaking into darkness. The order had come through from CIC moments before to fire all remaining missiles at the cloud’s perimeter, and Meier was doing so, though so far he’d seen little sign that the target was even aware of the barrage.

      All he had left were his six Boomslangs.

      He thoughtclicked a mental icon, triggering the release of his last missiles, sending them well out to one side of the cloud before looping them in for the kill. Kraits could be dialed up to a hundred megatons or so. VG-120 Boomslangs used focused bursts of vacuum energy to amplify the detonation to the equivalent of as much as a thousand megatons of high explosives. Generally, they were reserved for planetary or asteroid fortifications or extremely large and hardened military emplacements. The fireball flash of a VG-120 was eight kilometers across.

      That, he thought with a grim finality, ought to get that swarm’s attention!

      And that was it. His missile magazines were dry. He still had particle beams and a high-speed Gatling that fired depleted uranium, but those were popguns in the face of that incoming swarm.

      It was definitely time to head back to the barn.

       The Consciousness

       Outer Sol System

       2059 hours, TFT

      In a sense, the Consciousness was carefully feeling its way into this star system, unsure of what was here. It was awash in data. Literally billions of sensations flooded through its laser-sharp awareness second by second, sensory input carrying gigabits of information about the density of the local interplanetary medium, about temperature, about the local gravitational matrix, about radiation, light, and magnetic moment. It sensed the eternal dance of vibrating hydrogen atoms and the wrack of lifeless, drifting dust charged with searing radiation; the sharp pulse of thermonuclear detonations; the shrill keening of hundreds of millions of radio frequencies, some heterodyned with encoded meaning, most of it empty noise.

      It sensed spacecraft, it sensed the minute and insignificant flickers of warmth and electrical activity that were organic beings, it sensed the far faster and more information-rich pulses of electronic intelligences.

      Local space was, for the Rosette Consciousness, a kind of maze, with flares of hard radiation appearing and dissipating in seemingly random patterns ahead of it. Each flash of heat and light annihilated some hundreds of millions of the microcraft making up the entity’s physical form, but there were tens of trillions of the craft linked into its network, and the loss of a thousandth of 1 percent of the machines was trivial, a minor ablation to be expected as it moved through the relatively dense space of a typical star system such as this. The Consciousness allowed itself to flow in those directions that offered the least resistance. An opening appeared in the radiation storms … there …

      It sensed two spacecrafts, guided by simple-minded electronics, piercing the outer reaches of its diffuse body.

      Then, shockingly … horrifically … the Consciousness sensed something, a dizzying sense of loss and diminution, something that just possibly might be described as pain.

      TC/USNA CVS America

       Outer Asteroid Belt

       2059 hours, TFT

      “Captain!” the weapons officer called from his station in CIC. “The swarm is reacting!”

      “I see it, Commander.”

      Gutierrez watched, fascinated, as the swarm, painted in red both on her main screen and in the open window within her mind, sharply contracted and began folding back within itself. There could be little doubt that it was reacting to the nanotechnic disassemblers fired into its heart. The only question was … would they be enough?

      The cloud’s forward advance had stopped, at least for the moment. “CAG!” she called. “Now’s our chance. Bring our people back on board.”

      “The Headhunters are recovering now, Captain. We’ll have everyone back on board in … call it ten minutes.”

      Gutierrez checked other data feeds and noted that Task Force Ritter was now just six minutes away. They had fighters out, now, coming in well in advance of the light carrier Wotan. Missile trails reached out from the Pan-Euro fighters, probing the alien cloud.

      The cloud seemed to be reacting less to the fresh barrage of missiles than it was to the steady drumbeat of nano-D searing into its central core. It was flowing backward now, as though trying to escape the burning touch of the nanodisassemblers, and seemed to be compacting itself.

      A sphere. It was collapsing down into a smooth, black sphere …

      “What the hell is happening to that thing?” Gutierrez asked.

      “We’ve seen this sort of technology before, Captain,” Lydia Powell said. Powell was the new head of America’s xenosophontology department, replacing Dr. Truitt. “At the Rosette, in Omega Centauri … at Kapteyn’s Star. Those micromachines can join together in millions of different ways.”

      “Right now,” Gutierrez said, “they appear to be making a planet the size of Jupiter.”

      “A J-brain, Captain …”

      “What’s that?”

      “A jovian world made of solid computronium. It would possess an artificial mentality of staggering power.”

      “What would such a thing be for?”

      “I doubt humans would be able to grasp the reasoning of minds that powerful, Captain,” Powell told her.

      “I just want to know why it’s quietly turning itself into a planet,” Gutierrez said. “We already know it was intelligent, a super-AI of some sort. Why change from a cloud half an AU across to that?”

      “Power, Captain,” Mallory said from CIC. “As a diffuse cloud, each distinct unit was producing its own power … probably from the local magnetic field. As a single sphere one hundred forty thousand kilometers across, it could assemble internal structures to draw vacuum energy.”

      “It could build some pretty hellacious weapons, too,” Gutierrez said. As she watched the forming sphere ahead, she felt a deep stirring of fear mingled with awe. “Helm … let’s increase our separation from that thing.”

      “Yes, ma’am!”

      “Message coming through from the Pan-Euros,” the bridge

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