Jack McDevitt - Omega_玖贝云文库

Omega - [2003]

By: Jack McDevitt

Book 4 of the Engines of God Series

For Jean and Scotty Parrish, USN

Acknowledgments

I’m indebted to Sara and Bob Schwager for their work with the manuscript; to

Walter Cuirle, physicist and writer, for technical assistance; to Ginjer

Buchanan, for editorial guidance; to Ralph Vicinanza, for being there; and to

Maureen McDevitt for showing the way.

“Scientists have today confirmed that one of the omega clouds is indeed

approaching Earth. First, I want to reassure everyone that it poses no danger

to us. It is not expected to arrive in our vicinity for almost a thousand

years. So neither we, nor our children, nor our children’s children, need be

fearful.

“However, we are now aware that these objects have visited the Earth in the

past, at intervals of approximately eight thousand years. Apparently, they

destroy cities and will attack other kinds of construction. No one knows why.

No one knows whether they are natural objects or the results of a perverted

science.

“Our generation faces only one danger, that we might say to ourselves this is

not our problem, and that we will pass it off to the distant future. That we

might shrug and say to ourselves that a thousand years is a long time. That we

will become complacent and conclude that this problem will take care of

itself.

“But I say to you, we should take no satisfaction in the fact that we

ourselves are in no physical danger. This is a hazard to our world, to

everything we hope to pass on to future generations. And it is clear that we

should act now, while we have the time.

“Therefore, I am directing that the full resources of the Council of Nations

be brought to bear. We will learn how this cloud operates, and we will shut it

down.”

—MARGARET ISHIRO, GENERAL SECRETARY, WCN

SEPTEMBER 9, 2213

Prologue

On the surface at Brinkmann IV (“Moonlight”), in IC4756, 1300 light-years from

Earth.

Autumn 2230.

IT WAS THE most majestic series of structures David Collingdale had ever seen.

Steeples and domes and polygons rose out of ice and snow. Walkways soared

among the towers, or their remnants. Many had collapsed. There were pyramids

and open squares that might once have been parks or courtyards. An obelisk

anchored the center of the city. It was a place out of time, frozen, preserved

for the ages, a landscape that might have been composed by Montelet. A place

of crystal and glass, and, in a kinder age, of flowering trees and shaped

hedges and beckoning forest. Catch it at the right time, when its giant moon,

half again as big as Luna, was in the sky, and one might have thought that

here was the celestial city, Valhalla, Argolis, El Dorado by night.

It looked too ethereal to have actually served as a home for a thriving

population. Rather, Collingdale could not get away from the sense that it had

been intended by its builders as a work of art, to remain unused, to stand as

a monument rather than a city. Several of the towers had collapsed, broken

fragments rising out of a thick carpet of snow. Its name was unknown, so they

called it Moonlight, the city and the world and the sense of something lost.

A bleak wind howled down the empty streets, chilling him even in the e-suit,

which was apparently not functioning properly. He’d see to getting it adjusted

when he got back to the dome. Wouldn’t want to have it fail out here at twenty

below.

The sun was struggling to get above a flat mountain range. Several thousand

years ago, something had gone wrong with it. Abrams had explained it to him, a

surfeit of metals or some such thing. Just temporary, he’d insisted. Be back

to normal, he expected, in another few thousand years. Not that it would

matter.

He was at the equator, where the remnants of the once-global civilization had

fled. There were other cities, most in areas that had once been equatorial,

some buried in snowfields, still others frozen behind walls of ice.

He and his team knew little yet about the race that had lived here, except

that they were a long time dead, and their architecture rivaled anything man

had produced. Crystal bridges thrown across mighty rivers, hyperbolic domes,

broad walkways in the sky. All frozen now, the bridges as well as the rivers,

the crystal as well as the spirit.

It was perhaps a hard irony that Moonlight, which had thrived and died about

the time humans were rolling stones out of quarries to build the first

pyramids, would probably have remained undiscovered indefinitely had it not

been that it was about to receive an unwelcome visitor. A survey ship, the

Harry Coker, had been watching an omega, one of the monstrous clouds that

drifted in waves out of the galactic core, and which seemed bent on destroying

any civilization in their path. The Coker was anxious to see how the cloud

would fare in the complex gravity field of a planetary system, when it spotted

evidence of cities on the fourth planet.

Collingdale squinted into the hard gray sky. The cloud was visible from late

afternoon until shortly after midnight. It was up there now, partially

obscured in the glare of the sunset. In the daytime it looked utterly

harmless, a large dark thunderstorm, perhaps, like a million others he had

seen in his lifetime. But this one rose and set with the sky beyond the

atmosphere. It always described the same path across the heavens and it kept

getting bigger.

The omega clouds were old news. They’d been discovered a quarter century

earlier. Although no one had ever seen them attack a city, they were tied to

massive destruction in ancient times on Quraqua, Beta Pacifica III, and two

other worlds. Objects with a wide range of geometric shapes had been floated

in front of the omegas, and humans now knew beyond any question that designs

not found in nature could expect to draw lightning bolts.

Nobody understood how or why. No one knew where they came from. And few seemed

to feel it was likely we would ever find out.

Until now, no one had seen a cloud change course and glide into a planetary

system. No one had seen a city under attack.

It was fortunate nobody lived on Moonlight. The inhabitants had obviously been

overwhelmed by the ice age brought on by the instability of their sun. Best

estimates were that there’d been no one there for about two thousand years.

COLLINGDALE HAD GROWN up in Boston with an alcoholic mother and a missing

father, who, his mother insisted until the day of her sodden teary death, had

gone west on business and would be back any day. He’d spent two years in an

orphanage, been adopted by a pair of religious fanatics, run away so many

times they’d eventually implanted a tracker, and—despite everything—won a

scholarship from the University of Massachusetts. He’d taken a degree in

archeology, taken private flying lessons on a whim, and, as he liked to think

of it, never again touched ground. Eventually he’d decided that flights

between Chicago and Boston were too confining. He’d learned to pilot the

superluminals, had taken the command seat for several major corporations and

the Academy, had gotten bored hauling people and supplies back and forth

through the void, gone back to school, and specialized in a discipline that,

at that time, lacked subject matter: xenology.

In the meantime he’d attended the funerals of both his foster parents, who’d

died a year apart, the one unable to live without the other. They’d refused

longevity treatments on the grounds they were not God’s plan. They’d never

given up on him, even though they disapproved of the directions his life had

taken. He’d stopped going home during the last years of their lives because

they kept telling him they forgave him and were sure God would as well.

He didn’t know why they intruded on his thoughts while he gazed across the

city. He would have liked them to see Moonlight. Surely they would have been

caught up in its majesty, and they might have understood what his life was

about.

THE OMEGAS ROUTINELY hurled lightning bolts at perpendiculars. Any object

designed with right angles, or sharp departures from nature’s natural arcs,

could expect to become a target.

It had seemed an old wives’ tale when the stories first came back. Collingdale

recalled that the scientific community, almost to a person, had scoffed at the

reports. The notion that clouds could somehow navigate on their own seemed

absurd. That they could bump up to high velocities more absurd still. Most had

not accepted the idea until the one approaching Moonlight, the Brinkmann

Cloud, had changed course, begun to slow down, and headed insystem. That was

four years ago.

The claims had been so outlandish that nobody who cared about his reputation

had even tested them. But once the Brinkmann showed its ability to navigate,

researchers had come, and an attempt to explain the impossible had begun. It

had begun with the discovery of nanos in samples taken from the omega.

Were the clouds natural objects? Or artificial? Did the universe disapprove of

intelligent life? Or was there a psychotic force in existence somewhere? Or,

as his parents had thought, was God sending a warning?

“You coming, Dave?”

They’d cut their way into the base of the northeastern tower, and Jerry Riley

was standing aside, leaving for Dave the honor of being first person to enter

the structure. He clapped a few shoulders, strode down between banks of dugout

snow, paused at the entrance, put his head in, and flashed his lamp around.

The interior was as large as New York’s main terminal. The ceiling soared

several stories. Benches were scattered throughout the area. Sleek metal

columns supported balconies and galleries. Alcoves that might once have been

shops were set into the walls. And there was a statue.

He took a few steps inside, scarcely daring to breathe. They knew what the

natives looked like because they’d found remains. But they’d never seen any

depictions of them. No sculptures, no graphics, no engravings. How odd it had

seemed that a species so given to art had given them no copies of its own

image.

The others filed in and spread out around him, all enamored of the statue.

Jerry raised his lamp slowly, almost reverently, and played the light across

it. It was a feline. Claws were replaced by manipulative digits, but the snout

and fangs remained. Narrow eyes, in front. A predator. But it wore a hat,

rather like an artist’s beret, angled down over one eye. It was decked out in

trousers, a shirt with long fluffy sleeves, and a jacket that would not have

looked out of place in Boston. A bandanna was tied around its neck. And it

sported a cane.

One of the women giggled.

Collingdale couldn’t suppress a smile himself, and yet despite its comic

aspect, the creature displayed a substantial degree of dignity.

There was an inscription on the base, a single line of characters, executed in

a style reminiscent of Old English. It was probably a single word. “Its name?”

someone suggested.

Collingdale wondered what the subject had done. A Washington? A Churchill? A

Francis Bacon? Perhaps a Mozart.

“The architect,” said Riley, short and generally cynical. “This is the guy who

built the place.” Riley didn’t like being out here, but needed this last

mission to establish his bona fides with the University of Something-or-Other

back home. He’d be an inspiration to the students.

It was odd how the intangibles carried over from species to species. Dignity.

Majesty. Power. Whether it was seen in an avian or a monkey, or something

between, it always had the same look.

His commlink vibrated against his wrist. It was Alexandra, who’d arrived two

days before on the al-Jahani with a cargo of nukes, which she’d been

instructed to use in an effort to blow away the cloud. Nobody believed it

could be done, but no other course of action offered itself. The cloud was

simply too big, thirty-four thousand kilometers in diameter. A few nukes would

have no effect.

“Yes, Alex. What’ve you got?”

“It’s still slowing down, Dave. And it’s still on target.”

“Okay.”

“It’s coming in on your side of the world. Looks as if it’s homed in on your

city. We’re going to set the bombs off tonight. In about six hours.”

The omega was slowing down by firing jets of dust and hydrogen forward. Riley

thought it might also be twisting gravity, but there was no evidence yet to

support that idea. The only thing that mattered was that, however it was

managing things, the cloud was going to arrive right on top of Moonlight.

THEY WANDERED FOR hours through the underground. There was a network of

smaller chambers connected to the large area. They found an endless number of

chairs, bowls, radios, monitors, plumbing fixtures, conference tables.

Artifacts they couldn’t identify. Much of it was in surprisingly good

condition. There were boxes of plastic disks, undoubtedly memory storage

units. But electronic records were fragile. Early civilizations carved their

history onto clay tablets, which lasted virtually forever. More advanced

groups went for paper, which had a reasonable shelf life, provided it was

stored in a dry place and not mishandled. But electronic data had no staying

power. They had not yet been able to recover a single electronic record.

There were some books, which had not been stored properly. Nevertheless, they

gathered them into plastic containers. They’d been in the area several weeks,

but there was a special urgency about this visit. The cloud was coming.

Anything they did not carry off today might not survive.

The walls were covered with engravings. Collingdale assigned one of his people

to record as many of them as she could. Some of it was symbolic, much was

graphic, usually with bucolic themes, leaves and stems and branches, all of

which, when the sun came back, might grow on this world again.

Stairways and shafts rose high into the structure and descended to lower

floors, which were encased in ice. “But that might be a huge piece of good

luck,” Collingdale told Ava MacAvoy, who looked unusually attractive in the

reflected light. “It should survive the cloud, whatever happens to the rest of

the city.”

They went back outside. It was time to leave, but Collingdale delayed, taking

more pictures, recording everything. Ava and Riley and the others had to pull

him away.

The cloud was setting by then, and Collingdale wished it was possible to halt

the planet on its axis, keep the other side between the omega and the towers.

Hide the city.

Damn you.

He stood facing it, as if he would have held it off by sheer will.

Ava took his arm. “Come on, Dave,” she said. “It’s getting late.”

THEY RETREATED TO the dome, which had served as their base for the better part

of a month. A lander waited beside it. The dome was small, cramped,

uncomfortable. They’d brought out too many people, and could in fact have

brought several shiploads more. Everyone had wanted to come to Moonlight. The

Academy, under time pressure, had tried to accommodate the requests as best it

could. It should have said no. That was partly Collingdale’s own fault for not

demanding they cut things off.

They’d filled the dome with artifacts and shipped them topside to the

al-Jahani, which now carried a treasure trove of mugs and plates and table

lamps and electronic gear, and materials far more esoteric, objects whose

function defied analysis. Other pieces were now being loaded. There was more

than the lander could handle, but they’d stacked the rest in the dome, hoping

that it would be safe there.

Collingdale waited until everybody else was on board—there were seven of them,

excluding the pilot—took a last look around, and climbed in. The omega was

almost down. Only a black ridge of clouds was visible in the west, and a few

streaked plumes soared above the horizon. The pilot started the engines, and

the lander rose. Nobody said much.

Jerry commented how scary it was, and Collingdale couldn’t restrain a smile.

He himself was of the old school. He’d started his archeological career in

Iraq, had been shot at, threatened, deported. When archeology went

interstellar, as it had a half century ago, it had become, curiously enough,

safer. There were no deranged local populations defending sacred tombs, no

warlords for whom the security payment might be insufficient, no national

governments waiting to collapse with dire consequences to the researchers, who

might be jailed, beaten, even killed. There were still hazards, but they

tended to be less unpredictable, and more within the control of the

individual. Don’t take foolish chances, and you won’t get burned. Don’t stay

too long in the submerged temple, as had famously happened to Richard Wald

twenty-some years earlier, when you know the tidal wave’s coming.

So Collingdale was getting his people out in plenty of time. But it didn’t

prevent them from thinking they were having a narrow escape from something

dire. In fact, of course, at no time were they in danger.

He was looking down at the receding city when the pilot informed him he had an

incoming transmission from the al-Jahani. He opened the channel, turning up

the volume so everybody could hear. Alexandra’s blond features appeared

on-screen. “We’ve launched, Dave,” she said. “All twelve running true.

Detonation in thirty-eight minutes.”

The missiles were cluster weapons, each carrying sixteen nukes. If the plan

worked, the missiles would penetrate two thousand kilometers into the cloud

and jettison their weapons, which would explode simultaneously. Or they would

explode when their electronics failed. The latter provision arose from the

inability of researchers to sink probes more than a few kilometers into the

clouds. Once inside, everything tended to shut down. Early on, a few ships had

been lost.

“Good luck, Alex,” he said. “Give it hell.”

The lander, powered by its spike technology, ascended quickly, traveling west.

The cloud began to rise also. The flight had been planned to allow the

occupants a view of the omega when the missiles reached the target.

Collingdale ached for a success. There was nothing in his life, no award, no

intellectual breakthrough, no woman, he had ever wanted as passionately as he

wanted to see Alexandra’s missiles blow the son of a bitch to hell.

They climbed into orbit and passed into sunlight. Everyone sat quietly, not

talking much. Riley and Ava pretended to be examining an electronic device

they’d brought up, trying to figure out what it was. Jerry was looking through

his notes. Even Collingdale, who prided himself on total honesty, gazed

steadfastly at a recently recorded London conference on new Egyptian finds.

The cloud filled the sky again.

“Three minutes,” said Alex.

THEY COULDN’T SEE the al-Jahani directly. It was too far, and it was lost

somewhere in the enormous plumes that fountained off the cloud’s surface like

so many tendrils reaching toward Moonlight. But its position was known, and

Bill, the ship’s artificial intelligence, had put a marker on the screen. They

could see the cloud, of course, and the positions of the missiles were also

marked. Twelve blinking lights closing on the oversize gasbag. Collingdale

amused himself by counting the weapons.

“Thirty seconds to impact,” said the pilot.

Collingdale let his head fall back. He wondered whether one could achieve

impact with a cloud.

Ava watched the time, and her lips were moving, counting down the seconds.

“They’re in,” she said. Someone’s hand touched his shoulder. Gripped it. Good

luck.

Riley adjusted his harness.

Collingdale, knowing his foster parents would have been proud, muttered a

prayer.

“They’ve gone off.” Alexandra’s voice. “Too soon.”

There were a few glimmerings along the surface of the cloud. But he saw no

sign of disruption.

“It might take a while before we can really see anything,” said Riley,

hopefully.

The hand on his shoulder let go.

“You’re right,” said one of the others. “I mean, the cloud is so big.”

“The bombs had to do some damage. How could they not?”

“Maybe just screw up the steering mechanism. Hell, that would be enough.”

The glimmering got brighter. Collingdale thought he saw an explosion. Yes,

there was no doubt of it. And there. Over there was a second eruption of some

kind. They watched several patches grow more incandescent. Watched the cloud

pass overhead. Watched it begin to sink toward the rim of the world.

The explosive patches darkened.

On a second orbit, they were still visible, smoldering scars on the otherwise

pacific surface of the omega.

“I don’t think it’s going to work,” said the pilot.

ON THE THIRD orbit, they rendezvoused with the Quagmor, the vessel that had

transported them to the system. The mood on the ship was dark, and everybody

was making comments about having made a good effort. Just so much we can do.

Alexandra reported that the omega was still on course for Moonlight. “We

didn’t get much penetration. There’s still a chance we might have done some

damage that just doesn’t show. I mean, if we blew up the internal skunk works,

how would we know? So don’t give up, Doc.”

He didn’t. But the view was unsettling. The jets reached out, arcing as if to

encircle the planet. The omega was a malignant force, a thing out of religious

myth, an agency beyond understanding.

The al-Jahani maneuvered around the fringes of the cloud, trying to record as

much of the event as it could. Collingdale went to his quarters, slept, got

up, slept some more. The cloud closed and, as the city rotated into position,

made contact directly above. Winds howled. Lightning ripped through the skies.

Tornadoes formed.

It was just after sunset.

Collingdale could hardly bring himself to watch. Electrical discharges had

been growing in the cloud, had become more intense as it drew nearer. The

storm gathered force, but the towers stood, and the planet rotated, moving the

city directly to ground zero and then past. And for a while he hoped it would

get clear. But without warning a gigantic bolt tore though the cloud and

hammered the city. The chess-piece structures seemed to melt and blacken and

sink into the ice. Sprays of pebbles rattled against them, and something

blasted into the base of one of the corner towers. The tower shuddered and

began to lean precipitously. Other buildings collapsed or were blown away.

Once, twice, they lost the picture as satellites were neutralized. Lightning

ripped out of the night, scorched the diamond steeples and the crystal

polygons. Hurricane-force winds hurled black dust across the snowscape. A few

rocks fell from the sky, plowing into glass and crystal. It needed only a few

minutes, and when it was over, a ground blizzard buried everything.

Collingdale was hardly a violent or even a confrontational man. He hadn’t been

in a loud argument as far back as he could remember. But in those moments he

would have killed. Rage spilled out of his soul, sheer fury driven to excess

by his helplessness.

The cloud wrapped itself around the world, around Moonlight, and it found the

other cities. It struck them in a display of sheet lightning, forked

lightning, chain lightning, and fireballs. Collingdale couldn’t get away from

it. He wandered through the ship, downing glasses of rum, extreme behavior for

a man who seldom drank. He couldn’t stop moving, from the bridge to the

mission center to the common room to his cabin to Riley’s quarters. (“Hey,

Dave, look at what this damned thing is doing in the north.”) It fed his rage

to watch, and for reasons he would never understand, it gave him a twisted

pleasure to hate so fiercely.

When finally the cloud grew dormant, pieces of it broke off and began to drift

away, as if there were no gravity near the planet to hold on to them. The

skies began to clear.

The cities were charred and wrecked, wreathed in black smoke. Ava was in

tears. Most of the others were in a state of shock. The devastation was more

complete than anything they had imagined.

Collingdale was drinking black coffee, trying to clear his head, when a couple

of the technicians created a commotion. “Look,” one of them said, pointing at

a screen.

At a city. Intact.

Untouched.

Its towers still stood tall. Its hanging walkways still connected rooftops. A

monument was down, and, on its southern flank, a minaret had collapsed.

Otherwise, it had escaped.

It was halfway around the globe from where the intersection with the cloud had

happened. The safest possible place. But that alone wouldn’t have been enough.

Other cities, equally distant, had been leveled.

They went back and looked at the record.

Collingdale saw it right away: snow. The surviving city had been experiencing

a blizzard when the cloud hit.

“It never saw this place,” said Ava.

FIELD REPORT: Moonlight

The only aspects of this civilization that survive are the city that suffered

a timely blizzard, and the bases the inhabitants had established on the moon

and on the third planet. And in the artifacts that we’ve managed to haul away.

The loss is incalculable. And I hope that someone, somewhere, will realize

that it is time to devise a defense against the omegas. Not to wait until our

turn comes, when it might be too late. But to do it now, before the next

Moonlight happens.

—David Collingdale

Preliminary Post-omega Report

December 11, 2230

PART ONE - Hedgehogs

** Chapter 1

Arlington.

Tuesday, February 18, 2234.

HAROLD TEWKSBURY WOKE from one of those curious disjointed dreams in which he

was wandering down endless corridors while his heart fluttered and he had

trouble breathing. Damned thing wouldn’t go away anymore.

The doctors wanted to give him a synthetic heart. But he was over a hundred

years old, and even if they could fix things so his body wouldn’t be tired, he

was. His wife was long dead, his kids had grown up sixty years ago. Somehow

he’d been too busy for his family, and he’d allowed himself to get separated

from his grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Now none of them knew him.

The commlink was chiming, and he heard Rhonda’s soft voice. “Harold,” she was

saying. “The lab.” Rhonda was the house AI. “I don’t like waking you for these

calls, and I think you should let me deal with them.”

“Can’t, Rhonda. Just patch it through.”

“At the very least, you should take your medication first. Are you all right?”

“Yes,” he said, pushing up to a sitting position. “I’m fine. Just a little

short of breath.” He dumped a pill into his hand and swallowed it. And felt

better almost immediately.

It was 3:17 A.M.

“Put them on,” he said. And he knew, of course, why they were calling. The

only reason they ever called at this hour except the time that Josephine had

tripped over a rumpled carpet, broken an arm, and had to be taken off to the

hospital.

“Harold.” Charlie’s voice.

“Yes, Charlie? It happened again?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Same as the others?”

“Right. No record there was ever a star there anywhere.”

“Same signature?”

“We don’t quite have the details down yet, but it looks like it.”

A nova. But not really. Not the right intensity. Not the right spectroscopic

reading. And no evidence of a star having been in the neighborhood. He shook

his head. Can’t have a nova without a star. “Where?”

“Near the Golden Crescent.”

“On a line with the others?”

“Yes.”

And that was what really chilled him. There had been three earlier events. On

a line, as if something were marching through the sky.

“Did we catch it at the beginning? Or was it running when the package opened

up?”

“At the beginning, Harold.”

“Okay. Pipe it through.”

He rearranged his pillows. A starfield winked on. The Golden Crescent, nursery

to a thousand newborn stars, floated over his dresser. To his left, great

smoky walls fell away to infinity. The Mogul, a small, dim class-G, was close

enough to illuminate the clock. And the long arm of the Milky Way passed

through the center of the room.

“Five seconds,” said a recorded voice.

He pushed himself higher and watched a dazzling light appear over the dresser.

Brilliant and blinding, it overwhelmed everything else in the sky.

It looked like a nova. Behaved like a nova. But it was something else.

He ran it a few more times before closing the record. They had this one from

the beginning. If it was like the others, the light would sustain itself for

sixty-one days before shutting down.

THROUGH HIS WINDOW the lights of the Washington Monument were a distant blur.

The White Eagle Hotel, usually a bright beacon in the night, had been

swallowed by an unseasonable fog. He sat quietly, allowing full rein to a rush

of sheer pleasure. He was caught up in one of the great mysteries of the age,

had no clue what was happening, suspected there would not be a reasonable

explanation during his lifetime. And he could not have been happier. The

universe, it seemed, was smart enough to keep them all guessing. Which was as

it should be.

Jack McDevitt - Omega

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