Angelique and her Ange’s Angels were all well into their respective missions, traveling to every corner of their immediate region of space.
Angelique chose to head to Atlas herself rather than staying on the planet waiting for everyone to come back. She was a beta explorer after all. Staying on a planet waiting for her Ange’s Angels to return just wasn’t her style.
It meant she would be slightly out of the loop with everything gained from those planets as her Ange’s Angels returned to Everest with all their new technology and knowledge. But she considered that a reasonable sacrifice to make. Her Ange’s Angels would probably seek her out, anyway, since they had a piece of code in them driving them to merge with her.
Angelique was fast approaching the Tac system—the system where Atlas had set up his base.
As she looked out the window of the starship, she got a sense for why Atlas had chosen to do his research here. The system was completely strip-mined. She got a sense that building anything was possible given the amount of resources freely available and moving out in space.
It was a buzz of dead movement. It was beginning to closely resemble a Dyson swarm.
A Dyson swarm was the evolution of an idea from Freeman Dyson. He believed that as civilizations got more technologically advanced, they’d eventually require all the energy produced by a star. He envisioned a K2 civilization would cover their star in a dome to capture all the light that came off it.
The trouble was building a monolithic structure around a star wasn’t practical. So the idea was updated to become a swarm of probes around the star. Eventually, with enough probes, the whole star would be completely covered, and all energy would be captured by these probes.
Whatever Atlas was constructing had him well on his way to constructing a Dyson swarm. She hated to think just how many flying objects were moving around the system right now. She noticed at times her view of the star was completely obstructed as a cluster of probes, so thick she couldn’t see through them, whizzed past.
When Angelique had originally started this journey, she’d had the construction of a Dyson swarm on her bucket list. It was all the rage when she was back on Earth. Up until she’d actually terraformed a planet, she’d believed the natural progress for humans was to eventually move into orbit on trillions of small platforms.
The problem with a Dyson swarm was biological life needed protection from cosmic rays, and the easiest way to protect it was keeping it on a big rock with a thick atmosphere and strong magnetic field.
The other interesting fact about being able to design a city from scratch was humans didn’t take up that much space. It was a common misconception that you needed a lot of land to house a billion people.
She assumed that myth came from the fact most cities back on Earth had evolved and grown over time. They weren’t planned from the beginning to hold several million people.
Since she got to design her cities from the start, she was able to organize them perfectly. She also had the other benefits of flying robotic taxis, so her people never had issues with traffic. Farms were all automated and controlled by an algorithm so they were as efficient as possible.
In her experience, there wasn’t much benefit to building a Dyson swarm. It wasn’t even energy efficient, since fusion reactors created more energy than solar panels could capture given the same surface area. She didn’t even use solar panels much on tidally locked planets because the panels simply blocked usable soil.
Angelique hailed Atlas again, knowing she was within near-real-time-communication distance.
A few minutes later she received a reply from the Lex in the system giving her the location of where Atlas was. Lex let her know Atlas was deep in concentration trying to solve a problem, but it was alerting Atlas of their arrival.
Angelique and her Ship made their way slowly toward a massive spacecraft that was the same model as the one she left Mars in. She found it interesting that he was still using the outdated model, even though she’d already shared a bunch of new designs with him.
After docking the two spacecrafts together and building a secure connection between the two, Angelique and her Ship hopped over to Atlas’s research lab. Looking around the room, she saw Atlas and his Ship in front of mountains of papers. “You look like you’ve been busy.”
Atlas looked up from behind his huge stack of documents. He had a massive smile on his face. “Angelique, sorry I waited for you to come to me. As soon as I saw you enter the system, I wanted to say hi. But I knew I wouldn’t be able to keep this secret for that long if I did.”
“Secret?” Angelique eyed him curiously. “Good secret or bad?”
“I know where the Atua are,” he blurted out. “I know of eight star systems that they’ve colonized so far.”
Atlas handed over a piece of paper with a bunch of planetary images on it. They looked like they had been taken from orbit. It was clear these planets had intelligent life on them because they were awash with visible light sources. They were high-definition images of the planets. “I’ve taken these pictures of the planets I’ve found.”
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“What?!” Angelique didn’t know how to react to that. She knew on some level they’d be out there colonizing other worlds, but for Atlas to know exactly which star systems they were in, her mind was full of questions. “How?” Then she thought back to all the probes moving out in orbit around the system. Had he used the star to bend light like a telescope? Thinking about it again, it had to be the only way. “You used gravitational lensing to take an image, didn’t you?”
Atlas smiled and then nodded. Angelique knew he was impressed that she understood how it was done.
Angelique believed it was theoretically possible to do. Some of her scientists back on Earth suggested they create something similar. The idea had never progressed though because having that many satellites in orbit around the star raised the chances they’d be detected. In every discussion they’d had around the topic, the strategic value of such a massive undertaking wasn’t as big as building a standard telescope. Angelique was beginning to think she’d been wrong.
Angelique noticed something familiar about the planet she was looking at. It reminded her of one of her early ones. Then she realized it was one of hers. Atlas had clearly identified one of the planets she hadn’t told him about.
She’d made the decision long ago to keep some of her planets well hidden from all the others, partly as an experiment and partly as a security measure. She knew that if something went wrong on one of her worlds, they wouldn’t have knowledge about the locations of all her colonies.
Looking at what Atlas had shown her, she quickly realized how any sufficiently advanced civilization could quickly identify all other worlds that were habited.
Angelique finished looking at all the planets. She laid seven on one of the tables and then handed one back to Atlas. “This is the only one I don’t know about. These others are mine.” She looked over at her Ship. “Can you check I’m right?”
“Those look right to me,” Ship said after reviewing the files. “Do you want me to share the classified documents with Atlas?”
The classified documents were a separate collection of data about all the planets Angelique had colonized. They contained more information than what she’d shared with the leaders of the planets. Angelique considered it for a moment. It looked like Atlas would eventually discover all her planets, anyway. She decided there wasn’t much point in waiting for him to discover them all—or wasting his time discovering systems she already knew about. “Do it.”
Her Ship looked toward Atlas’s Ship. “Do you want to come with me? I’ll transfer you the files now.”
The security protocols were such that giving Ship the files would require him to physically plug into her spaceship.
Angelique and Atlas were left alone to discuss things.
It was Atlas’s turn to eye her suspiciously. “I should have known you had more worlds that you let on.”
“I should probably let you know I have a few sleeper systems too. Empty planets where I’ve hidden a few fabricators and radio dishes. I can broadcast a copy of myself to one of them if I needed to. They’ll all be contained in the files Ship shares with you.” Then she looked down at the world that she didn’t know about. “This one is new though. Are you sure it’s not one of Trillion’s or Icarus’s?”
“Not a chance,” Atlas said. “Trillion’s confirmed it’s not one of hers. And Icarus got so excited about exploring an alien world that he’s snuck onto the planet to visit them.”
“Visit the aliens?” she asked a little uncertainly. “Do you know what kind of aliens they are?”
“We’re about seventy percent certain they’re the Atua, the same aliens that brainwashed Earth. Ariana is confident it’s them because the biosignatures of the planets are similar to the samples she took from the spacecraft.”
“Wait, Ariana’s here too? Has everyone come and visited you?”
“The Starnet, remember? I’ve been working on rebuilding the connection between everyone ever since the unit in this system blew up. Trillion is currently trying to talk to a cloud. Icarus is offline, trying to sneak onto an alien world.” Atlas paused for a moment. “And Ariana is on her way here. I got confirmation a while back that she escaped an attack from the Atua people who came back to finish the job.”
Angelique realized she had so much to catch up on. She thought Icarus had made a stupid decision. “He visited their home world? What if they get caught?” Then she thought about it a bit more; he would probably get caught. There was no way an alien could sneak onto one of her worlds. At least she hoped not. “How much about my world did Icarus know?”
Angelique knew she was being selfish by focusing her questions on the risks to her worlds rather than being concerned for the well-being of Icarus. But ultimately it was his decision to go there. She just didn’t want his dumb mistake to cost her.
“He specifically didn’t want to know for that exact reason. And he programmed his spacecraft to self-destruct if they got caught.”
“How will we know if he self-destructs?”
Atlas scratched his chin. “We won’t. But he left the backup in one of his systems, I can’t remember how long they set the timer. But the backup will turn on if it hasn’t had confirmation from Icarus in a few thousand years.”
Angelique thought about it a bit more. What was done was done. She couldn’t change the past. And it probably didn’t matter, anyway, since, with the telescope Atlas had access to, no alien civilization could hide. Not even ones covered by a cloaking bubble.
She realized the benefits of the Starnet now outweighed the costs. Since any advanced alien could identify all her spacecraft, she needed to speed up the communications between her colonies. “Speaking of alien worlds,” Angelique said, changing the subject. “Do you think you could make the Starnet work without needing a constant stream of particles?”
Atlas bit his lower lip. “You don’t want the Starnet giving away the position of all your planets?”
Angelique nodded. “If I can help it.”
Atlas nodded his head. “There’s a way. The reason the Starnet is constantly broadcasting signals is because it only has one quantum entanglement device. But I could create a billion of them at once, preload a few hundred years’ worth of entangled particles, then keep half of them here while we send a spacecraft to your planets with the other half.”
Angelique nodded, not quite understanding what he was talking about but glad he’d found a solution. “How long would that take?”
“Maybe a few hours. There’s a lot of resources in this system. I can do anything quickly.”
Angelique again was impressed with how useful a resource-based system like this was.
She handed a memory stick to Atlas. “Before I forget, Peter sent you a few recorded messages. He wants you to build a weapon.”
Atlas raised an eyebrow at that comment. “What sort of weapon?”
“He’s confident we’re going to be attacked by the Atua people soon. And from what you said about Ariana, he might be right. Anyway, he wants you to build something big. Something capable of destroying an entire planet in one shot. He wants it as a deterrent, just in case we get into a war.”