Singularity: Star Carrier: Book Three

Chapter Thirteen

30 June 2405

Briefing Virchamber

TC/USNA CVS America

TRGA, Texaghu Resch System

0945 hours, TFT

Millions of stars . . .

“This is from a fighter on the far side of that cylinder?” Koenig asked.

“Dragonfire One, yes, sir,” Wizewski said.

The command and science teams from all of CBG-18’s ships were united electronically within a virtual reality created by America’s principal AI. Within their minds, they were adrift in space, surrounded on every side, above and below, by a shining wall of stars. Hundreds of people were present, together with the AIs from each vessel; rather than representing that entire mob, however, Koenig was aware of only a handful of humans—their electronic avatars, actually—seemingly adrift at the heart of that titanic globe of swarming suns. The representations of the others seemed to shift and fade, to come and go, depending on who was thinking, who was up- or down-loading information, and sometimes simply at the whim of the AI guiding the simulation.

The virtual projection had been integrated with America’s navigational department, and was fully interactive. The officers immersed within the illusion could move through it, as if it were an immense 3-D map, or they could follow the movements of Dragonfire One from Trevor Gray’s point of view as it fell through the TRGA cylinder and into this new and alien space.

They could see the moving clouds of Sh’daar ships, the distant dark shadow ahead on Gray’s line of drift, and the approach of the immense spacecraft that swallowed him. The record was cut off as the fighter was pulled inside an alien vessel the size of a small world.

“So where the hell is he?” Koenig wanted to know. He let his gaze sweep across that dazzling panoply of stars. “The galactic core?”

“No, sir,” an older woman said. She was Dr. Ann Joseph, America’s senior astrophysicist, a civilian serving on board as a science advisor. “That was our first thought too. I think a lot of us were expecting the Sh’daar to be residing inside the center of the galaxy, somehow.” Her electronic avatar smiled. “Where else do you put the capital of a galaxy-spanning interstellar empire?”

Several in the mostly invisible crowd chuckled.

“Gray’s record enabled us to get a fair idea of the star cloud’s size and makeup. It gave us a good enough picture to know we were dealing with globular cluster . . . though an unusual one in several regards.”

Koenig looked at the surrounding stars, and wondered. He knew about globular clusters, of course, though no human—until now—had ever approached one. The nearest was many thousands of light years beyond the limits of Humankind’s galactic explorations to date. But a globular cluster also seemed like an unlikely place for the birth of a star-conquering civilization like the Sh’daar. Globulars, he knew, were composed of what astronomers called Population II stars; they were among the oldest stars in the universe, 12 billion years or so old, and they were impoverished when it came to elements heavier than hydrogen and helium—those elements like carbon, oxygen, and iron necessary to build planets.

Possibly the Sh’daar had migrated to a cluster, but it was hard to imagine why. Lots of stars, all hydrogen and helium, no planets . . . what would be the point?

Joseph waved her hand, and several dozen of the stars surrounding the group appeared haloed by green circles. Those specific stars shifted in their color, some becoming red or orange, others green or blue. “Enhanced spectral contrast,” Joseph explained. “We were able to pick out a number of the brightest stars in this cluster, and match their individual spectra with our stellar database.

“Lieutenant Gray,” she continued, “has fallen into the very unusual galactic cluster we know as Omega Centauri.”

Koenig opened a data channel in his mind, and let streams of information flow in from America’s library.

Omega Centauri, also designated as NGC 5139, was unusual among known globular clusters. For one thing, it was one of the largest known—the largest globular of all such in Earth’s galaxy, and second only to the Andromeda’s Mayall II in the entire local group of galaxies. It was one of very few globulars actually visible to the naked eye, appearing as a fuzzy patch in the skies of Earth’s southern hemisphere just 17 degrees northeast of the brilliant and relatively nearby Alpha Centauri. Normally, it was visible from Earth as a fuzzy, third-magnitude star. When viewed in an absolutely black rural sky far from Earth’s cities and megopoli—or from orbit over Earth’s nightside—it appeared to be as large as Earth’s full moon.

And it was massive—equivalent to 10 million suns like Sol, which made it ten times as massive as normal globulars. Since the early twenty-first century, astronomers had known an intermediate black hole lurked within its heart, one massing perhaps twelve thousand suns. The stars of the cluster, swarming like bees, were rotating fast enough to flatten the entire sphere somewhat.

Like normal globular clusters, Omega Centauri was orbiting the center of the galaxy; unlike most globulars, the spectra of its stars showed a broad range of metallicities . . . a word astronomers used to mean any element heavier than hydrogen and helium. That meant that the cluster contained stars of many different ages. The oldest were, indeed, ancient and metal-poor Population II stars, but it also contained younger Population I stars, stars containing a percentage of heavier elements and, possibly, attended by planets.

What all of this meant was that Omega Centauri quite likely was not a globular cluster at all . . . but the stripped-naked core of a dwarf galaxy devoured by Earth’s Milky Way untold hundreds of millions or even billions of years in the past.

“Omega Centauri,” Dr. Joseph went on, “is one of the very closest globular clusters to Earth—about fifteen thousand, eight hundred light years.”

As she spoke, the surrounding stars seemed to rush past the disembodied observers, falling together into a huge, flattened sphere of swarming suns that itself dwindled into the distance. The image froze with the cluster seeming to hang just above the broad and soft-glowing sweep of one of the Milky Way’s spiral arms. Above, sparsely populated by the faint and hazy smears of other galaxies and clusters, yawned the emptiness of the intergalactic Void; below glowed the Milky Way, a vast spiral viewed from just above the blue-hued curve of the galactic arms, with the core visible off to the left, a swollen bulge of faintly red and gold suns in the distance.

“Currently,” Joseph continued, “it’s positioned just above the plane of our galaxy, and orbiting the galactic core retrograde to the local stellar population, including our sun. As you can see on your data channels, we now believe it to be the core of a small galaxy that was absorbed by the Milky Way. We’ve known for a long time that large galaxies like ours can be . . . cannibalistic.”

So Omega Centauri once—how long ago, in fact?—had been a separate galaxy, a member of the Local Group that strayed too close to the young and voracious Milky Way and was swallowed. It would have been tiny compared to the Milky Way, an irregular or spherical mass of stars a few thousand light years across, compared to the hundred-thousand light year diameter of the Milky Way. Gravitational interactions would have ripped away the outer stars of the morsel, stripped off the gas and dust, and left behind this remnant of a galactic core, orbiting the Milky Way’s center as a satellite cluster with a period of a few hundred million years.

“We’ve actually had a close-up look at one of Omega Centauri’s stars,” Joseph went on. “Just thirteen light years from Sol, there’s a small, very old red dwarf, Kapteyn’s Star. Studies of that star’s motion—which is retrograde to Sol’s, incidentally—and of its composition suggest that it actually came from Omega Centauri.”

“So Kapteyn’s Star was originally from a different galaxy?” Captain Harrison of the Illustrious put in. “Interesting.”

“I visited Kapteyn’s Star once,” Captain Buchanan added, “when I was a young and very callow lieutenant on the Zumwalt. The Dolinar Expedition. When . . . twenty-five years ago?”

Koenig had downloaded docuinteractives on Kapteyn’s Star, and on Bifrost and its arid and ruin-haunted moon Heimdall. The hair at the back of his neck prickled. Billion-year-old super-civilizations and nano-etched planetary computers in the rocks.

“I wonder,” he said, “if there is a correlation between the beings who left their ruins on the surface of Heimdall and the Sh’daar.”

“A distinct possibility,” Joseph told him. “Those ruins on Heimdall have been estimated to be approximately one billion years old. That is, very roughly, when we think the Omega Centauri dwarf galaxy was torn apart and its stars assimilated by Earth’s larger galaxy.”

“Impossible,” another voice said. The speaker was Dr. Phillip Lethbridge, and he was chief of the science department on board the United States of North America. “No civilization could possibly survive for a billion years.”

“The exposed ruins on Bifrost,” Dr. Amanda Fischer, of the Science Department on board the Nassau, said, “are absolutely inert. No power, no means for data to be dynamically stored or accessed. Most of them are little more than metal stains in the rock.”

“The idea is preposterous,” another voice added—that of Lieutenant Commander Adams of America’s biological sciences department. “Evolutionary pressures alone would result in a species changing out of all recognition in that period of time. Think about it! A billion years ago, Earth was home to nothing more advanced than single-celled life, cyanobacteria and such. Every complex multicelled creature, from sponges to sequoias to humans, has evolved since the end of the Proterozoic . . . say, six hundred million years ago. And a billion years from now, there will be nothing even remotely like humans on Earth. As for an AI civilization? Uploaded mentalities? God, what would they think about for a billion years?”

“Such a civilization would have to be completely static,” Fischer said. “No change whatsoever, over geological eons.”

“Worse than that,” Lethbridge added. “A span of even a few thousand years would guarantee major changes to the civilization’s structure. A million times that? It will have changed out of all recognition.”

Koenig wondered if Liu was put off by the sharp responses to his question from the Americans, but Liu was still present within the virtual matrix, still a part of the conversation. “It may,” he pointed out gently, “be necessary to rethink some of our assumptions about the possible longevity of galactic civilization.”

The Chinese, of course, had always thought in terms of enduring civilizations. The Middle Kingdom had flourished in various guises through more than four thousand years of continuous history. Compared to them, North Americans and even Europeans were rank newcomers on the stage of human civilization.

But compared to a species that might be a billion or more years old, there was no difference whatsoever between the Chinese and the Johnny-come-latelies of the Martian Republic.

And Koenig himself wondered if the scientists with the expedition might not be exhibiting a certain amount of anthropocentric nearsightedness. Discussions about the Vinge Singularity had gotten him thinking about what the next stage in human evolution might be—especially when that stage might represent some sort of merging of biological with electronic life. At the moment, he and several hundred officers and scientists with the America battlegroup appeared to be adrift in empty space a few hundred light years from an immense, slightly flattened globular cluster of stars, with the blue-limned glow of the galactic spiral arms spread out below—a virtual reality created by America’s AI software. An uploaded intelligence might well have plenty to do besides simply think. The artificial universe available to such sentients might well be larger, richer, and more varied than reality . . . whatever that was.

The entire history of Humankind was an uneven march of change in how humans perceived themselves—from special creations of God to the pinnacle of evolution to one form of life among countless many. Even the basic definitions of life and intelligence had been rewritten many times, from the opening chapter of Genesis to the creation of AI software agents.

Liu could well be right. It might again be time to rethink certain basic assumptions, this time about the nature of civilization.

“Whether those ruins are the Sh’daar or not,” Koenig said after a moment, “the fact remains that hostile forces—presumably the Sh’daar—now occupy the space on the other side of the TRGA cylinder. The problem is how to get in there with the fleet . . . or even if we should attempt to go through.” He manipulated the imagery around them, returning their viewpoint to where they’d begun, somewhere near the heart of that titanic globe of teeming suns. The TRGA cylinder was visible in the distance, slowly dwindling in apparent size until it was lost among the stars.

“Lieutenant Gray was able to record these ships on the other side,” he continued, and a cloud of gray and silver leaf shapes arrowed through that dazzling sky, momentarily surrounding the disembodied viewers, and then streaming away like a school of coral-reef fish and vanishing into the distance. “He also detected a body that his AI designated as an anomalous infrared source—AIS-1.”

The magnified image of a low-resolution disk appeared, a blocky mass of purples and dark blues. “It is still some tens of thousands of kilometers away from Gray’s fighter,” Joseph continued, “and he was not able to pick up much detail, but it appears to be a dwarf planet, probably a free body ejected from its parent star system eons ago. The data he transmitted suggests that the body has a diameter of less than two thousand kilometers, and a surface temperature very close to absolute zero. There’s one really interesting point, though.”

The blue-and-purple disk expanded under extreme magnification. Two bright, white stars appeared against the featureless blue backdrop. One was a simple point; the other, slightly larger, had a white core, with thin bands of yellow and green trailing off rapidly into the surrounding cold ultramarine.

“This,” Joseph said, indicating the single point, “appears to be the large spacecraft that was approaching Gray at the moment he released his battlespace drone. This larger, less-defined heat source may be a base of some sort located on the planet’s surface.”

“By God,” General Joshua Mathers said quietly against the silence. Mathers was the commanding officer of MSU-17, the battlegroup’s fleet Marines, some twelve thousand men and women embarked on the assault carriers Nassau and Vera Cruz. “A target at last!”

“Maybe,” Koenig said. “But it’s going to be sheer hell getting at it.”

Trevor Gray

Omega Centauri

1005 hours, TFT

Gray was still in his fighter, but imprisoned. He knew he’d been taken aboard a gigantic alien vessel, knew that outside his Starhawk, now, was an empty blackness and hard vacuum. The fighter appeared to be resting on something, and Gray could feel the reassuring drag of a gravitational field—roughly half a G, he thought. But there’d been no movement, no change, no attempts to communicate of which he was aware, nothing, now, for the past sixteen hours.

His dark gray skin suit and the bubble helmet he wore could double as a pressure suit, but there was no point in his leaving the Starhawk and wandering around in the dark. Radar pings broadcast over the past several hours suggested that the open space he was in was large—perhaps a hundred meters across—and there were suggestions that the walls were convoluted and broken by openings within which he could easily get lost. His life support would keep him supplied with air, water, and food more or less indefinitely by nanotechnically recycling his wastes, with the addition of only small quantities of trace elements and water from time to time. His life support reserves would keep him going for months.

He was not carrying a hand weapon, of course. Even if he had been, it was hard to imagine what he could do about the alien inhabitants of this vast ship.

If there were inhabitants. He’d seen nothing so far that indicated that the vessel was crewed. Repeated transmissions of both radio and laser-com signals and even the flashing of an external light on the decked fighter, counting out the first five prime numbers, had all been ignored.

Sixteen hours. What the hell were the aliens waiting for?

“Lieutenant Gray,” his fighter’s AI said in his head. “I may be picking up an attempt to communicate with us.”

The announcement startled Gray. He’d been dozing, on the assumption that since there was nothing practical he could do but wait, there was no point in worrying about it.

“What do you have?” Gray said. His heart was pounding now.

“A laser transmission from the far end of the compartment within which we currently reside,” the AI replied. “They are using protocols we’ve established with the Agletsch.”

Which made sense. The Agletsch had been the alien species, interstellar traders in information, with which Humankind had been in communication for almost a century . . . and from which humans had first learned of the Sh’daar thirty-seven years ago.

“What is it?” Gray asked. “Vid? Audio only?”

His AI hesitated, a humanlike affectation that was probably for Gray’s benefit and not a reflection of any limitations within the software. “It appears,” the software told him, “to be a full virtual simulation.”

“Of what?”

“That I cannot say. Do you wish to accept the communication?”

Gray thought about this. Sims—fully interactive virtual realities—were used routinely for conversations both between humans and with aliens, like the Agletsch, who possessed the appropriate electronic know-how and implants. They were safe enough, at least in theory, though there were periodic rumors of people who’d come out of a sim with serious cardiovascular or emotional problems if they’d “died” while in a virtual reality. Occasionally, you heard stories of people who’d been trapped in-sim permanently, though those were almost certainly technophobic urban legends. Growing up in the Periphery, a Prim living in the Manhattan Ruins, Gray had heard plenty of such tales.

And since joining the Navy and receiving implants of his own, he’d worked hard to banish those legends, because to accept them would have been to surrender to utter and complete paranoia.

The offer of an in-sim communication might be an attack, but surely if they wanted to kill him they had ways of vaporizing his fighter here and now. Why even bring him aboard? The nanomeds coursing through his bloodstream and chelated throughout the muscle tissue making up his heart would protect him from heart attack if he received a really sharp shock, and his AI would be monitoring the transmissions and should be able to buffer him against any growing mental or emotional instability.

Yeah, it meant depending on advanced technology, something that still left him as uncomfortable as a Prim in a VirSim, but he should be all right.

“Okay,” he told his AI. “Go ahead. I accept.”

“Place your palm on the pad contacts, please.”

Gray flexed his left hand, then placed it on the pad set on the armrest of the seat that embraced him. Simple and routine sim-feeds—such as the AI’s voice, com links with other pilots, and most navigational data—were transmitted through connections in his skin suit either at the base of his spine or at the back of his neck. A full-sensory connection, however, required the labyrinthine tangle of microscopic contacts grown into the skin of the palm of his hand. Matching contacts in his skin suit allowed a direct connection to the fighter’s communications electronics—and the reception of the simulation now flowing into his cerebral implants.

The darkness of the interior of his Starhawk’s cockpit gave way to a deeper, more profound darkness.

And then . . . there was light. . . .

CIC

TC/USNA CVS America

TRGA, Texaghu Resch System

1015 hours, TFT

At some point, they’d begun calling the thing the tunnel.

The word was less clumsy, and far more evocative than “TRGA” or “cylinder” or even “Triggah.” And it seemed perfect to describe the immense artifact—a star’s mass compressed into a tiny tube connecting two points in space removed from each other by more than eighteen thousand light years.

Admiral Koenig stared at the alien structure adrift in space a few thousand kilometers from America and the other members of the battlegroup. From here, through the feed provided by a remote probe hovering directly in front of the tunnel’s open maw, the carrier’s CIC crew could actually look through the rotating cylinder and glimpse, far off, as if in the tunnel’s depths, the unwinking glow of myriad, close-packed stars.

They’d sent a dozen unmanned probes of various types through the tunnel already, but no signals had threaded their way back through to the fleet. Since starlight was passing through the tube, the silence suggested that something had happened to the probes on the other side—that, or the distance was a lot farther than appearances suggested. Dr. Raymond Clark, head of America’s astrophysics department, had pointed out that the interior of a Tipler cylinder was likely to cause odd distortions to space and possibly to time as well. The starlight emerging on this end might be centuries, even millennia old, and if that was the case it would be a long time before they heard anything from the probes.

Far more likely, in Koenig’s opinion, was the possibility that the probes had been intercepted on the other side by enemy ships and destroyed.

Koenig was a fan of Occam’s razor, the age-old proposition that states that the simplest explanation is probably the correct one.

The Sh’daar fleet, if those had been Sh’daar warships, had given in far too easily. Their maneuvers had suggested that they’d been being guided by software, not organic intelligence . . . and rather low-grade software at that. After taking heavy losses, every one of those gray and silver ships had vanished down that rotating tube. The smart money said they would now be on the other side, probably heavily reinforced, waiting for the Confederation fleet to follow them.

And if the CBG did so, it would be a slaughter.

The problem was the tactical situation in which the battlegroup would find itself after traversing the TRGA cylinder—a situation analogous to a primitive warrior faced with entering an enemy’s tent, with the only access provided by a low and narrow door that required that he stoop and crawl. The interior of the tunnel was only about a kilometer wide, as wide as America was long. The ships of the battlegroup, all but the smallest frigates and destroyers, would have to go through in single file, and they wouldn’t be able to see what was waiting for them on the other side. The enemy would be in position to swarm in on each vessel as it emerged and destroy it, annihilating one ship at a time. An alerted enemy could be expected to have the far end of the tube covered by a hellstorm of nuclear warheads and high-energy beams, as well as those deadly weapons that appeared to collapse matter into neutronium. Unable to shield or to maneuver, unable even to fight back, the battlegroup would not have a chance against that concentration of firepower.

But there might be a way. . . .

He’d dismissed the fleet conference earlier, giving orders to the tactical departments throughout the fleet to work on possible approaches to the problem and report back to him by 1030 hours.

Koenig checked his internal time readout. It was nearly time. . . .