Singularity: Star Carrier: Book Three

Chapter Nineteen

30 June 2405

CIC

TC/USNA CVS America

Omega Centauri

1422 hours, TFT

The wink of two transponder beacons on the mobile planet was the first proof the battlegroup had had that Lieutenant Gray had survived after being picked up by the enemy. And who was the other? The coding attached to the beacon indicated Lieutenant Schiere’s reconnaissance CP-240 Shadowstar. Better and better.

The fact of the transponders didn’t mean the two pilots had survived, of course, but it was strong evidence in that direction.

Unfortunately, the possibility that they’d survived didn’t mean that the fleet was going to be able to do anything about it. Something strange was happening over there.

“What the hell?” Koenig asked. In the window, the surface temperature of the dwarf planet was rising, and a column of data to one side was changing rapidly.

AIS-1 had rotated in space, and now it was accelerating, and quickly, a most un-planetlike thing for it to do.

“It appears to be projecting an enormous gravitational singularity,” Commander Craig pointed out. “But there still are going to be massive tidal effects.”

“We’re seeing that on the infrared imaging,” Dr. Tina Schuman said. The astrogation-department physicist had been brought into the link just moments before, when the dwarf planet had begun its anomalous rotation. “The surface is heating up. That suggests tidal stress and friction.”

“The straight-line acceleration will be free fall,” Sam Jones, America’s exec pointed out. “Just like for a starship. That rotation might have been a jolt, though.”

“They’re going somewhere in a hell of a hurry,” Koenig said. “Where?”

“I’ve got some data coming up on-screen,” Craig said. “But I’m not sure I believe them.”

“And what the hell is that?” Koenig asked.

A portion of the backdrop of stars had been picked out by a small rectangle within his in-head view, then sharply expanded. An insignificant star, one of millions, suddenly appeared ahead as an ethereal, inexpressibly beautiful artifact—six brilliant blue stars in a perfect hexagon.

“Okay,” Captain Buchanan said. “Why the hell didn’t we see that before?”

“I’m checking, sir,” Craig’s voice said.

“I’ve got it,” Koenig’s AI said. “That artifact was on the visual data sent back by Gray’s message drone. I see it here now. But until the dwarf planet’s motion called attention to it, it was lost in the background. I did not at first notice it.” His AI, Koenig thought, sounded almost contrite at having missed the thing.

“Overwhelmed by detail lost among ten million stars,” Koenig said, nodding. “It’s not surprising. This is unknown territory for all of us.” Even AIs couldn’t keep up with everything the fleet’s sensors were bringing in.

“We would have noticed the anomaly eventually,” Karyn’s voice added.

“Okay, now that we see it, I want a complete analysis of that thing. CAG? We need to put some recon probes in that region. How far away is it?

“Approximately half a light year,” his AI said. “Over four point seven quadrillion kilometers.”

“That means a microshift under Alcubierre Drive, and we launch recon ships when we come out. I don’t want to spend the next six months in transit at c.”

“Apparently they’re not waiting around either,” Buchanan pointed out. On the screen, the dwarf planet had just blurred, then winked out, enclosed within the Sh’daar equivalent of an Alcubierre bubble.

“Transponder signals lost,” Jones reported.

“We’ll need to proceed cautiously, sir,” Hargrave suggested. “We don’t have accurate metrics of this space.”

Accurate navigation while traveling enmeshed within a bubble of FTL space, unable to see out, required a good understanding of the gravitic “shape” of the volume of space in which you planned to emerge. “Metric” was the technical term for the gravitometric readings of local space taken by both unmanned probes and recon pilots.

In particular, you didn’t want to try to drop into a volume of space where local mass—such as a planet or one of those giant suns in the distance—was so distorting the region that the emerging ship was ripped apart by the differences in the shapes of space itself. In practice, starships approaching a planetary system would drop into normal space out in the local Kuiper Belt, a region beginning about thirty to forty astronomical units out for sunlike stars, closer in for cooler suns, farther out for giants. Out here, though, the battlegroup was working in the dark despite the brilliance of the surrounding star cloud. No one knew what to expect, or what the norms might be.

“I agree,” Koenig said, answering Hargrave’s statement. “But we’re not going to be so cautious we lose the initiative. We seem to have the bastards on the run. I want to keep it that way.”

“We’ll have the figures run for you in fifteen minutes,” Schuman said.

“Pass the word for the fleet to regroup,” Koenig said. “We accelerate in one hour.”

Trevor Gray

Omega Centauri

1427 hours, TFT

The visual feed from the surface of the planet suddenly went black. “Hey!” Gray said. “What’s going on?”

“The feed is still open,” his AI said, “and we’re still getting some infrared.” As if to show him, the AI stepped up the contrast and dropped in an IR filter, which let Gray see the ice surface in muted swaths of blue and deep purple.

“But the stars went out!” Gray protested.

“I would surmise,” the AI replied, “that the planet has just shifted into the Sh’daar equivalent of Alcubierre Drive.”

Gray blinked, at a loss for words. Finally, he managed to stammer, “The . . . the whole planet?”

“That would be consistent with the data we have available.”

Human Alcubierre drives achieved faster-than-light travel by bending a pocket of space around the starship, using projected artificial singularities and a great deal of energy. While it was flatly impossible for a material object to travel at the speed of light or faster, there was nothing in the rules that said that space couldn’t do so; indeed, the best theories about the early life and growth of the universe after the big bang suggested that during the so-called inflationary period, space was expanding at many times the speed of light. Propelled by an asymmetric twist to the leading edge of the gravitic field, the folded-up pocket of space slid through space at between 1.7 and 1.9 light years per day; the spacecraft inside the bubble remained virtually motionless relative to its immediate surroundings.

Folding up the pocket, however, cut the spacecraft off from all connections with the outside universe. There was no way to see out during an FTL passage, which put something of a strain on the ship’s astrogation department to bring the vessel out within the desired target area.

Manipulating space in order to create a fast-moving bubble around even a single starship the size of the America took a staggering amount of power, drawn from the virtual or vacuum energy filling the base state of empty space. But to create fields big enough to move a planet, even a “pocket planet” like this one . . .

The idea drove home to Gray just how great the technological gulf between the Sh’daar and the Earth Confederation actually was. With technology like this, hell, the Sh’daar could pick up Pluto and slam it into the Earth, and there wouldn’t be a damned thing Humankind could do to stop them. The Turusch had launched an attack on Earth using high-speed KK projectiles half a year ago. The impact in the Atlantic Ocean 3,500 kilometers from the East Coast of North America had killed an estimated 80 million people on four continents. That technology was nothing, nothing compared with this.

Another earthquake shudder rippled through the fighter, and abruptly the lights came on once more, stars in their millions filling a rose-white sky. And there, just above the glacier-edged horizon, blazed six blue-hot pinpoints of searing, actinic light. Gray’s AI swiftly stopped down the intensity of the light flooding through the optical link, and by doing so almost certainly saved Gray’s eyes. Those stars were hot, and so bright that even with the stopped-down optics it was impossible to look straight at them, and the sky-dome of stars beyond were almost wiped out of view entirely.

And there were other . . . things in that alien sky as well.

“I think,” Gray said softly, “that we’ve arrived.”

CIC

TC/USNA CVS America

Omega Centauri

1525 hours, TFT

“All departments report readiness for acceleration to Alcubierre microshift,” Captain Buchanan told him. “We just need a final determination of our emergence point.”

“All designated battlegroup ships report readiness for acceleration as well,” Commander Craig added.

Koenig nodded. The fleet had pulled together well, and swiftly, even after its rough handling during the battles around both of the TRGA cylinder’s tunnel mouths. A total of eight capital ships had been destroyed, and another five badly damaged enough that they would not be making the transition with the rest of the battlegroup. Between the casualties on both sides of the tunnel, the ships Koenig had ordered to stay and guard the tunnel mouths, and the various stores and maintenance vessels that were also being left behind, there were just twenty-three Confederation warships left to take this final part of the assault to the enemy.

Koenig had ordered the two large carriers into a tight, side-by-side formation surrounded by their escorts. America and the United States would lead the assault. The third big carrier, Lincoln, which had taken some serious damage after her emergence into the Omega Centauri battlespace, was one of the vessels remaining at the TRGA, making sure the fleet had its lines of retreat open should that become necessary. The light carriers Jeanne d’Arc and Illustrious, together with the Marine assault carriers Vera Cruz and Nassau, would follow close behind. Among the larger capital ships accompanying the assault group were the railgun cruiser Kinkaid, the heavy cruisers Groznyy, Valley Forge, Lunar Bay, and Saratoga, and the bombardment vessels Cheng Hua and Ma’at Mons. The Cheng Hua had been shot up pretty badly after emerging from the tunnel’s mouth, but the ship’s skipper had reported that the ship’s damage-repair facilities had plugged the leaks from her shield cap and that all systems were now nominal. Captain Jiang had told Koenig in no uncertain terms that he would not be left behind.

Koenig had been impressed enough by the man’s determination that he’d let the hint of insubordination slide.

He stared into the tactical tank, which showed the battlegroup at one side, the destination, a circle of six tiny blue points of light at the other. Half a light year. “How close can we get to those stars without getting fried?” he asked his AI.

A column of data appeared in a new window opening in his mind. “These stars appear close to the known blue giant Zeta Puppis in size and luminosity,” she explained. Data for Zeta Puppis, also called Naos, streamed through his awareness.

STAR: Zeta Puppis

COORDINATES: RA: 08h 03m 35.1s Dec: -40˚ 00' 11.6" D 335p

ALTERNATE NAMES: Naos, Suhail Hadar, HD 66811

TYPE: O5 Laf

MASS: 40 Sol; RADIUS: 11 Sol; LUMINOSITY: 360,000 Sol (Optical 21,000 Sol)

SURFACE TEMPERATURE: ~39,000oK

AGE: 4 million years

APPARENT MAGNITUDE (Sol): 2.21; ABSOLUTE MAGNITUDE: -5.96

DISTANCE FROM SOL: 1,093 LY

PLANETARY SYSTEM: None known

“Damned bright,” Koenig observed.

“Indeed. If Zeta Puppis were as close to Earth as Sol,” Karyn Mendelson’s voice continued, “it would appear to be twenty times larger in the sky and twenty thousand times brighter. Earth’s surface would be heated to around six thousand one hundred degrees Kelvin, and ultimately the planet would be completely vaporized.

“For a planet to enjoy Earthlike temperatures in orbit around Zeta Puppis, it would have to be at least four hundred fifty astronomical units away—about eleven times the distance of Pluto from the sun.”

“And there are six giants out there that hot and bright. Does that mean six times the distance for one, if we want to find a zone with habitable temperatures?”

“Not necessarily. We calculate that each star is approximately fifty AUs from its nearest neighbors, in a ring nearly one hundred AUs across. The amount of radiation any given volume of space receives will depend on the aspect of the stellar ring, and the total will not necessarily be cumulative. We estimate that habitable zone temperatures will be found at roughly two thousand to two thousand five hundred AUs from the artifact’s central point.”

Koenig ran the numbers through his in-head math processor. A light year, he knew, measured close to 63,000 astronomical units. “About four one hundredths of a light year.”

“Precisely.”

“CAG? All of our chicks back on board?”

“All fighters recovered or accounted for, Admiral.”

“Punch it,” Koenig said.

And the battlegroup punched.

Even though the final determination of where they were accelerating to had not yet been made.

That dwarf planet had accelerated into the distance, together with a huge number of surviving enemy warships, then folded space about itself and slipped off at faster than light, exhibiting yet again the marked superiority, the sheer elegance of Sh’daar technology compared to human-designed systems. Some of their client races, notably the H’rulka, showed similar superiorities in style and technique, though they’d never demonstrated anything close to this. The ships of the human fleet would have to accelerate at five hundred gravities for 16.6 hours in order to push close to the speed of light. Only at 0.997 c could they use their relativistic mass to warp space into the tightly knotted bubbles that would allow them to outpace light itself.

Over sixteen and a half hours.

The assault force hadn’t fully bought into the idea of pursuing that planet . . . and Koenig wasn’t going to phrase this one as an order.

Especially when such monumental questions about the Sh’daar, about who and what they were, were yet staring Koenig in the face.

As the minutes passed and the fleet continued to accelerate, Koenig continued to study the tactical tank. After a time, he pulled in another download of astronomical data, searching through all of the information stored there on the Omega Centauri cluster. What he saw there—or, more precisely, what he didn’t see—had been bothering him.

“Astrogation department,” he said.

“Yes, Admiral?” He’d linked through to Dr. Tina Schuman.

“I’ve got a question.”

“We have a lot more questions than answers right now, Admiral. But I’ll take a shot.”

“Six hot, blue Type O stars in a tight grouping just about one hundred AUs across. That must give off a hell of a lot of ultraviolet and X-ray radiation.”

“They do.”

“Enough that they should have been seen by astronomers on Earth studying Omega Centauri.”

There was a long pause on the other end. “Yes, Admiral. They should have been.”

“But I’ve seen nothing about them in the data on the cluster.”

“No, sir. And that’s been bothering us as well.”

“What data do you have that actually identifies this cluster as Omega Centauri?”

He heard her sigh. “Not all that much, actually, Admiral. Mostly it’s the estimated number of stars—about ten million—and the estimated diameter of the cluster—about two hundred thirty light years. The distribution of spectral types is roughly the same as well.”

“You also mentioned stellar markers when we talked before. Stellar fingerprints.”

“Yes, sir. Absorption lines in some of the cooler stars that appear to be unique to those stars. What we saw in Lieutenant Gray’s data—what we’re seeing now—appears to match fairly closely with the spectra of several stars in the cluster studied from Earth.”

“But our Omega Centauri doesn’t have those six blue stars. I’d have thought they could have been seen pretty easily from Earth.”

He was looking at an astrophotograph taken by an Earth-orbital robot telescope called the Hubble, in the early twenty-first century. It showed the heart of the Omega Centauri cluster, a thick array of multihued suns.

There was no sign of the anomalous hexagon.

“But those six stars are obviously artificial, Admiral. Or at least they were engineered from pre-existing stars by bringing them together, allowing them to merge as artificial blue stragglers. Our assumption is that they were made sometime recently, within the past fifteen thousand years, anyway.”

“So the light from those stars hasn’t had time to reach Earth yet.”

“Exactly, sir.”

“How does that sit with you, Doctor?”

“I beg your pardon, sir?”

“Does that seem to be a likely explanation?”

“Sir, it’s just about the only explanation.”

“Is there any way to determine how old those stars are from here?”

“Well, they’re obviously quite young. Definitely less than five million years in terms of stellar evolution. Any older, and they’d have started to evolve toward the red super-giant phase of their life.”

Such intensly hot, massive young stars, Koenig knew, lived fast, furious, and very brief lives, at least as stars measured things. Stars that hot would burn up their stores of hydrogen, evolve through the spectral types from blue to yellow to red, then detonate in a supernova, probably after a total life span of less than 10 million years.

“But you can’t tell if they’re less than fifteen thousand years old.”

“No, sir.”

“And you can’t tell me anything about the stars that were used to form them.”

“No, sir. When two stars merge, that resets the clock. We can assume that the original stars were Population II giants—probably red giants. We’re working on the assumption that whoever manufactured those stars actually brought together a large number of such stars.”

“Why is that?”

“Those stars up ahead each run to about forty solar masses,” she replied. “Rather than bringing together two twenty-solar-mass suns, it seems more likely that they merged a larger number of smaller stars.”

“Maybe tossing in a new star each time the fires started to burn low.”

“Possibly.”

“Except that it would take several million years for the new sun to start to cool. And that means the light would have reached Earth long ago. We’d have seen them from home.”

“Yes, sir. As I said, we have more questions than answers.”

“Thank you, Doctor.”

“There’s something else you should know, sir.”

“What’s that?”

“Well, we’ve been studying this volume of space since we came through the TRGA, of course,” she told him. “And we’ve found another anomaly.”

“What’s that?”

“There appears to be more gas and dust in this cluster than we know exists in Omega Centauri.”

“Gas and dust?”

“Typical globular clusters have almost no gas. They used it all up in a single burst of star formation around twelve billion years ago. Omega Centauri consists of several generations of stars, suggesting that star formation continued for some time after the cluster’s creation, but most of the gas was still used up, oh, nine billion years ago or so.

“Sir . . . it’s quite possible that this isn’t Omega Centauri after all.”

Which left, of course, the question of just where the carrier battlegroup was at the moment.

“Can you figure out where we are?”

“Not with the local stellar density, Admiral. We’re going to need to get outside of the cluster so that we can see the starscape around us, the rest of the galaxy. We should be able to tell from that . . . assuming we’re still within our galaxy, of course.”

There was a chilling thought.

“Very well,” Koenig said. “Keep at it, and let me know if anything turns up I should know about.”

“Of course, Admiral.”

Omega Centauri was distinctive, Koenig knew, in its diameter, its slight flattening at its poles, and in its huge number of stars. It was, he remembered, the second largest cluster ever identified . . . and the largest, Mayall II, was in the Andromeda galaxy, 2.3 million light years away.

Perhaps this cluster was on the far side of Earth’s galaxy, hidden from Earth by the dust and gas of the galactic core.

It shouldn’t matter. So long as they had the tunnel secure, so long as they could find their way back there, it shouldn’t matter.

But God in heaven, where were they?

And how far were they now from home?

Trevor Gray

Omega Centauri

1530 hours, TFT

For almost an hour, Gray had studied that strange, that impossible, sky, trying to make sense of it. The flattened circle of brilliant blue suns, some two degrees across its longest dimension—spanning an area as wide as four full moons seen from Earth—hung low in the sky, casting hard-edged shadows off the glaciers in the distance, and dazzling the eyes with sheets of ice. His Starhawk, he knew, was stopping down the incoming light considerably; the illumination above the planet’s surface was so high that he would have been instantly blinded otherwise.

The ice outside, he noticed, was beginning to steam.

Hanging in the sky were a number of other anomalous objects, each harshly illuminated by the six suns, with hard-edged contrast between light and shadow. It was impossible to get a sense of scale or distance, but two of them, Gray saw, were identical to the TRGA cylinder, hard, tiny knots imbedded in larger, fuzzy glows of gold and blue light twisted by their intense gravitational masses.

There were also planets, several of them, showing as hard-edged crescents bowed away from the intense glare of the stars. And there were other things . . . huge starships, perhaps, or orbital manufactories, or drifting facilities of less easily discernable purpose. The impression Gray had was that whoever had designed this . . . this place had parked ships and worlds and factories and transit systems close enough to the obviously artificial arrangement of suns to draw on their energy, but far enough out to avoid being vaporized.

“AI,” he said. “How far are we from those suns? Must be pretty far out. . . .”

There was no answer, and Gray felt a sharp stab of panic.

“AI!”

There was no one there.

And an instant later, everything went black. Gray was again alone, sitting in the darkness of his Starhawk cockpit, somewhere inside the mobile alien planet.

He took a deep breath, and worked to control the rising fear. There had to be a logical explanation. . . .

His own internal AI, his personal assistant, was intact and operating. A low-end model residing within the nanochelated circuitry implants within his brain and parts of his nervous system, it possessed neither sentience nor a simulated personality. Having been born and raised out in the Periphery, beyond the reach of “proper” North-American civilization, he’d not received one as a child entering the education track. His had been issued to him the first day he’d arrived at basic training. It allowed him to interface with the electronic world around him, communicate with others, download data from local networks, and receive other very basic services, but he couldn’t talk to it.

His Starhawk’s AI was far more powerful and flexible. A standard Gödel 900 series, it was, technically, sentient, but only within certain, very tightly defined parameters, “of limited purview,” as the techies said. It was very good at what it did—directing and overseeing the fighter’s systems, correlating data, operating weapons, and performing maneuvers at super-human speed—but it wasn’t exactly a brilliant conversationalist.

Gray had always felt somewhat ambivalent about his AI. Most other pilots he knew named their fighter AIs, established emotional bonds with them, even thought of them as fellow pilots. Gray had never been able to manage that, not that he’d tried all that hard. The fighter AI was a tool. It interfaced directly with Gray’s personal AI and with the fighter’s electronics, allowing Gray, in a quite genuine sense, to become the fighter when he engaged the connections between his brain and the ship.

And now it was gone.

His personal AI maintained its link with his fighter systems. He could still download data, monitor system function, and the like. If he’d wanted to, he could have opened the cockpit and gone outside, not that he saw any point to doing so. His fighter’s external sensors indicated a temperature of minus 200 Celsius, no light, and no atmosphere, and if there were machines out there—like automatic doors—his implant circuitry wouldn’t be able to operate them. His jackies, his flight utility suit, could keep him breathing for a while with the helmet closed, but they wouldn’t hold off that bitterly frigid cold for more than a few moments.

He was far better off staying where he was. His fighter still had power—at low, barely maintenance levels for life support, but power enough to keep him warm and alive. His communications systems were still operating, in case Lieutenant Schiere surfaced again.

But Trevor Gray had never felt so inexpressibly alone as now, sitting there in the dark, imbedded in the close-fitting embrace of a high-tech fighter cockpit that was now little more than inert nanomatrix and dead electronics.

He waited. There wasn’t anything else he could do.

And the wait stretched out longer . . . and longer . . . and still longer, and he wondered if this was where he would die when his power gave out and his heat and atmosphere finally failed.