Singularity: Star Carrier: Book Three

Chapter Twenty

30 June 2405

Admiral’s Office

TC/USNA CVS America

Omega Centauri

1700 hours, TFT

It had been one hour since the assault group had begun accelerating. The magnified view of their destination—the tiny, slightly flattened hexagon of six suns—gleamed against the backdrop of massed cluster suns on their forward screens.

Fifteen hours to go. . . .

The image was repeated on one viewall of Koenig’s office, where he’d retreated shortly after the battlegroup had commenced acceleration.

“Admiral,” Karyn’s voice said, “the virtual conference is ready.”

“Very well.” Leaning back, he closed his eyes and placed his left palm on the contact plate of his chair. The reality of office, of viewscreen and desk and waiting reports of combat damage and tactical assessments all faded away, and Koenig sat at a virtual copy of a certain conference room at the Ad Astra Confederation government complex in Geneva. Outside one in-slanting wall of green glass, sunlight, the light of Earth’s sun, sparkled on the waters of Lake Geneva out beyond the broad, labyrinthine Plaza of Light, with its towering epic statue, Ascent of Man, by Popolopoulis.

Koenig had chosen the simulated venue for the conference of ship commanders and staff carefully and with great deliberation. He’d discussed it at length with Karyn—with Karyn’s electronic ghost, rather—and it had been she who’d first suggested the towering green pyramid of the Ad Astra complex.

It was all rather elemental human psychology, actually.

Koenig himself was widely seen as being in rebellion against the Confederation government, especially after HD 157950. Many of the North-American officers in the carrier battlegroup disliked the fact that the United States of North America was a mere member state of the Earth Confederation. There’d always been a strong secessionist flavor to the North Americans, ever since the creation of the Pax Confeoderata out of the war- and disease-savaged survivors of Humankind 272 years before. Those officers would have joined Koenig more because of his perceived rebellion than anything else.

Other of the officers here had deeper, older ties to the Pax—Harrison, of the Illustrious, for instance . . . and Michel of the Jeanne d’Arc. Harrison and the skippers of the British contingent might well share some of the USNA’s historical doubts about both Confederation grand strategy and about Confederation legitimacy as the de facto government of Earth. The French, Germans, and other Pan-Europeans, though, were only here because they’d been convinced by Koenig’s argument that the only possible way Humankind could hope to survive this war lay in taking an offensive path, that a defensive or appeasing strategy would end with humanity’s subjugation or with its extinction.

And then there were the Chinese, excluded from the Confederation for 272 years because of the Wormwood asteroid attack, but nevertheless determined to participate in this final expedition against the alien Sh’daar. It was still tough to see where their primary loyalties lay.

But the green glass pyramid of the Ad Astra complex offered a powerful and tangible symbol, not only of the Confederation Government, but of a united humanity as well. And that was what this mission was all about—a united humanity against an empire that had arbitrarily decided to set limits upon the shape and scope of human technology.

Koenig studied the mammoth statue for a moment. The Ascent of Man was gaudier than he cared for, but that, too, was an enduring symbol, like the corroded and crumbling Statue of Liberty outside of the Manhattan Ruins.

“Admiral Koenig?” his AI said. “Captain Buchanan would like a private word.”

“Put him through.”

A window opened. Randolph Buchanan’s long and worry-lined face appeared. The worry looked deeper, now.

“Thank you, Admiral,” Buchanan said.

“You’re wondering,” Koenig said in a matter-of-fact manner, “just what the hell I think I’m doing.”

Buchanan showed a moment of surprise, then nodded. “I wouldn’t put it quite that harshly, Admiral, but yes. That’s not why I simmed you, though.”

“Why did you?”

“To wish you luck . . . and let you know that I, my officers, and my crew are behind you one thousand percent, no matter what you’re up to!”

Koenig grinned. “I appreciate that, Randy. Don’t worry. I don’t think I’ve gone too far around the bend.”

“It’s a relief to hear that, Admiral.” The window closed. Buchanan’s simulated image, however, had taken its place among the ranks of officers now dropping into place one by one around the virtual table.

The captains and senior officers—CIC heads and staff, mostly—from all of the ships on this side of the tunnel had been directed to come. There were forty-one ships in all, including both those in the assault group and those left guarding the tunnel leading home, and that meant more than two hundred people. The room appeared to be full, with places at the table reserved for captains, with smaller desk workstations for their staff behind them out to the walls of the room.

Koenig’s place was at a simulated lectern at the front of the room, just to one side of the broad glass window looking out over the plaza.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “ladies, and AIs, thank you for coming. With luck, this could be the last briefing session you have to attend with me.”

Gentle laughter rippled through the room, though some of the expressions showed uncertainty. Was he saying that the campaign was about to end in victory? In death? In a return to Earth?

Well . . . yes, actually. Any of those was a distinctly possible outcome.

“I imagine most of you have been curious about what I’m planning . . . on why we’re pursuing that mobile planet we spotted zorching off toward the Six Suns.

“Up until now, the battlegroup has been staying ahead of the enemy, surprising them, getting in and hitting them where they weren’t expecting us, and getting out before they could bring in reinforcements. Eta Boötis. Arcturus. Alphekka. Texaghu Resch. Even on this side of the tunnel.” He gave a wry smile. “We were always outnumbered, and we’ve taken some heavy casualties, but we were always able to hit them before they could get their shit together.

“This last time, they were able to throw fighters at us numbering in the millions, however. We’re following what’s left of them into what is probably the very heart of the Sh’daar Empire. We can expect manufactory centers capable of producing further large numbers of spacecraft. Think of it as a target-rich environment.

“If this is indeed the center of the enemy’s empire, possibly his homeworld, then this will be our final encounter on this mission. They may be ready for us in there. But this is also our opportunity to end this war.”

“Admiral,” Captain Hernandez of the cruiser Libertad said, “if they could throw millions of fighters at us at the tunnel mouth, what are they going to have waiting for us in there?”

“I don’t know. But what I do know is that we have a singular opportunity here. An opportunity we’re not likely to see ever again.”

“What opportunity?” Captain Jiang of the Chinese Cheng Hua asked.

“A chance to end the war. A negotiated end.

“From the very beginning, thirty-some years ago, we’ve been fighting Sh’daar client races. Turusch. H’rulka. Nungiirtok. God knows what else. So far as we know, we have never directly encountered the Sh’daar. Everything we know about them, or think we know about them, has come through the Agletsch . . . and they’re a Sh’daar client species as well. What does that tell you?”

“That they’re very shy.” That was Harrison, always something of a jokester.

Koenig smiled. “Possibly. Seriously, though, the galaxy is a hell of a big place. We’ve only been engaged at the very outermost periphery of the Sh’daar Empire. I’d expect the Sh’daar are in towards the center, somewhere. There are just too many stars, too many intelligent species, for the Sh’daar to personally try to manage each and every one.

“It is my intent to seek out the leaders of the Sh’daar Empire and to negotiate a peace.”

That struck home. The avatar images seated around the table didn’t change position or expression, of course, but Koenig could hear the swell within the undercurrent of conversations.

“How do you propose to communicate with those . . . those monsters?” Captain Paulson of the cruiser Burke asked.

“I think more to the point is how to talk to them while they’re doing their best to kill us,” Captain Harrison pointed out.

“We know,” Koenig continued, “from our contact with the Agletsch that individuals within each client race carry tiny communications devices, called Seeds, implanted within their bodies. The Sh’daar apparently keep track of what’s going on in their empire by monitoring events through those individuals. Every so often, when a Seed-carrying individual has acquired important information, that data is uploaded to the local Sh’daar network and eventually makes its way to a Sh’daar node. We believe the TRGA tunnel is such a node, and there are others. We’ve followed this node here. If this is not the Sh’daar imperial capital, it’s likely to be the next best thing.

“And now that we’re here, it is my hope that our two Agletsch guests on board the America will be able to help us make direct contact.”

Koenig had already discussed the possibility with the two Agletsch, Gru’mulkisch and Dra’ethde. They’d been brought along on this mission, after all, as liaisons and translators for any alien species encountered along the way. That applied to the Sh’daar as well as to Sh’daar client races. Gru’mulkisch carried a Sh’daar Seed, a microscopic knot of circuitry carrying a kind of Sh’daar emotional and cognitive presence. The Agletsch had not even been aware of carrying the thing until a close biological scan had detected it.

“Sir, the Sh’daar have never shown any interest whatsoever in negotiations,” Commander Conway of the destroyer Fitzgerald said. She sounded shocked. “How do you intend to make them sit down and talk?”

“A fair question,” Koenig said, “and an important one. I have two answers for you.

“First of all, our contact with the Sh’daar themselves so far has been entirely through the medium of the Seeds. As I understand it, based on what our Agletsch guests have told us, Sh’daar Seeds have a certain amount of hard-wired AI intelligence to them, but they can’t really make decisions more important than whether or not to transmit the data they’ve accumulated. The various Sh’daar client races we’ve encountered so far—the Turusch, the Nungies, and others—have evidently been working under orders relayed to them down the chain of command, but only through the Seeds. They’ve not been as . . . as flexible in their relationships with other species as they might be otherwise.

“Dealing with the Sh’daar directly might give us a better chance of being heard.

“Secondly, if we’re in orbit over their capital, we have them by the balls. Their technology is advanced enough that they’d be able to swat us down eventually . . . but I think they’re not going to want to risk any significant damage to their infrastructure. A barbarian with a club can take out a battle-armored Marine, if he can get close enough.”

“That’s a very large ‘if,’ Admiral,” General Mathers said, and that raised a chuckle from the others.

“Agreed. The important thing, however, is that we’ve got the bad guys reacting to us for a change,” Koenig observed, “and that is a vitally important distinction. For thirty-eight years, the Turusch and the other Sh’daar client races have acted, and Humankind has reacted. That means that the Confederation has constantly been on the defensive. It does not take a military genius to recognize that the Confederation can never hope to win a purely defensive war fought on the enemy’s terms.

“On the other hand, the Sh’daar face a serious disadvantage in not knowing the capabilities, the strengths and abilities, of all of the species they control. Even the word ‘control’ is misleading. I’ve never liked the term “empire’ as it applies to Sh’daar space, simply because an empire carved out of a significant chunk of the entire galaxy would be so unwieldy, so large and cumbersome, that they would not be able to rule it in a conventional sense. The Agletsch tell us that we are the twenty-thousandth-and-some species they’ve encountered that employ carbon, oxygen, and water in their biochemistry. That implies a staggering number of mutually alien races within their . . . jurisdiction, for lack of a better term. Evidently, all they’re really concerned about is that developing civilizations not evolve too far along a path that could lead to a technological singularity. Though we don’t have a lot of information about it, it sounds as though a majority of species can’t develop high technology—they’re marine species, or evolved within gas giant atmospheres, or are trapped under the ice caps of gas giant moons or even in hard vacuum. Species that evolve in non-oxygen environments, obviously, can never develop fire, and that puts a sharp limit on what they can do in the way of metal smelting, alloys, steam power, radio, and other early industrial technologies. Many of the rest are capable of developing nanotechnology and computers and other dangerous technologies, as the Sh’daar think of them, but they don’t. They don’t have the philosophical or ideological mind-set that drives them, the way humans do.

“The Agletsch claim that no client race has ever confronted the Sh’daar directly. If so, we’ll be the first . . . and I expect that it will come as something of a shock for them. That, at any rate, is what we’re gambling on.

“Our expectation,” Koenig added, “is that the mobile planet is retreating toward those six stars. We will follow them, assess the situation when we arrive, and move to gain the upper hand tactically and locally immediately. We will then use the Seed within one of our tame Agletsch to attempt to get into direct contact with the Sh’daar leadership there.”

“What is the range of those Seeds, anyway?” Aliyev, the dour skipper of the Groznyy, put in.

“Dra’ethde and Gru’mulkisch aren’t sure,” Koenig replied. “Certainly they appear to operate over a range of at least several light minutes. They seem to respond to and work off of the local Sh’daar information systems network, if one is available. I suspect that the main limiting factor is the speed of light . . . and the time constraints that imposes on two-sided conversations.”

Koenig studied the group for a moment, gauging its emotional currents. They were excited, he thought, keyed to a high point of expectancy, but they were with him.

“It will take another fifteen hours to reach near-c,” Koenig told them, “and a little over six hours more to make the half-light-year microshift. We will emerge some three thousand astronomical units from the gravitational center of the suns. We estimate that that will actually be within the life zone of those stars, far enough out that water is liquid.

“If we can find the mobile planet, General Mathers will land his Marines there and attempt to establish a beachhead, which the fleet can use as a field projection center. That should give us enough breathing room to make contact with them. The fact that that planet retreated before we could approach it suggests that it may be, at the very least, some form of command-control center, and as such would be an appropriate target. It’s a place for us to begin, at any rate.

“Questions?”

“Yes, sir,” Charles Michel, the captain of the Pan-European Jeanne d’Arc, said. “What about the rumor that we are no longer within our own galaxy?”

Koenig nodded. He’d been expecting the question. Karyn had told him that rumor to that effect—scuttlebutt, to use the acepted naval terminology—was spreading rapidly throughout the fleet.

“We’ve uploaded what we know to the fleet net,” he replied. “Unfortunately, we don’t know a lot. Inside this cluster, we can’t see out, so we can’t check navigational markers in the Milky Way. We believe we’re quite close to the center of the cluster—the chances are good that the Six Suns mark the actual gravitational center. Once this action is resolved, we may be able to send a reconnaissance mission a hundred or a hundred fifty light years out to have a look around.

“I think the thing to keep in mind is that it doesn’t matter if we’re inside our own galaxy or in some other galaxy halfway across the cosmos. The TRGA provides a quick and efficient shortcut. So long as we control both tunnel mouths, we will be able to make it back to Texaghu Resch. Okay?”

Captain Michel’s image nodded but did not look particularly happy. Koenig couldn’t blame him. If the Sh’daar had some means of switching the TRGA off, CBG-18 would be trapped here, wherever “here” might be. Much worse from a tactical point of view, the TRGA created a tactical bottleneck; if things went bad at the Six Suns, surviving Confederation vessels would have to hightail it back to the tunnel, and the enemy knew this. They could have a fleet there ready and waiting. . . .

Best not to think about that, since there was nothing that could be done about it in any case.

“Sir.” It was Captain Charles Whitlow of the star carrier United States of North America.

“Yes, Captain?”

“There’s also a rumor that you’re going in after a couple of America’s lost pilots. The two beacons on AIS-1.”

“Not true. At least, they’re not the primary reason for this deployment. If we can rescue those men, fantastic . . . but our goal is to grab the Sh’daar by whatever they have for balls and hang on until they agree to negotiate.”

He hesitated before continuing. “I think all of you know by now that I put a high premium on the battlegroup’s personnel, on bringing them all back safe and sound . . . but we’re also well aware of the realities of war. It does not make sense to risk fifty thousand men and women for two men. But risking them to stop this war, to preserve what we have back home, to secure the safety of Earth, our families, our species . . . that, ladies and gentlemen, is why we’re here.

He paused for a long moment, allowing for any further questions or remarks, but there were none.

“If any of you have problems with any of this, or more questions, I urge you to contact me or my staff. While command of a battlegroup—like command of a single ship—is not a democratic process, this will be a volunteer mission. Those of you who do not wish to proceed with the Alcubierre jump can opt out, decelerate, and return to the TRGA.

“You should all know that I have also directed that a complete copy of my log, including all of my decisions and our actions to date, has been placed in one of America’s remaining Sleipnirs. By now, it has returned through the TRGA and is on its way to Earth. I intend to dispatch another as soon as we emerge at the Six Suns. The Confederation needs to know what’s going down out here.”

The HAMP-20 Sleipnir-class mail packet was the fastest means of communication available to the fleet. It could manage a thousand Gs of acceleration, and under Alcubierre Drive could cross 5.33 light years per day.

At that rate, starting from Texaghu Resch, it would take the Sleipnir thirty-nine days to cross the 210 light years to Earth.

“Questions?”

There were none.

“We will continue acceleration, shifting to metaspace at 0910 hours tomorrow, and with emergence on target at 1545.

“That is all.”

And the images of the CBG’s senior officers began winking out.

Junior Officers’ Quarters

TC/USNA CVS America

Omega Centauri

1930 hours, TFT

Shay was hard at work building the city of Washington.

Physically, she was in her occutube in her quarters, linked in through a sim builder. The software was designed to let ship’s personnel create their own private worlds for downtime or relaxation, and included a sizable library of existing sims for most of the North-American metropolis—New New York; Columbus, D.C.; the Newbraska Metroplex; the SanSan Towers. There were international sites like Quito and Geneva, and a number of offworld sites were available as well—Copernicus Under, Chryse, New Egypt, Kore, and others. It didn’t have the Periphery Ruins, though, like Manhattan or the old D.C., and so she was building the sim herself.

She wasn’t sure why she was bothering with it. God, she’d hated the Washington Swamp when she lived there, before her family had finally moved north out of the Periphery to the Bethesda Enclave. Somehow, though, as her tour of duty on board the America dragged on, she’d found herself remembering the swamps with something approaching genuine affection.

What the hell was wrong with her?

She’d actually started with a Jurassic sim, a fantasy world of mangrove swamps and brackish water. She’d edited out the wildlife—today’s Washington Swamp didn’t include dinosaurs or pterodactyls—as well as the shrill screams, bellows, and jungle titterings in the background. Using tools from the sim builder, she’d begun adding the shells and island-debris piles of buildings and half-swallowed monuments, working from memory. She was pretty far along, now. She’d finished the stump of the old Washington Monument, thrusting up from its rubble pile and partially shrouded in rampant kudzu. The white husks of the Smithsonian buildings were in place as well, rising like crumbled cliffs to either side of the broad expanse of water that once had been the Mall, and the Capitol Building on its island to the east. The Reagan Trade Tower; the DuPont Arcology; the ruin of the Connecticut Circle Complex, where she’d lived with her family, farming the broad rooftop enclosure with its shattered glass dome—she’d completed all of those, and more. She was working now on modeling the buildings along the Kalorama Heights, rising from thickly wooded land high enough to have escaped the general flooding of the low-lying ground to the south. In her mind’s eye, she painted the rugged hillside along the Rock Creek Estuary, cloaking it in gnarled swamp oaks dripping with Spanish moss. South, past the massive white cylinder of the DuPont, it was all mangroves.

She was having trouble modeling people, though. The standard tool set with the software let her import background people, anything from individual friends to the thronging hordes of Ad Astra Plaza, but they tended to be of a uniform type: squeaky clean and smiling, wearing anything from skin-suit utilities to pure light. You never saw a rooftop farmer with dirty hands and cracked nails . . . or a fish trapper with straggly hair and wearing filthy rags. No oil-stained mechanics, no wrinkled olders, no frollops or polesters, no barge dwellers, no commuwatchers with their handcrafted bows, no Prims.

But that was okay, because it wasn’t the people she missed so much as the solitude. Despite the constant danger of raids by Prim rebels from the far side of the Potomac Estuary, Shay had never been happier, she thought, than when she was alone in her skiff, checking the fish traps among the mangrove roots along the placid, dark waters over what once had been the Washington Mall.

Her project, she’d decided, was mostly a means of helping herself get used to her implants. As a non-citizen Prim, she’d not been eligible for even the free and most basic set. That had never been a problem so far as she was concerned. Most folks in the Periphery didn’t want the Authority electronically peering into their business in any case, and if there was no such thing as universal health care or Net access, there were also no taxes, no registration checks, and no security scans. Not until she’d joined the Navy and received the standard military issue implants during basic training had she been able to interface with the electronic world around her. She used her cybernetic implants now, of course, for everything from downloading morning briefings to ordering breakfast to piloting her Starhawk, but it wasn’t until she could express herself with them creatively that they truly felt a part of her.

So why this longing for the Washington Swamp?

Most likely, she thought, it was because when she’d lived in the swamp she’d been free. There’d been rules within the community, of course, but for the most part, people had left her alone and she could be herself. As a Navy aviator, she was constantly under someone’s eye—if not that of her squadron leader and the CAG and his staff, then the eyes of her squadron mates who still thought she was a little odd, a little different, just because she was a Prim.

Well, fuck them all, very much. . . .

A light winked within her consciousness. Someone Outside wanted her. She queried, and Lieutenant Rissa Schiff’s name appeared.

Now, what in hell? . . .

Shay saved her work, then disconnected from the program. The humid swamp of the Washington ruins faded away, and she lay once more within the narrow confines of her enclosed rack. The end of the occutube dilated open and she grabbed the handholds and pulled herself out.

Rissa Schiff stood in the middle of the compartment, wearing her Navy grays and looking distraught. Her face was red, the eyes puffy. She’d been crying.

“Ms. Schiff?” Shay said, concerned. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

“I’m sorry,” Schiff said. “I . . . I . . . I don’t know why I’m here. I need to talk, I guess. . . .”

“About what?” But Shay knew the answer before the words were out. “Oh . . . him.”

“Sandy . . . Lieutenant Gray. I’d hoped . . . I’d hoped we’d find him on this side of the Triggah.”

Shay sighed. “I know. So did I.” She thoughtclicked an icon in her mind, and a seat big enough for two people grew out of deck and bulkhead behind them. Shay put her arm around Schiff and sat her down. “You miss him, don’t you?”

“Of course I miss him! Don’t you?”

Shay nodded. “Of course I do.”

It was an awkward moment for her. One of the defining cultural characteristics of most Prim communities was a somewhat antiquated belief in monogamy, the close and exclusive pairing of two people sexually, socially, and economically. Social anthropologists liked to point out that in the savage surroundings of many Prim communities, a close-paired couple had a better chance of survival than an individual . . . or than a line or poly grouping. The idea of bonding with just one other person sexually seemed quaint at best, a mild perversion at worst; it was different, alien, a break with the accepted civilized norms of civilized North American and European culture.

Shay was well aware that most of the other pilots in the squadron simply assumed that the two Prims, Gray and Ryan, had something going together.

It wasn’t true, in fact. Shay liked Gray, and knew he liked her, but perhaps it was the expectation of others itself that had kept her a bit aloof from him—a relationship that was strictly business, strictly professional.

She also assumed that Gray had been having sex with Schiff since before she’d come aboard, back when Lieutenant Schiff was still an ensign in America’s avionics department. She’d not been sure what their relationship was now, though Schiff’s unhappiness at the moment was suggestive.

Shay pushed past the discomfort, and pulled Schiff a little closer. “You know, hon, there’s scuttlebutt that the Sh’daar must have picked him up after he came through the tunnel. If he’s alive, he might be on that moving planet they spotted.

“What . . . what if he was on that battleship?”

“Then he’s dead, and there’s not a thing we can do for him, except to remember him.”

Schiff began sobbing quietly.

“But if he’s still alive, we will find him. We don’t leave our own behind. Ever.”

And she held the younger pilot for a long time.