Singularity: Star Carrier: Book Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

1 July 2405

CIC

TC/USNA CVS America

Omega Centauri

1545 hours, TFT

Emergence. . . .

America dropped out of her unfolding Alcubierre bubble in a flare of dazzling light. Koenig leaned forward in his seat, watching the main bulkhead displays as well as windows open within his mind.

On target. . . .

Ahead, the Six Suns spanned two degrees of arc, the diameter of four full moons seen from Earth. Their glare was so bright they erased even the blaze of cluster stars beyond and behind it, and the AI handling the carrier’s imaging systems had to stop the sensor feeds far, far down. Had any human beheld those suns without optical shielding or other protection, they would have been instantly blinded.

Against the glare, silhouettes drifted in the sea of harsh light—at least three small worlds showing visible, black disks, and a scattering of closer artificial structures—deep space bases or manufactories, possibly, orbital fortresses, space habitats of some sort, perhaps. Two widely separated knots of gold and blue-white haze appeared to be a pair of artificial singularities like the TRGA cylinder.

And, at the moment, at least, only a handful of starships were visible, most of them apparently moored to far larger orbital docking facilities.

There was far too much going on, too much to see across the entire surrounding sphere of the heavens, to take it all in at once.

“Admiral,” his personal assistant murmured in his head. “We are picking up the transponder signals of the two lost pilots.” One of the big CIC screens showed the worldlet enclosed by green bracket graphics, and a pair of winking red points of light appeared on the surface. Accompanying blocks of data identified the world as AIS-1—Anomalous Infrared Source One—and gave its distance as just 1.31 million kilometers.

“Any sign of either the Nassau or the Vera Cruz yet?” Koenig snapped.

“The Nassau has appeared four light seconds below and to starboard,” the PA replied. “The Vera Cruz has not yet registered on our scanners.”

“Open a link with the Nassau.”

“Transmitting.”

“General Mathers! This is Koenig. Execute Plan Bright Thunder.”

There would be an eight-second time delay before Koenig could expect to hear a reply.

During the acceleration period leading up to the last Alcubierre transit, Koenig and his tactical team had worked for hours with Mathers, the CO of MSU-17, and Colonel Murcheson, the commander of MSU-17’s planetary assault Marines. They’d devised a number of alternate combat plans depending on what they might actually find when they emerged within the habitable zone of the Six Suns. Bright Thunder assumed that at least one of the two Marine assault transports would emerge from metaspace close enough to AIS-1 to effect a landing and secure a beachhead.

It was an assumption for which no one in the battlegroup would have given decent odds. While the CBG had adhered close to the observed line of flight of the mobile planet, the so-called habitable zone for the Six Suns—the region surrounding those stars where ambient temperatures were between the freezing and boiling points of water—was extremely deep, several hundred astronomical units at least. The battlegroup had been targeting the outer regions of that habitable zone, about three thousand AUs from the gravitational center of the Six Suns. This allowed them to emerge within a flatter gravitational metric, It also minimized the chances of materializing out of their Alcubierre warp bubbles within the same volume of space as a Sh’daar ship or world.

And apparently, the Sh’daar mobile planet had been operating according to the same general set of rules. The battlegroup had been extremely lucky.

But despite good luck, the CBG had still been scattered, the inevitable result of tiny discrepancies in course and speed and mass and local metric when each vessel dropped into metaspace for the microjump. Even across so relatively tiny a distance as half a light year, Nassau had emerged four light seconds away from America, and as the seconds crawled past, more and more of the battlegroup members were appearing on-screen as the photon dumps of their emergences finally crawled across intervening space to America’s sensors.

“America, Nassau,” a voice said in Koenig’s head. “Nassau copies. Executing Bright Thunder.”

“Admiral,” his PA said. “Vera Cruz has just appeared on-screen. Range fifteen light seconds, high, astern, and to port.”

“Pass them the same message.”

“Transmitting.”

It would be another thirty seconds before he heard a response form the second Marine transport.

“How many ships are linked in?” he asked.

“Twelve ships so far, Admiral, at twenty-three seconds after Emergence. Now fourteen ships . . .”

About half the battlegroup, then, emerging within a sphere less than thirty light seconds across. Not as bad as it could have been . . .

“Make to all vessels on the fleet net,” Koenig said. “We will target AIS-1 in support of Operation Bright Thunder. Initiate acceleration now.”

“Now,” of course, was a relative term, since the order would take time to crawl its way at light’s snail pace out to the other ships. The frigate Badger, closest to the America, began accelerating first, followed by the half dozen or so other vessels that had emerged close by—the destroyers Fitzgerald and Adams, the heavy cruisers Lunar Bay and the Pan-European Frederick der Grosse, and the Marine assault carrier Nassau.

America would delay acceleration until her handful of fighters was away.

“CAG,” Koenig said. “You may launch all fighters.”

“Aye, aye, Admiral,” Wizewski shot back. “Launching all fighters.”

And the fleet battle was joined.

Captain Barry Wizewski

Dragonfires

Omega Centauri

1547 hours, TFT

“Dropping in three . . . two . . . one . . . drop!”

At half a G, five meters per second, Wizewski’s fighter fell from the drop tube and into open space. In moments, he was clear of the carrier’s shield cap and accelerating toward AIS-1. “Form up on me, Dragonfires,” he ordered. “Nighthawks, take formation astern.”

All of the SG-92 Starhawks from the Dragonfires, the Black Lightnings, the Impactors, and the Death Rattlers—a total of just fourteen fighters—were now flying as Dragonfires. The remaining fourteen obsolescent SG-55 War Eagles of the Nighthawks and the Star Tigers were flying now as Nighthawks.

Two heavy squadrons . . .

“What about CSP, CAG?” one of the Nighthawk pilots asked. “We’re leaving America pretty naked.”

“Orders, Paulson,” Wizewski replied, “straight from the admiral. What’s important is that we get down on the deck and cover the Marine landings. The carrier will take care of herself.”

Wizewski himself had protested those orders earlier that afternoon, when the admiral had laid out for him the various alternate battle plans. He’d protested again just minutes ago, when Koenig had told him that it would be Dawn Thunder. Traditionally, going all the way back to atmospheric fighters and wet-navy carriers, fighters had performed in numerous combat roles—offensive, defensive, and reconnaissance. Key to the defensive role had been Combat Air Patrol in the wet-navy days, Combat Space Patrol beyond planetary atmospheres. Carriers of either type, cruising oceans or space, had never been heavily armed and were vulnerable to attack. CSP was the first and best line of defense for modern space carriers.

Generally, that had been a role relegated to the older War Eagles. Defending the space around a carrier didn’t require speed, high-G maneuvers, or the morphing abilities of a nanomatrix hull, and SG-55s weren’t at the same disadvantage there as they were in long-range strikes against heavily defended enemy targets.

But Admiral Koenig had been adamant. “If we do find AIS-1 in there,” he’d told Wizewski, “we’re gong to need all of the long-range firepower we can muster over that planet as quickly as we can get it there.

The planet, Wizewski thought, was bound to be heavily defended, and the War Eagles would be at a serious disadvantage.

But then, given the numbers they likely would be facing, all of the fighters would be at such an extreme disadvantage that details like speed and acceleration would scarcely matter.

“On my command,” Wizewski told the fighter group, “initiate full acceleration. Weapons are free. Boost in three . . . and two . . . and one . . . punch it!”

And America’s vast, dark gray shield cap dwindled away astern.

Trevor Gray

Omega Centauri

1547 hours, TFT

The gas giant Bifrost loomed huge in a violet, aurora-charged sky. The hard, bright ruby point of Kapteyn’s Star hung just above the horizon at Gray’s back, glinting from the distant ancient glaciers and casting weak purplish shadows on the cliff face before him.

He was standing once again within the virtual simulation of the planet Heimdall, with Frank Dolinar at his side. Curiously, Dolinar’s voice was that of the Agletsch, Thedreh’schul. “They’re not dead,” the voice said. “There yet is energy, yes-no?”

Gray reached out and touched the worn and rust-stained surface of the rock in front of him. Flakes of stained rock crumbled and slowly fell at his touch. “What energy? The place is dead!”

“You are used to computers that work very swiftly, as you consider time, yes-no?”

“I guess so.” Gray wondered where this was going.

“Computers with . . . you use the term ‘processors,’ yes . . . computers with processors performing some billions or even trillions of instructions per second. And this can require considerable power.”

“My AI,” Gray said, “can run half a million-trillion instructions per second, with a clock speed of twelve terahertz. That’s fast enough for most artificially intelligent systems. But it doesn’t require that much power.”

“Within the rocks on the surface of this planet,” Thedreh’schul told him, “are the digital uploads of some tens of trillions of Baondyeddi, Adjugredudhra, and Groth Hoj, all existing within artificial realities created by powerful sentient networks. What power they require is drawn from the light of that sun, from internal heat generated by tidal stresses with the large planet it circles, and from incident background radiation.”

Gray brushed at the crumbling rock. “But . . . it’s eroding away! There’s nothing left!”

Dolinar’s simulated avatar reached down and picked up a chunk of loose rock perhaps the size of his head. “Ur-Sh’daar computer technologies were such that those trillions of electronic life forms could have existed within a computer smaller than this,” he said. “You would call this . . . massive redundancy, yes-no? If a glacier scrapes away a mountain, if a falling planetoid obliterates half of the world, life goes on.”

“My God. They were planning to live for millions of years?”

“Trevor Gray, they planned to live considerably longer than that. The sun is a red dwarf, a cool star expected to continue shining for another fourteen billion years . . . about as long as the universe has existed so far. Tidal interactions with that gas giant in the sky would provide energy until this world eventually spirals free and becomes a planet in its own right . . . and even then, gravitational energy within this world’s core will continue providing a trickle of energy, as will ambient radiation and, eventually, the gradual decay of protons. The computer currently is operating at a very slow rate, executing perhaps one line of code every few hours. As time passes and the universe cools, the computer will run more and more slowly, until it executes one line of code in a thousand years . . . or a million. It makes no difference to those within the rock. They will experience the lives they have chosen normally, as will their electronic offspring and countless generations to come, all utterly unaware that trillions, even quadrillions of years are passing Outside.

“The beings within this planetary computer were confident of existing until the heat death of the universe.” Dolinar’s image dropped the rock, which drifted slowly to the ground, then patted the stained cliff face. “This is their idea of what humans call heaven, Trevor Gray, a means of waiting out eternity.”

“Electronic immortality,” Gray said. “Or as close to immortal as the universe permits.”

“Exactly so.”

“And this is where the ur-Sh’daar went when they transcended?”

“Some of them,” the electronic fusion of Thedreh’schul and Dolinar replied. “As I said, many seemed simply to vanish, and may now occupy other dimensional planes of existence or reality that we cannot access . . . or they may be beyond our reach and our awareness for other reasons we cannot begin to comprehend or even imagine.

“The Sh’daar—the Refusers—never understood precisely what happened with the Schjaa Hok, the transcendence. They felt . . . abandoned. Even as they rebuilt much of the fallen galactic civilization, they . . . feared what had happened, and they feared what might yet happen if they or other species reached a similar technological singularity and transcended as well.”

“Why?” Gray asked. He gestured at the rock face in front of them, his shadow mimicking both the movement of his arm and his shrug. “It doesn’t look like they’re much of a threat!”

“Perhaps not. Especially when one considers how different the flow of time is for them compared to us. They live so slowly that their lives, their thoughts cannot intersect with ours in any meaningful fashion.

“But there were many, many others whom the Refusers feared might still have a presence, watching them, perhaps, from a higher dimension. They became fixated on . . . what the Agletsch call the dhuthr’a. You might say ‘ghosts.’

“The idea has terrified the Sh’daar Refusers and their descendents for millennia. The transcendence had a profound effect upon them, and upon how they look at the universe around them. Their attempt to control or limit the technological development of the new species they met within this galaxy, their use of the Sh’daar Seeds to monitor the development of those species . . . all of this was calculated to prevent a new transcendence.”

Gray considered this. “You haven’t been entirely honest with me,” he said after a moment.

The cliff face, the loom of Bifrost, the glaciers and the wan, pinpoint ruby sun all faded away. Gray stood once again beside the spidery form of Thedreh’schul on the surface of a conventionally living world. Millions of brilliant stars cast an illumination as bright as day. Alien towers threaded their way into the glowing, white sky. The Six Suns, Gray thought, must be below the horizon.

For a time, Gray had been assuming that the alien city was an image of the world before it had become dark and ice shrouded. He’d even wondered if it was the same world as the one he’d visited in the docuinteractive—Heimdall, the moon of the gas giant Bifrost circling Kapteyn’s Star.

But what he was being shown simply didn’t fit together right. Time, he thought, was seriously out of synch.

“We have told you everything we could, as we understand it,” Thedreh’schul told him.

“And just who do you mean by ‘we’?” Gray asked. “Who’s speaking now? The Sh’daar? Or their Agletsch servants?”

“I represent the Sh’daar.”

“What world is this? The one you’re showing me?”

“The Agletsch call it Gahvrahnetch.”

“Your archives? What you called the ‘Sh’daar operational center’?”

“Yes.”

“And you’ve been lying to me. Or at least not telling me the entire truth.”

“We have told you everything we could, as we understand—”

Gray felt the jolt transmitted through the ground. For an instant, the simulation wavered and flickered out, and once again he was sitting within the close, darkened cockpit of his fighter.

Then the alien city reappeared.

“What was that? What just happened?”

“Your fleet has arrived in local spacetime,” Thedreh’schul replied. “They are attacking this world.”

“Which world?” Gray demanded. “The mobile planet where you’re keeping me? Or what you called the Sh’daar operational center?”

The imaginal world flickered again, and again Gray sat alone in the darkness.

Lieutenant Shay Ryan

Omega Centauri

1548 hours, TFT

Lieutenant Shay Ryan saw the white flare of a detonating Krait missile on the icy surface ahead just as she loosed a pair of her own Kraits. The objective planet, AIS-1, loomed from tiny to immense in a flash, and for a brief interval blurred past her port side as an immense wall.

After accelerating at fifty thousand gravities for seventy-two seconds, she was traveling at over 36,000 kilometers per second, and the objective world, a dwarf planet barely a thousand kilometers across, had dwindled to a point astern before her human reflexes had time to react.

Her AI, though, had acquired distinct targets on the icy surface and loosed the Kraits precisely on the mark. The targets appeared to be enormous gravitational projectors half buried into the surface, and were probably part of either the dwarf planet’s shielding or the means by which its owners moved it through space. Installation after installation vaporized within the glare of one hundred megaton explosions, however, as the flight of Starhawks flashed past. Her AI, with reflexes far quicker than those of organic beings, captured imagery from the world.

The icy sphere was now a world of horrific storms and violently swirling winds. A kind of cometary tail stretched away from the world now, a pale, white luminescence propelled by the intense light and radiation of the Six Suns.

AIS-1, with a diameter of less than 800 kilometers, was a close twin to the frigid dwarf planets Makemake or Haumea within the Kuiper Belt of Earth’s solar system. Halfway between the dwarf planets Pluto and Ceres in size, its surface temperature while it had been adrift in open space half a light year away had dropped to a few tens of degrees Kelvin. Massive enough to have compressed itself into a spherical body rather than a potato-shaped planetoid, its surface consisted of frozen methane and nitrogen.

In interstellar space, of course, any atmosphere the worldlet possessed had been frozen out, leaving an achingly cold surface beneath hard vacuum. Hours earlier, however, the dwarf planet had emerged from faster-than-light within the liquid-water zone of the Six Suns, and the frozen surface had begun to boil. Already, AIS-1 was surrounded by a tenuous envelope of gaseous methane and nitrogen. As the surface temperature had lifted above 63 degrees K, the nitrogen had begun sublimating directly from solid to gas. At 91 degrees K, the methane had begun to liquefy, then to sublimate directly into the thickening atmosphere.

The surface temperature now was passing 112 degrees Kelvin—minus 161 Celsius—and even liquid methane was beginning to vaporize. The atmosphere was still extremely thin, but the rocketing surface temperatures were generating fierce storms, as the Six Suns continued to blow traces of the warming gas off into space like a comet’s tail.

As she passed the world, Ryan’s AI had flipped her fighter end-for-end and begun to decelerate. Facing now the day side of ASI-1, she targeted another large surface structure and triggered her Starhawk’s PBP-2. Tightly focused proton beams, charged particles moving at just beneath the speed of light, slashed through the turgidly churning white clouds above the surface and clawed at half-buried gravitic projectors and field-bleed towers.

So far, there was no sign of enemy fighters, no indication of a defense. . . .

CIC

TC/USNA CVS America

Omega Centauri

1549 hours, TFT

“Admiral,” Commander Sinclair said, “the last of the fighters are away.”

It had been a fast drop—just twenty-eight fighters, plus ten recon Shadowhawks from the Sneaky Peaks. Those last would not be engaging in combat, but their eyes and electronic ears would be invaluable in this strange and alien space.

“Very well,” Koenig said. “Captain Buchanan? You may accelerate.”

“Aye, aye, Admiral. America is under acceleration.”

At five hundred gravities, America would accelerate for eight and a half minutes, then begin decelerating until she arrived at AIS-1 with near-zero relative velocity, a total flight time of 1,023 seconds, or a bit over than seventeen minutes. The Nassau should arrive at AIS-1 a minute and a half later.

Other ships were already on their way, and would be arriving at the mobile planet a couple of minutes ahead of America. And more ships were dropping into America’s radio horizon, now; ships that had emerged four light minutes away—half an AU—were now on the carrier’s screens and receiving her orders.

Ponderously, the fleet was deploying to converge on the tiny dwarf planet.

The tactical tank in CIC showed a curious lack of enemy fighters or capital ships, other than the handful docked at several large, orbital facilities. That wouldn’t last. If, as Koenig thought, AIS-1 was of some strategic importance to the Sh’daar, they would have to defend it.

In another twenty minutes, the issue should be decided, one way or the other.

Operation Bright Thunder called for grabbing it so quickly that they didn’t have time to get into position. It was a race now, with both sides attempting to grab the metaphorical high ground around AIS-1.

Trevor Gray

Omega Centauri

1550 hours, TFT

Gray felt the repeated shudders rippling through the rock and ice of a world. CBG-18 was giving the dwarf planet a hell of a shellacking.

He wondered if the Dragonfires were up there, what was left of them—Shay and Rissa and Ben. “Is there any way to communicate with our ships?” he asked his PA.

“Negative,” the AI replied. “I have been sensing radio impulses through the fighter’s emergency beacon transponders. The Fleet almost certainly knows we’re here. But I cannot open a voice or Net communications channel. The Sh’daar are blocking it.”

“Can you pick up the Sh’daar? Can we talk to them?”

“I may have a possible channel to the Sh’daar. There is a signal—what amounts to a carrier channel for the simulation feed. And I can pick up what is almost certainly side bands or leakage from an artificial intelligence on that channel, possibly the same one that was communicating with us a short time ago.”

“What’s your impression?” Gray asked. “That AI . . . is it software? Or some sort of blend of organic intelligence and software?” He knew the feeling was irrational, but he desperately wanted to talk to a person, an organic intelligence, rather than a tool.

At the same time, he knew that AIs like those commonly used in the Confederation were just as intelligent—and quite likely far more so—than any human.

“It is impossible to tell. Remember that human-derived AIs were originally designed to so perfectly mimic specific humans that outside agencies could not tell the difference. We may be facing a similar identity problem here.”

Gray had to accept this pronouncement. In fact, most humans he knew, now, were themselves blends of flesh and blood and of nanochelated carbon, silicon, and synthetics. And when someone else talked to Gray on the Net, in a virtual reality sim, he was in fact interacting with Gray’s electronic avatar, and it didn’t really matter which was which.

“See if you can connect with it . . . whatever it is,” Gray said.

A long minute passed.

And then the alien appeared.

It wasn’t an image of Thedreh’schul this time, but of one of the sea-star aliens, the species identified as Groth Hoj. The entire body appeared to be a writhing mass of tendrils a meter or more in length. Some of those tendrils ended in swellings that were probably eyes or other sensory apparatus, while others ended in three-jawed mouths. The vast majority, however, appeared to be manipulatory members. The central mass was a deep, lustrous, almost gleaming black; the tips of the tentacles, however, were rainbow hued and iridescent, and as the tentacles writhed and twisted, the colors changed.

Thedreh’schul had said something about the Groth Hoj communicating by color changes of their tentacles. Gray hesitated. How the hell did you understand something that talked to you by changing body color? And how did you make it understand the sounds coming from your mouth when it might not even have ears, or any concept of what spoken language was?

Then he realized that if he was seeing the Groth Hoj in a simulation, it must have some way of linking in with the local Net . . . and that meant that it could understand Gray if Gray was on that Net as well. He didn’t know how it was done . . . but evidently the Sh’daar had tapped into his electronic presence earlier and learned enough.

He would have to trust the technology, even though he couldn’t understand it.

“I know what you’ve been trying to hide from me,” Gray said. “And I’d be willing to bet that my friends out there know it too.”

What do you know?

The words were spoken as a whisper deep within his mind.

“I know that I and those like me have come back through time—maybe as much as a billion of our years—to meet you. And that means that you are in terrible danger.”

Danger . . .

“Let me communicate with my people. There’s still time. We can stop this. And you and your people can live. . . .”

No! . . .