Singularity: Star Carrier: Book Three

Chapter Twenty-Six

1 July 2405

Colonel John Murcheson

Objective Gold, AIS-1

Omega Centauri

1616 hours, TFT

The enemy troops in this dark and cavernous place seemed to move and respond like machines rather than organic beings, machines with lightning-fast reactions. Each was huge, standing ten meters tall when they stood on two legs, half that on four or six. The uppermost pair of limbs appeared to double as legs or as arms. Weapons, however, were built into the smooth surface of that massive armor; electron beams snapped from outstretched gauntlets like lightning, eerily silent in the hard vacuum, devastating when they struck Marine armor.

The Crocodile was no use in here. Guided by the flash of a Navy emergency transponder, the Marines had homed in on something like an immense dome of red metal eight kilometers across, a thick-walled fortress topped by spires and blisters and towers rising from the ice in a bristling forest. Radar and X-ray scatter mapping during their approach had revealed far more of the structure buried beneath the ice. The structure, evidently, was an enormous ship of some sort, a design utterly unknown to the Confederation grounded on the surface of the dwarf planet.

Weapons turrets on the surface had obliterated one of the four incoming Crocodiles with a bolt of artificial lightning, but the other Marine assault craft, coming in at extremely low, ice-skimming altitude and weaving back and forth, had managed to close with the grounded ship, been able to slip in so close that the enemy’s weapons could not be brought to bear.

Under the cover of a barrage of particle-beam fire, the three surviving Crocodiles had slammed into the main body of the alien ship close together, their docking collars swiftly melting through a meter of solid metal and ceramic alloy to breach the hull and gain access to the interior. The breaching tunnel at the Crocodiles’ bows had dilated open, and Murcheson and his Marines rushed through. They’d emerged inside an immense cavern, its overhead some twenty meters high, the far walls over a quarter of a kilometer distant.

The armored alien forms had attacked moments after the Marines gained entry.

“Spread out! Spread out!” Gunnery Sergeant Charlie McKean yelled. “Plasma gunners! Put fire on those black hats at two-one-one!”

Murcheson let the gunny do his job, using his M-64 laser carbine to snap off a quick quartet of shots at one of the armored giants. So far as he could tell, the weapon had no effect whatsoever.

There weren’t many of the giants, thank the gods, but that armor, gleaming silver and highly reflective, was tough. It was just possible that the enemy troops carried some sort of screen generator as well; they certainly were big enough to do so. The assault team carried a mix of armaments—M-446 laser rifles and the heavier M-18 squad plasma weapons, for the most part, backed up by hand torches and pulse grenades.

The enemy troops were something like the Nungiirtok, another Sh’daar client species the Marines had clashed with more than once, but these were obviously of a different species and were carrying higher-tech gear. They moved with a smooth, flowing grace that seemed impossible for beings their size, and with a glittering precision that suggested highly sophisticated machines.

The Marines were at a considerable disadvantage here. The surface gravity of AIS-1 was only four tenths of a meter per second—about .04G. A Marine who together with her combat armor weighed 180 kilos on Earth weighed only 7 kilos here, but she still possessed 180 kilos of mass. Worse, things fell here with agonizing slowness, and when a Marine tried to dart for cover, he tended to launch himself into empty space and take a couple of seconds to drift back down.

And as they drifted, they were easy targets.

Within a moment or two, the Marines were scattering, taking shelter behind various odd-looking pieces of machinery or conduits growing between deck and overhead. Under the concentrated fire of a plasma gunner and three Marines with laser rifles, one of the giants was burned down, but the others were advancing steadily, laying down a heavy and relentless fire. Five Marines were down . . . six . . . and then it began to look as though the Marines had run up against more than they could handle.

Colonel Murcheson wondered if it would even be possible to pull back to the Crocodiles and break off the attack.

Trevor Gray

Omega Centauri

1617 hours, TFT

“That wormhole tunnel,” Gray yelled into the darkness, “it’s a kind of inside-out Tipler machine! It’s a shortcut through space . . . but it’s also a shortcut through time, isn’t it? It brought us back in time! Maybe a long, long way into our past! And now that we’re here, we could really screw your future! Isn’t that right? . . .”

There was no response from the impenetrable darkness.

“Where are they?” he asked his AI.

“Unknown.” The AI seemed to hesitate. “However, you should know that Confederation Marines have penetrated the chamber within which we are being held. A battle is being fought nearby.”

Gray felt an electric thrill at the news. “Let me see!”

A window opened in his mind. The chamber within which the Starhawk had been trapped for the past twenty-two hours remained pitch-black . . . but flashes of light sparked and flickered in the distance, perhaps a hundred meters distant.

“Three Marine boarding craft penetrated the wall surrounding us—likely the hull of the large spacecraft that captured us yesterday. A number of Marines have entered this chamber and are engaged in combat with armored beings of an unidentified species.”

Gray watched for several minutes as the AI directed high-magnification scanners at different scenes of the engagement. From his vantage point, it was difficult to see the Marines, but he did note several of the large defending figures, six-limbed and clad in bulky armor, revealed in infrared false colors.

“Can you pick up the Marine radio channel?”

“Affirmative.”

He heard a click, then a confused tumble of voices. “Over here! Over here!”

“Watch it, Kaminski! Silver clunker moving on your position!”

“Plasgunners! Hit ’em! Hit ’em!”

“Take cover! The fuckers’re getting too close!”

Gray heard a piercing scream that bubbled away into silence.

“Shit! Shit! Dougherty’s down!”

“Corpsman, front!”

“Devon! McBride! Put down some fucking covering fire!”

Gray dialed back the channel volume. It sounded like the Marines were in a hell of a tight spot. “How is auto-repair coming along?” he asked, thoughtful.

“Power plant, life support, and defensive screens are at one hundred percent,” his AI told him. “Our maneuvering thrusters are at one hundred percent, but our gravitic drive projectors are showing readiness at twenty-five percent, no more. Nanomatrix hull morphing is inoperable, and we are frozen in combat mode. All missiles have been expended. PBP weaponry is inoperable. We have 793 KK Gatling rounds remaining.”

“Can we hover?”

A pause. “Affirmative.”

“Can we drift forward . . . turn . . . maybe change altitude?”

“Affirmative. But I would advise against attempting to fly this spacecraft inside the Sh’daar ship.”

“Why? There’s enough room. . . .”

A plan was coming together in Gray’s mind.

But it might mean the end of his attempts to communicate with the Sh’daar.

CIC

TC/USNA CVS America

Omega Centauri

1617 hours, TFT

“Colonel Murcheson is reporting that the Marines have been stopped just inside the hull of Objective Gold,” Sinclair told Koenig. “Major Hegelmen reports slow progress inside Objective Blue.”

But Koenig scarcely heard. He was watching the final destruction of the United States of North America.

The carrier was wheeling end over end, falling past AIS-1, as parts of the hull, wracked by savage internal explosions, continued to fold and crumple into high-G singularities scattered across its broken and ravaged structure. The hab modules had gotten clear before the end, carrying perhaps half of her crew, but for personnel trapped in the spine, there’d been no possible escape. Carrier bridge towers were constructed with jettison rockets allowing emergency evacuations, but the destruction had overcome the United States too quickly for Captain Whitlow and his bridge and CIC crews to abandon ship. The United States of North America was a lifeless hulk.

It was a fate that America might soon share.

Elsewhere, the ships of CBF-18 exchanged fire with enemy warships at practically point-blank range. Fighters continued pursuing the leaf-ship swarms each time the formations began to re-form. Capital ships stood toe-to-toe with Sh’daar vessels, which in space combat meant anything less than ten thousand kilometers, and slugged it out with hivel guns, PBP and plasma cannon, and high-energy lasers.

How much longer should they stand their ground? . . .

Trevor Gray

Omega Centauri

1618 hours, TFT

“Main drive start-up!” Gray said, thoughtclicking an in-head icon. “Give me manual control. Just don’t let me slam into anything.”

“Monitoring attitude,” his AI replied. “You are clear for lift and hover.”

The Starhawk stirred, then lifted off the internal deck of the alien vessel. Local gravity, Gray noted, was only about four hundredths of a G; he needed only a trickle of power from his quantum taps into his drive projectors, focused at a point several meters above his head, to nudge the fighter, massing 22 tons but now weighing only 880 kilos, into the vast, dark emptiness of the huge chamber. He could feel the faint buzz of vibration as the microsingularity flickered on and off thousands of times per second, bootstrapping the fighter along, then holding it perfectly balanced between matching gravitational fields.

Five meters off the deck, he rotated his ship, bringing the prow around to face the combat now raging a hundred meters away. His ship was still in its combat configuration, molded into a flattened, dead-black fuselage with down-sloped wings to either side. His port-side wing had been chewed up pretty badly by the fringe of the Sh’daar matter-compression beam—the likely reason that both his particle beams and hull-morphing capability were down—but he was able to limp forward, silently drifting in the space between decks.

“Targeting! KK cannon!” he called, and a window opened in his mind, showing Sh’daar ground troops in false-color greens and yellows. A red targeting cursor closed on the nearest armored form and locked there, following it as it bounded across the deck in low, sprinting leaps.

“Check me!” he told his AI. “Quarter-second burst,” he ordered. With fewer than a thousand rounds in his mass-shielded magazine, his weapon’s twelve-rounds-per-second cyclic rate would exhaust his ammo in about one minute of steady firing. The AI, with faster reflexes than Gray’s, could limit his bursts and conserve his ammo.

Gray thoughtclicked the trigger. The Starhawk’s spinal-mounted Gatling RFK-90 kinetic-kill cannon spit three 400-gram slugs, each the size of Gray’s little finger, giving the hovering fighter a sharp recoil nudge. In space combat, the weapon’s muzzle velocity of 175 meters per second typically was added to the fighter’s current speed, giving it a substantial load of kinetic energy. In here, with the fighter drifting nearly motionless, 175 mps was a pitifully weak offering . . . considerably less than the velocity of an old-fashioned rifle bullet.

The depleted uranium rounds each were considerably more massive than a rifle bullet, however, and they struck the target almost together, slamming into the armor.

With little effect. The Sh’daar trooper whirled, searching for the source of the triplet of rounds that had struck it. A moment later, Gray’s screens flared with the impact of a bolt of high-energy electrons from the soldier’s weapon. Other Sh’daar soldiers stopped their advance, turned, and added their firepower to the salvo.

“We need to boost muzzle velocity!” Gray yelled. “Dial it up!”

“I recommend against—”

“Just fucking do it! Firing!”

The Starhawk’s KK Gatling could be powered up to slam out projectiles at anything up to five thousand meters per second. In normal space combat, with combatants traveling at tens of thousands of kilometers per second, such a high muzzle velocity was dangerous. It tended to overload critical weapon circuitry, and the recoil could throw a fighter badly out of control. And with the muzzle velocity added to the fighter’s forward vector, the lower number was usually adequate.

Gray’s KK Gatling spoke again, and this time the recoil was savage, shoving the fighter backward like a rocket burst. His AI compensated, juggling the gravitic projection to wrench the ship back under control before it could slam into something; three hi-vel rounds struck the targeted Sh’daar soldier with the sort of energy generally released only in combat in open space, punching through armor with the force of a small detonating warhead.

The armored figure came apart in a haze of vaporizing metal. Gray was already jockeying the fighter around, centering the target cursor on another moving, false-color figure and triggering a second burst. And a third. And a fourth . . .

Colonel John Murcheson

Objective Gold, AIS-1

1618 hours, TFT

“What the fuck was that?” a Marine yelled, ducking as fragments of high-velocity metal sparked off the deck and a nearby bulkhead. In front of her, one of the hulking, silver giants had just exploded, the upper half of its body disintegrating in hurtling bits of shrapnel.

“The zorchie’s giving us a hand!” Murcheson yelled back. “Pour it on!”

And the Marines began advancing once more.

Trevor Gray

Omega Centauri

1619 hours, TFT

Gray nudged his Starhawk closer and yet closer to the embattled Marines, using the fighter’s super-human senses to locate pockets of Sh’daar troops and target them. The enemy continued to concentrate their fire on him, but his screens shunted the particle bursts aside.

And then the enemy troops were running, bounding in long, low-G leaps across the deck and vanishing into dilated openings in the bulkheads.

“The Sh’daar wish to speak with us,” his AI told him.

“The fucking Sh’daar can fucking wait,” Gray replied. “Open a channel to the Marines.”

“Channel open.”

“This is Lieutenant Gray, Confederation Navy,” he said. “Thanks for coming after me.”

“This is Colonel Murcheson,” a voice replied. “Thank you for the assist. We appreciate you joining the party.”

“Anytime. I’m coming up to your perimeter now.”

“Come ahead. It looks like the black hats have decided to call it quits . . . at least for the moment.”

He let his fighter drift in for a landing in a brightly illuminated circle ringed by armed and black-armored Confederation Marines.

“Wait a sec, guys,” he said as Marines moved forward to help him down from the cockpit. “Someone wants to talk to me.”

And he opened another channel.

CIC

TC/USNA CVS America

Omega Centauri

1619 hours, TFT

“Admiral Koenig.” The voice of Dra’ethde, one of the Agletsch on board, sounded in Koenig’s mind. “A . . . simulation of an Agletsch that calls herself Thedreh’schul has opened a channel through the Sh’daar Seed residing within Gru’mulkisch and wishes to speak with you. She claims to represent the Sh’daar.”

“I . . . see,” Koenig said. Something inside him sagged. To have come so far . . . “They’re offering us surrender terms?”

“No, Admiral. Unless we are mistaken, it appears that the Sh’daar are surrendering to you. Yes-no?”

Trevor Gray

Omega Centauri

1619 hours, TFT

The transition from flat-out combat, with Marines and Navy battling at the ragged edge of survival, to peace was so abrupt as to be disconcerting. Linked through his AI, Gray connected with the Sh’daar mind, and realized that the enemy had ceased fighting throughout the volume of the grounded ship, throughout the volume of local space surrounding AIS-1. A species capable of using planets as starships was requesting a cease-fire, requesting negotiations, possibly offering peace.

He stood once again on the barren surface of Heimdall. The simulated image of Frank Dolinar appeared before him, standing in front of the crumbling, rusty cliffs of an ancient Sh’daar computer.

A computer intended to last for eons, to house an artificial world, to create a refuge from the universe for a species capable of manipulating and re-engineering stars.

“It is imperative,” Dolinar said . . . and this time he spoke in his own voice, rather than with that of an Agletsch translator, “that this fighting stop. Your actions threaten the Gateway of Creation.”

And in the simulated sky behind Dolinar’s image appeared the eerie wheel of the Six Suns, their harsh blue light glinting off steaming cliffs of ice.

“Those stars?” Gray asked. “How are we a threat to those?”

“Perhaps not to the stars themselves,” Dolinar’s image said, “but to the future beyond them.”

Gray did not understand.

But he would.

4 July 2405

CIC

TC/USNA CVS America

Omega Centauri

1725 hours, TFT

There were levels, it seemed, of high-tech heaven. Apparently some of those levels could be interpreted as hells by the others. Three days after the Battle of the Six Suns, Koenig was still trying to understand.

The polity of alien civilizations collectively known as the Sh’daar, apparently, was made up of a number of organic species that were already extinct. They—or copies of “they”—existed still as patterns of electronic information, as data residing within a far-flung network of advanced and interconnected computers. The Sh’daar of today were entirely digital.

The young lieutenant, Trevor Gray, had provided the download channels of the Sh’daar. In simulation, Koenig had gone back through a series of virtual worlds, scenes revealing the history of the civilization now designated as the ur-Sh’daar, the original, organic forebears of the Sh’daar of today. He’d watched the civilization spanning its tiny, dwarf galaxy during its approach to the vast spiral of the Milky Way, watched its growing concern at having the bright, coherent light of a billion years of history spread out among the larger galaxy’s immensity, scattered, and lost. He’d watched, fascinated, as the ur-Sh’daar collapsed entire suns into the fast-rotating cylinders, the inside-out Tipler machines that would give them shortcut access to the looming galactic spiral ahead.

And he watched as the member races of the ur-Sh’daar began vanishing, first one by one, then by the thousands, the millions, the billions, and the trillions, the individuals of a galactic culture evaporating into . . . otherness.

There were no clear, hard answers as to where they went, and it was possible that the question itself was meaningless. Higher dimensions, alternate worlds, and timelines, hidden pockets in space or behind space . . . it was probable that language—whether English, Agletsch, or Drukrhu, the artificial Lingua Galactica of verbal Sh’daar client species—simply didn’t have the words or, more important, the concept to frame the reality. The Agletsch phrase was Schjaa Hok, the “Time of Change.”

Humans called it transcendence, or the Technological Singularity, the point at which technology and organic intelligence so completely merged that they passed into what amounted to hyper-accelerated evolution, vanishing beyond the ken of those who remained behind.

And there were left-behinds. They called themselves, Koenig learned, V’laa’n Grah, which meant something approximately like “the Forsaken” or “the Abandoned Ones.” Many were organic beings, but they tended to be flesh-and-blood individuals who’d rejected the accelerating trend of technological advancement in the specific sciences of genetics, robotics, information systems, and nanotechnology—the GRIN driver technologies long thought to be leading to Humankind’s eventual and inevitable transcendence. The biological species left behind after the Schjaa Hok had gone into decline and become extinct within a few thousand years of the destruction of their civilization. All that had remained were the digital shadows of once flesh-and-blood intelligences, residing within the computer networks that spanned their tiny galaxy.

That remnant was determined to re-establish the collapsed ur-Sh’daar civilization and to keep it safe. To do so, they would establish colonies within the larger galaxy up ahead, make contact with as many civilizations native to that galaxy as possible, and attempt to enforce a certain stability, even stasis, in the pace of their technological advancement.

The vast majority of species throughout the larger spiral galaxy, it seemed, were nontechnic. They’d evolved in deep oceans, beneath planet-wide icecaps, or within anoxic atmospheres that forbade fires and the easy smelting of metals. Others, even native to worlds with atmospheres rich in oxygen, developed civilizations emphasizing philosophy or religion rather than science, meditation or contemplation rather than technology, the liberal arts rather than engineering. Those few who developed technic civilizations became the special targets of the Sh’daar infiltration. Most of these accepted computer implants, the Sh’daar Seed, each functioning as a node, a tiny component of a far vaster network intelligence.

And those who rejected the Sh’daar Ultimatum were exterminated. The Sh’daar still remembered, after all, how to gravitationally manipulate the cores of stars.

But what none of those targeted races had understood—none until now, at any rate—was that the Sh’daar’s reach had not only been through space, but through time.

Officer’s Lounge

TC/USNA CVS America

Omega Centauri

1850 hours, TFT

“It was staring at us the whole time,” Koenig said. “We knew that Tipler machines allowed transit vectors through space and time.”

“Einstein pointed out that it’s not ‘space and time,’ ” Commander Costigan pointed out. “It’s spacetime. You can’t separate the two.”

Koenig was standing in the officers lounge one level below the bridge and CIC in America’s command tower. With him were Randy Buchanan, America’s skipper, and several members of the CIC command staff—Sinclair, Craig, and others. CAG Wizewski was there too, along with Costigan, who was head of the battlegroup’s intelligence department. Suspended in the intergalactic Void in astonishing and high-resolution detail across the dome overhead glowed the Galaxy of Man.

The viewpoint was that of just 120 light years from America’s current position at the core of Omega Centauri. Shortly after the collapse of the Sh’daar defenses, Koenig had dispatched a mail packet to travel that distance, look around, and return. This was what it had seen.

“It takes some getting used to,” Buchanan observed. “It doesn’t feel like we’re almost a billion years in the past.”

“What is the past supposed to feel like, Randy?” Koenig asked. “It’s just another set of coordinates in spacetime.”

The intergalactic vista they were studying was hidden from the core of Omega Centauri, masked by the thick-packed wall of 10 million suns that comprised the dwarf galaxy’s innermost core. Just 120 light years away from the Six Suns at the core’s heart, the swarming stars thinned out drastically; the outlying reaches of Omega Centauri in this epoch consisted of another billion suns scattered as an irregular cloud 10,000 light years across at its widest.

In this epoch. A close astronomical survey of the spiral galaxy hanging above their heads had narrowed down “time-now” to a period some 876 million years before humans had evolved on Earth, give or take about a million years. Individual suns were lost among that whirlpool of 400 billion stars, and the actual location of Earth’s sun within that vast swirl of starlight could not be determined. The actual date had been determined by comparing the relative positions of other, more distant, galaxies hanging in the sky—especially M-31 in Andromeda, M-33 in Triangulum, the Greater and Lesser Magellanic Clouds, and the fourteen dwarf galaxies that orbited the Milky Way. Galaxies move with respect to one another, and their relative positions in respect to one another within three-dimensional space were well understood by Confederation astronomers. The positions of M-31 and M-33 established in general where the other, smaller, closer galaxies ought to be to within 50 million years or so; the positions of the dwarfs allowed a closer calibration. During the time of man, one of the dwarfs—the Canis Major Irregular Galaxy—was in the process of being devoured by the Milky Way, while another, the Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical, was 50,000 light years out and headed for an eventual collision. In this sky, both were considerably farther out, perhaps two or three orbits of the main galaxy in the past.

The galaxy that one day would be known as Omega Centauri was at this point just skimming above the sweep of the Milky Way’s spiral arms, a few thousand light years above the galactic plane, and a mere hundred thousand years or so from collision. An exact demarcation in time was impossible, of course, since the star clouds that comprised entire galaxies didn’t have sharp boundaries. The outer stars of both galactic systems were already merging, in fact, and Koenig could see where tidal interactions were sharply warping a portion of the Milky Way spiral, and were already seriously disrupting parts of Omega Centauri.

When the final coalescence occurred, most of Omega Centauri’s suns and dust and gas would be stripped away, leaving the naked core to orbit through the Galaxy of Man as an apparent globular cluster.

Koenig was looking at the Humankind’s galaxy as it had appeared almost 900 million years ago. Somewhere in that frozen maelstrom of stars and curling tentacles of interstellar gas and dust, of glowing nebulae and evolving suns overhead, lay hidden Sol and her retinue of planets. On Earth, at this moment, living cells in shallow, warm seas were learning how to congregate into multicellular colonies, the stromatolite reef builders were beginning to go into a long decline, and a few adventurous organisms were just at the point of inventing sex. Those two linchpins of evolutionary creativity would make possible the entire astonishing panoply of life on Earth that would follow. From here, the dinosaurs lay another 626 million years in the future, and humans some 250 million years after that. Such a stunning abyss of time left Koenig awed and a feeling a little lost.

And perhaps that’s why the Sh’daar had elected to extend their reach through time, to an epoch in the remote future, when Omega Centauri had evolved—or devolved, rather—into a globular cluster orbiting within the hundreds of billions of stars of the Milky Way’s galactic spiral.

The fact that the AIs had been able to identify Omega Centauri with the infalling dwarf galaxy of a billion years before remained an astonishing technological leap. Even across a billion years, it turned out that many of the cluster’s stars retained the spectral fingerprints necessary to make the identification . . . that, and the cluster’s unusual size. Even so, the leap felt more like intuition than science.

And AIs weren’t supposed to indulge in such human ways of viewing the cosmos.

There’d been endless speculation about the true nature of the Sh’daar, of course, ever since their Ultimatum in 2367. An advanced civilization ruling the galaxy, existing for millions, even for hundreds of millions of years . . . no. Koenig never had liked the term Sh’daar Empire. The galaxy was simply too vast to permit such shallow and shortsighted terminology. Evidently, the Sh’daar had agreed with him. They’d hoped to infiltrate the future by bypassing almost a billion years, pruning away those species that threatened their plans, co-opting the rest into nonthreatening acquiescence. Koenig strongly suspected that the enigmatic Six Suns were a part of that, but he couldn’t prove it. One interesting fact, though, had been pointed out by the astrogation department: the Six Suns no longer existed in Omega Centauri, the future version of the Sh’daar galaxy.

Stars that massive would die after a few million years, of course, going supernova. Still, the life spans of those artificially enhanced stars could have been extended by feeding in more stars. What had changed?

What were the Sh’daar—or the ur-Sh’daar, for that matter—really up to?

“What I want to know,” Wizewski said, “is whether the bastards can be trusted.”

“I’m not sure it’s possible to trust another species,” Koenig said.

“My, but aren’t we cynical today,” Buchanan said, laughing.

Koenig shrugged. “Hell, we still have trouble trusting members of our own species. And as for the alien . . . with an entirely different way of looking at the universe, a different concept of the natural order of things . . .”

“Exactly,” Wizewski said. “Things we take for granted, they don’t. Things they take for granted are sheer fantasy, aren’t even conceivable, to us.”

“But they seem willing to talk,” Koenig said. “That’s the important thing, at least for right now.”

“I’m still trying to get a handle on the idea of us joining the Sh’daar,” Katryn Craig said. “Becoming a part of their civilization.”

“I suppose it makes sense,” Wizewski said. “We’re in on their secret. If we can’t beat ’em, join ’em. And share the galaxy.”

Koenig had his own ideas about that. How does an enemy bent on your absolute annihilation become a friend, an ally, almost literally within the blink of an eye?

After almost four decades of fighting the Sh’daar, could Humankind accept them as allies?

Should Humankind accept them as allies?

Ultimately, it would be the Confederation government that upheld the hastily cobbled-together treaty he’d presented to the Sh’daar . . . or struck it down. He suspected they would accept; after all, those government factions set on accepting peace at any price, including that of giving up GRIN technologies, had been in the majority back home. When the Fleet returned to Earth, Koenig would be giving them an option, a chance for peace without hobbling human technological advancement.

Koenig knew he would still resign his commission, though . . . and that they might well court-martial him before that happened.

Time would tell.

“It’s not over yet by a long shot,” he said after a long moment. “We don’t know how all of the Sh’daar client races are going to react to upstart humans suddenly hobnobbing with their galactic masters. The Turusch, the Nungiirtok, the H’rulka . . . none of them think like humans. And there’s a lot we still don’t know about the Sh’daar themselves. Or the ur-Sh’daar, for that matter.”

“We know they’re afraid of our being here,” Buchanan said. “Here and now, a billion years in our own past. We’re going to need to learn more about that.”

Three days ago, the battlegroup had been at the point of final defeat when the Sh’daar had linked in through the fleet’s Agletsch liaisons and the fighter pilot, Lieutenant Gray, who’d been a prisoner within the ship designated as Objective Gold. They’d requested a cease-fire—“an immediate and unconditional end of all military operations,” as they’d put it—in order to protect the integrity of spacetime.

The Sh’daar, it seemed, were as terrified of temporal paradox as they were of technological singularities.

The grandfather paradox. It was as well established in the realm of scientific myth as Schrödinger’s cat. Build a time machine. Travel back to the past and kill your grandfather. You are never born, hence you can not travel back in time and your grandfather lives, so you do build the time machine and you do kill him, and on and on and irreconcilably on.

Modern quantum theory suggested that killing Granddad simply created a new universe, one in which the murderer had never been born. Paradox resolved.

But at the heart of Omega Centauri, under the fierce and unrelenting glare of the Six Suns, there was the possibility that the invading humans of CBG-18 would cause unexpected and unplanned-for havoc with the Sh’daar vision of the future. Exactly what that havoc might be was unknown, and the Sh’daar, understandably, were reluctant to discuss it. Perhaps there were other gates here, leading still further into the past—those two new TRGA wormholes in the skies of AIS-1, perhaps. Reinforcements had come through those gates; suppose the knowledge of the battle here and now changed decisions made in the past? The here and now Sh’daar might fear the possible resultant changes.

Or perhaps there was the possibility of making contact with the ur-Sh’daar. If the present Sh’daar feared transcendence and yet possessed time travel, why hadn’t they gone back and talked things out with their ancestors?

Perhaps they had.

And what would changes in the here and now mean for that part of the Sh’daar intelligence living in the Milky Way in the far future, the era of Humankind, of the annihilation of the Chelk and how many other species, of the alliances with far-long civilizations like the Nungiirtok and the Agletsch, of the rise of Humankind itself and its expansion through the galaxy?

In any case, the presence of the human fleet here, at what appeared to be the central nexus of travel in both space and time that might win the Sh’daar immortality, had abruptly kindled their interest in working with humans, rather than trying to suppress them.

Koenig wasn’t sure that Humankind was ready for this.

And yet, after thirty-seven years, peace . . .

Or at least a truce, and an opportunity to get to understand the longtime enemy a bit better. What Humankind needed now was time.

The new science of sophontology, he knew, had within the past few centuries acknowledged that there were more intelligent species upon the Earth than Homo sapiens, many more. There were, for instance, various species of monkeys showing the beginnings of evolutionary development first demonstrated by humans a few millions of years before. Monkeys. Not Humankind’s closest living relatives, the apes, but monkeys. Certain species living in open savannah had learned to walk upright, at least for a few seconds at a time, in order to see above the high and all-encompassing seas of grass. Others had learned how to crack the husks of large, tough nuts with hammer stones in order to get at the soft meat within, and passed the knowledge down to the young of those species from generation to generation.

For the Sh’daar to agree to work with humans was roughly akin to humans sitting down with those tribes of clever monkeys and deciding together how best to run the world.

No matter. All the monkeys needed was some time.

And Carrier Battlegroup America had just purchased that time in blood.

“I wonder,” Koenig said quietly, “what Geneva is going to think about this?”

“They’ll call it,” Buchanan told him, “Independence Day.”

“Eh?”

“Look at the date.”

Koenig had to query the fleetnet. July Fourth was not widely celebrated in the United States of North America nowadays, but it had been significant in the history of the old United States. Koenig read the download and chuckled. A union at any level with the Sh’daar might force a divided Humankind to unite at last. They would have to as they attempted to understand their new and still mysterious partners in spactime.

Union, and, at long last, freedom from war.

It was something worth fighting for.