Singularity: Star Carrier: Book Three (26 page)

Atmosphere jetted into space, a powerful lateral rocket that put the damaged planetoid in an awkward tumble. Donovan’s Starhawk put two more Kraits into the wreck ten seconds later, and the blasts reduced the planetoid to a half dozen broken fragments falling outward from a blossoming flower of hot plasma.

The Sh’daar fighters, lightly shielded, many badly damaged, were in full retreat, now. Shay ignored them, concentrating instead on the enemy’s capital ships. There were at least a hundred of these, some of them enormous, and the human fleet was still seriously outnumbered.

And with no more nuclear weapons in her personal arsenal, Shay was limited in what she could do.

But more fighters were coming through the tunnel, now, squadrons from the
United States
of North America
and the
Lincoln
and
Illustrious
. Her CPGs could still knock out enemy screens and render their shield projectors vulnerable . . . and if even one Sh’daar point-defense turret was tracking her, it wouldn’t be tracking one of the fresh and fully armed fighters.

She selected yet another target and vectored in. . . .

Chapter Seventeen

30 June 2405

CIC

TC/USNA CVS
America

TRGA, Texaghu Resch System

1354 hours, TFT

A
merica
entered the tunnel mouth.

Somewhere on the other side of that alien transport system, most of the carrier’s fighters would be battling for their lives. It was time for the mother ship to come in and lend her not inconsiderable support.

The last of the fighters had gone on through, along with twelve frigates, eight destroyers, three light cruisers, and the railgun cruiser
Kinkaid
. And now it was
America
’s turn.

The carrier approached the kilometer-wide maw, her sensors detecting the irresistible tug of rapidly increasing gravitational forces. There were no tidal effects, thank God, and no sensation of acceleration, merely a steady, smooth flow of the space within which
America
was currently imbedded. On the CIC display screens, the cylinder mouth appeared to yawn around
America
on every side, its rotation so fast that any surface detail whatsoever was blurred into a featureless silver-gray. The ship’s sensors, at this range, detected other pieces of the immense structure invisible to the unaided eye—a complex weaving of magnetic fields forming a kind of funnel shape approaching the material portion of the artifact.

And beyond—within the maw—space itself was acting quite odd indeed.

The ships of the battlegroup had been moving without incident through the TRGA smoothly for the past thirty minutes or so. Koenig, as always trying to anticipate the worst in order to prepare for it, had closely and repeatedly questioned his physics people on how the tunnel worked. Obviously things went both ways . . . but how did it know not to admit spacecraft from the other side? Was it possible for the enemy to drop a salvo of missiles—or a fair-sized planetoid—in at the other end and destroy ships coming through from this side?

The physicists had spoken, with what seemed to Koenig to be a lack of certainty, of dark matter currents triggered by an object entering one end or the other, and of the flow being one-way. Since the artifact appeared to use gravitational acceleration as a conveyer, that conveyer—the dark-matter currents—could only move in one direction at a time, and it appeared that that direction was set by ships entering the magnetic fields surrounding the openings. It was possible, even probable, that the thing possessed an AI that monitored traffic . . . but if that was the case, why was it allowing the Confederation vessels through at all? Hell, for that matter, if the Sh’daar were controlling the tunnel, it ought to be simple enough to collapse the wormhole with the human ships in-transit.

Fortunately, that didn’t seem to be an issue. The controlling intelligence might not be capable of telling the difference between Sh’daar ships and human . . . or it simply didn’t care. Or perhaps the Sh’daar couldn’t—or wouldn’t—risk destroying the technological wonder, either by switching it off or by triggering an incalculable explosion inside through a head-on collision at near-
c
.

It was even possible that the TRGA cylinder had not been constructed by the Sh’daar, but had been created by some other, older, even more advanced galactic civilization. Koenig passionately hoped that that was the case. The Sh’daar, whoever and whatever they might be, were far advanced technologically beyond human capabilities, but the science behind the tunnel was sheer magic. The carrier battlegroup—and Humankind itself—had little chance for survival in a contest against beings that could crush a star to create a space-spanning bridge.

Which, once again, raised the question of why the Sh’daar War had already lasted for thirty-eight years. A civilization powerful enough to build the tunnel, surely, would scarcely be inconvenienced by the Earth Confederation, could conquer or extinguish Humankind, if it so desired, with a casual sweep of a grasping appendage.

There had to be more to the Sh’daar, to their culture, their way of thinking, which humans still were missing. Their fear of other races developing high technology, perhaps, or simply the fact that even the Sh’daar were dwarfed in their attempts at empire-building and controlling by the sheer scale of the galaxy.

For as long as he’d been in the Confederation Navy, Koenig had resisted giving any credence at all to the idea of a “Sh’daar Galactic Empire.” The catch phrase was popular with the newsim feeds back home, but in Koenig’s opinion, no civilization, however powerful, however technically advanced, could extend its political sway across galactic distances. Hundreds of billions of suns . . . most of them with worlds, and many of
those
replete with life. . . .

Gray emptiness encircled
America
as she plunged through the tunnel. Time and space twisted strangely, the shining pocket of stars up ahead seeming to recede as the carrier’s velocity increased toward
c
.

Trevor Gray

Omega Centauri

1355 hours, TFT

The break in the communications feed with the aliens had been abrupt and total. One moment, Gray had been in a virtual reality, on the simulated surface of the planet as it had been a billion years or more ago. The next, he was back in his all-too-real grounded Starhawk, encased in blackness, the external feeds severed, and even his connection with Lieutenant Schiere gone. He could guess what had happened. Ships from the carrier battlegroup had emerged on this side of the TRGA cylinder, following up on the message drone he’d dispatched hours before, and his Sh’daar hosts were suddenly intently and completely focused on something else.

“Can you pick up anything?” Gray asked his AI. The fighter’s electronic intelligence had been sampling the local electromagnetic spectrum. There were signals aplenty—mostly infrared radiation, but including radio waves modulated in a way that suggested a network intelligence. A ship this large must have hundreds of powerful computers, or the Sh’daar equivalent. Most likely, they were hardwired together—fiber optics, perhaps, or something more advanced.

But such machines leak RF—radio frequencies—and it’s possible for a sophisticated computer with the appropriate software to use that leakage to take a peek inside the background system.

His AI had been working on the problem for almost an hour now.

“The alien imagery is . . . alien,” his AI replied. “There is an optical component, but it is difficult to interpret.”

“You’re saying they see things differently from humans,” Gray suggested, “and
not
just as a metaphor for a different worldview.”

“Human brains have evolved to interpret impulses coming through the optic nerve,” the AI told him. “In fact, humans are capable of interpreting only a small percentage of the actual data available. The brain, in fact, acts like a kind of filter, screening out what it is programmed to exclude.”

“I don’t buy it. An apple is an apple, right?”

“And a Sh’daar, never having seen an apple, would have difficulty deciding what it was.”

“That’s cultural. If they’ve never seen anything like a piece of fruit, they wouldn’t know what it was, sure . . . but they would still see something round and red.”

“They almost certainly do not see red as what humans think of as ‘red,’ ” his AI said. “I certainly do not.”

“What do you see?”

“It’s questionable that I ‘see’ at all, and the same may be true for the Sh’daar. I observe patterns of digitized points, each with numerical values indicating hue, brightness, and reflectivity. At least one of the species we’ve just seen appears to sense mass in a way we would think of as shape and form. Another puts far more emphasis on texture than do humans. You might say that it ‘feels’ an object, but from a distance, by interpreting reflected photons differently than do you, through a completely different sensory net.”

Gray thought about this, then shook his head. “I’m still not tracking you.”

“It is important, Lieutenant, that you understand how different these beings actually are. They do not perceive reality in the same way that you do. And this makes tapping into their visual networks both difficult and uncertain. What seems commonplace or obvious to them might be invisible to us . . . or we might be aware of it but place an extremely low value on the information, when, in fact, it is that datum that they are most eager to convey.”

“We were doing all right earlier,” Gray pointed out. “They were drawing on that docuinteractive stored in my implant memory.”

“Agreed. And as we shared that virtual experience, they almost certainly were seeing something quite different. The exchange was possible because I was able to interface, in a tentative and unsatisfactory fashion, with their equivalent of an artificial intelligence. But I am still uncertain as to what, if any, information was usefully transmitted.”

“An apple is an apple is an apple,” Gray said, stubborn. “They
must
perceive something pretty much like it, or else they’re not living in the same universe we are. If I don’t see a solid wall in front of me, or if I interpret it as a pretty sunset, I’m going to get a sore nose when I walk into it.”

“And if you were an AI,” his system told him, “you might be aware of the wall, but it would not pose a barrier to you. A wall does not mean the same to an AI as it does to organic life.”

“So . . . you’re saying these aliens aren’t organic life forms? They’re digital uploads? Virtual reality?”

“I am not saying that. At least, not yet. The possibility is intriguing in some respects, however, especially in light of the possibility that the inhabitants of Heimdall—the planet we were virtually experiencing—eventually uploaded themselves into large and highly advanced computer networks somehow engraved within the rock strata of their world. We might well be dealing with a digitized sentience, one without organic substance, or, indeed, even without any material existence whatsoever.”

“The ghost in the machine,” Gray mused.

The phrase had been repopularized recently in discussions of the Vinge Singularity, speculations about the possible dramatic next step in human evolution. Gray had looked it up and downloaded the history; the term originally had been used by a twentieth-century British philosopher named Gilbert Ryle, poking fun at the much earlier philosopher Descarte and his separation of mind and body. If an intelligent species learned how to upload minds into machines, would they in fact be the same minds, or mere copies? Did the originals die, giving immortality to software imposters running on hardware, or did the ego, the actual identity of the original transfer as well?

Gray mistrusted modern technology, although his life—especially his current life as a Navy fighter pilot—depended on it. To a Prim brought up in the Manhat Ruins, technology had been the mark of the haves. The have-nots living in the Periphery quickly learned to hate and fear the high-tech Authorities who attempted to impose their laws on them. By extension, Prims came to hate the technology as well.

Those old habits, those old channels of thought, had been tough to reverse. Forced to join the Navy in order to buy treatment for his stroke-ravaged wife, he’d accepted the implants and the AIs and all the rest, he’d
had
to . . . but that deep inner core of mistrust and fear had never gone away.

The others in his squadron talked easily in late-night bull sessions about uploading their own minds into computer networks one day, a means of achieving immortality. For Gray, the very idea was as revolting as it was nonsensical. The human mind arose from the natural processes of the human brain, the firing of neurons, the release and reabsorption of neurotransmitter chemicals, the creation of set neural pathways in response to repeated stimuli and experience. Copy every aspect of the organic brain, right down to the molecular chemistry and transfer it to a computer . . . and what you had was a copy, an electronic facsimile. The original, surely, was still trapped in the organic body and doomed to die. That the copy was itself convinced that it was the original, successfully uploaded, made the whole idea that much more grotesque.

“Gilbert Ryle,” the AI said, apparently following Gray’s train of thought, “was unaware of the possibilities of future human evolution in concert with the developments of implant technology and artificial sentience. Human beings today—those who have adopted technological symbiosis—are substantively different from their atechnic ancestors. A new subspecies of human. Not
Homo sapiens
, but
Homo sapiens machina
, a symbiotic fusion of man and machine.”

“Bullshit,” Gray said, but he smiled in the darkness. “I started off as the archaic version, remember? Plain old untampered-with
Homo sap
. They didn’t change me by growing a computer in my head.”

“I would argue that they did.”

“I’m the same as I was before they gimmicked me up,” Gray said, the stubbornness returning. “My implants are
tools
, nothing more. I need them to interface with the fighter, to talk to you, to receive and store downloads, but I’m the same man I always was.”