Singularity: Star Carrier: Book Three (28 page)

An instant later, the second projectile slammed at over fourteen kilometers per second into the huge vessel’s unprotected prow at the same, white-glowing point, plunging through the partially molten crater in her thin outer skin and burrowing deep, deep through her vitals, a high-speed bullet smashing through relatively soft and unprotected internal organs.

The battleship-sized alien vessel staggered and rolled under the impact. Her shields flickered, then fell. The destroyers
Trumbull
and
Adams
moved closer, turning their shield caps away from the target in order to allow their turreted laser and particle beam weapons to bear. Krait missiles streaked through the intervening space, and the piercing flash of nuclear detonations began to strobe and flare across the enemy vessel’s hull.

“There go the fighters,” tactical officer Lieutenant Commander Hargrave reported. “They’re vectoring for a close pass.”

Eight fighters—surviving shreds of the Dragonfires, the Impactors, and the Black Lightnings operating together, descended on the broken hulk like hungry piranhas on a crippled cow. Normally, a warship of that size could sweep that many fighters out of the sky without effort, but internal systems had been savaged, including, probably, her tracking and targeting sensors.

The giant was still dangerous, however. The battleship didn’t appear to be armed with the matter-crushing weapons witnessed earlier, but beams of charged particles lashed out with devastating fury.

One of the fighters flared into a dazzling white fireball . . . then another. . . .

Lieutenant Shay Ryan

VFA-44

TRGA, Texaghu Resch System

1411 hours, TFT

The last of the Impactors died in a silent, savage flash of light ahead and to Shay’s right. Lieutenant DeVrye—Shay hadn’t known her, not well—but it hurt like hell when any of the few remaining pilots was vaporized. The enemy battlewagon was badly hurt, but her point defense systems were still operating, still targeting the incoming Confederation fighters. Shay urged her fighter into a series of unpredictable jolts and vector shifts, jinking to throw the enemy shooters off. She wondered if they were flesh and blood over there, trying to lock her into their sights, or if she was facing the implacably cold calculations of a machine.

Fifty kilometers. She was following Lawrence Kuhn in, and Kuhn was zorching in just above the alien’s hull now. “Firing pee-beep!” Kuhn shouted over the tactical net, his voice shrill with adrenaline.

And then the battleship was there, in front of her, expanding in an instant from a dim star to fill her forward screen, enormous and malignant. Shay swept in low across the gray and pitted landscape of the alien vessel’s ravaged body, firing the last of her Gatling KK ammo into the thing, and hammering the wreckage again and again with her PBP-2.

Explosions flashed within the vessel, glimpsed through rents in the ship’s torn hull.

“Explosion of target imminent,”
her AI called out.

And then the universe dissolved in blue-white radiance.

CIC

TC/USNA CVS
America

Omega Centauri

1412 hours, TFT

“I think she’s about to blow,” Commander Craig said, and then the alien battleship exploded from inside, geysers of blue-white plasma erupting through weakened portions of her hull, ripping huge chunks of hull metal open, clouds of molten droplets spraying outward as they cooled rapidly to invisibility. In moments, perhaps a third of the giant remained, a ragged chunk off the stern end, trailing wreckage as it slowly rotated in space.

“Some of our people were pretty tight in there,” Wizewski said. “Permission to deploy SARs to that wreckage.”

“How’s the retrieval on the
Gurrierre
pods coming?” The Pan-European bombardment vessel was a crumpled, lifeless, and highly radioactive hulk, now, but nearby space was filled by the evac pods of personnel who’d managed to get clear before the ship’s singularity had gone rogue.

“Recovery under way, sir. We can leave that to the DinoSARs, and divert some tugs from the Jolly Blacks to pick up our pilots.”

“Do it.”

“Aye, aye, Admiral.”

“Sir,” Hargrave said. “I think you should see this.”

Koenig accepted an in-head link, opening a window created by
America
’s long-range scanners. There was a planet out there . . . the tiny worldlet detected by Gray’s fighter and designated AIS-1.

And it was showing the wink of two emergency transponder beacons.

Trevor Gray

Omega Centauri

1415 hours, TFT

Gray felt the seismic quake, a distant, shuddering rumble that reached his consciousness even while he was deep within the depths of the simulation. The virtual image of Thedreh’schul shimmered, winked on and off several times, and then vanished, along with the simmed view of the planet’s ice-bound surface. He was again within the confines of his Starhawk, immersed in blackness.

“AI,” he called. “What’s going on?”

“Data is conflicting and uncertain,” the fighter’s software replied. “However, the facility within which we are being held appears to be undergoing extreme gravitic acceleration.”

“ ‘Facility.’ Do you mean the ship that picked us up?”

“Yes. However—” The AI hesitated, as if genuinely at a loss for words, or as if uncertain how to interpret the data. “I have tapped into one of the local optical feeds,” the AI continued after a moment, “by piggybacking through RF leakage from nonoptical cryocircuitry. It appears to be a surface view.”

This time he saw the panorama in a window within his mind, rather than a full sim within which he seemed to be standing. It was, once again, the dark and frozen ice plain he’d first experienced in-sim, with the impenetrable cloud of Venus-bright stars filling the bowl of the sky overhead.

But this time, those stars were
moving
.

Directly ahead, more stars were rising from behind glacier cliffs of frozen methane and nitrogen. Abruptly, then, the drifting motion stopped, and as it did so, Gray felt another sharp, seismic shock.

“Wait a second,” he said. “I thought we were on that big ship that picked us up!”

“Evidently we are,” his AI replied. “But the ship has landed on a planetary surface, most likely the body designated as AIS-1.”

“But we’re
moving
!”

“Planets move,” his AI replied. “It is in their nature. But I agree that this motion appears to be anomalous.”

“But
how
are we moving! We started rotating . . . then we stopped!”

“I have no data with which to formulate conclusions. It should be remembered that we cannot necessarily trust incoming data from outside.”

And what, Gray wondered, had that statement cost his AI? Artificial intelligences
lived
for data, at least in a loose sense of the word.

“I don’t buy that,” Gray replied. “We felt that shock whenever we started rotating.”

“We might simply be on board the starship that picked us up, and it is the ship that rotated.”

“Your data feeds from outside. What do they tell you?”

“That we appear to be on or just beneath the surface of a dwarf planet, and that the planet rotated through eighty-five degrees, then began accelerating toward six particular nearby stars.”

“What stars?”

For answer, a new window opened in Gray’s mind. In it, he saw the backdrop of the cluster’s stars, thickly massed, with only scattered bits of the infinite night beyond visible between some of them. But arrayed against that brilliant wall were six foreground stars, far brighter than the rest and gleaming a brilliant crystalline blue.

The overall color of the background stars tended to be white, shading ever so slightly to a faint orange or red. That was to be expected. Star clusters—as well as galactic cores, such as Omega Centauri was supposed to be—were made of truly ancient stars. Globular clusters, generally, were made up of truly ancient Population II stars, which tended to be red giants. Hotter stars, blue giants, for example, burned up their supplies of nuclear fuel swiftly indeed, dying in spectacular supernovae after a mere 10 million years or so. Even Omega Centauri, though it possessed both Population II and the younger Population I stars, like a galactic nucleus, still tended to be made up of red-hued stars, cooler and slower-burning, and able, therefore, to live throughout the 10 to 12 billion years or so that they’d been in existence.

Those six stars were blue giants, and they were arranged artificially. There could be no doubt of that; they were aligned in a perfect hexagon, a circle of six brilliant stars.

“My God,” Gray said, staring at the circle of stars. “How did we miss that?”

“This is a magnified image,” his AI told him. “Under a routine, nonmagnified scan, these six stars dwindle to an apparent single point, lost among all of the background stars. I noticed them just now only because the planet we are on appears to be accelerating in that direction. I would suggest that those stars are our captors’ destination.”

“They’re . . . beautiful,” Gray said. They looked like some perfect objet d’art, six intensely blue diamonds in an invisible setting.

“Those six stars,” his AI said, “show spectra similar to that of Zeta Puppis and other blue giants. I estimate that they are of spectral type O5, that each has a mass of roughly forty times that of Sol, and that all are relatively young, likely less than four million years old.”

“Four million years,” Gray said. “What are they doing inside a cluster that’s supposed to be ten or twelve
billion
years old?”

“Unknown.”

“Those have to be artificially put there like that,” Gray said, shaking his head. “They must be in precise gravitational balance. They couldn’t have formed that way naturally.”

“Agreed. And that lends credence to the possibility that the stars themselves are artificial or, at the least, artificially generated from existing suns.”

“How do you mean?”

“They could well be blue stragglers. And to have six of them in a perfect hexagon implies that they all were deliberately created, and that they were created at the same time.”

Gray had to open another inner window and download a definition of
blue straggler
, a term he’d not heard before. Scanning through the few lines of text stored in his cybernetic hardware, he learned that as much as four centuries earlier, astronomers had recognized blue, apparently very young suns inside the teeming swarms of ancient red stars that made up globular clusters. Because blue stars were much shorter lived than red, dying in spectacular fashion after only a very few million spendthrift years, there was no way that they could possibly exist within clusters of stars a thousand of times older, not when the gas and dust from which new stars were born were generally absent from those clusters.

And yet there they were, gravitationally bound to the clusters as contradictions to established physics and astronomy—the blue stragglers.

Eventually, astronomers had worked out what must be happening. The ancient stars within the swarms of globular clusters did not occupy orderly and precise orbits, but literally swarmed through the cluster, their nearest neighbors a tenth of a light year or less away at any given time, their vectors constantly tugged and twisted by ever-changing gravitational tides. While stellar collisions were rare throughout the rest of the galaxy, in such tight quarters, collisions were actually fairly common. Most collisions, though, were not head-on affairs ending in annihilation; instead, two stars would approach, graze, then slowly come together in a series of tight mutual orbits, until eventually they combined, coalescing.

Where there had been two stars there now was one, but a star of much higher mass than before. The increased mass meant a higher fusion temperature, and that in turn meant not a cooler, redder star, but a much hotter, bluer one. Two ancient stars were reborn as one young one . . . but a young spendthrift destined to squander its hydrogen wealth and, as with all blue stars, to die within a few million years.

To have six of these young stars in a circle suggested that someone had been deliberately slamming stars into one another, turning old cool stars into young hot suns.

Gray thought about the ramifications of this. The technology required to create not one, but six blue stars, orbiting a common center in perfect balance, to
keep
them in balance for millions of years as they independently burned their dwindling supplies of hydrogen fuel . . . the thought, the sheer scope and scale, the staggering
arrogance
of such celestial engineering, beggared belief.