Singularity: Star Carrier: Book Three (29 page)

And yet . . . there they were, six stars in a perfect ring, diamond-bright, intensely beautiful.

And completely impossible.

Chapter Nineteen

30 June 2405

CIC

TC/USNA CVS
America

Omega Centauri

1422 hours, TFT

T
he wink of two transponder beacons on the mobile planet was the first proof the battlegroup had had that Lieutenant Gray had survived after being picked up by the enemy. And who was the other? The coding attached to the beacon indicated Lieutenant Schiere’s reconnaissance CP-240 Shadowstar. Better and better.

The fact of the transponders didn’t mean the two pilots had survived, of course, but it was strong evidence in that direction.

Unfortunately, the possibility that they’d survived didn’t mean that the fleet was going to be able to do anything about it. Something strange was happening over there.

“What the hell?” Koenig asked. In the window, the surface temperature of the dwarf planet was rising, and a column of data to one side was changing rapidly.

AIS-1 had rotated in space, and now it was
accelerating
, and quickly, a most un-planetlike thing for it to do.

“It appears to be projecting an enormous gravitational singularity,” Commander Craig pointed out. “But there still are going to be massive tidal effects.”

“We’re seeing that on the infrared imaging,” Dr. Tina Schuman said. The astrogation-department physicist had been brought into the link just moments before, when the dwarf planet had begun its anomalous rotation. “The surface is heating up. That suggests tidal stress and friction.”

“The straight-line acceleration will be free fall,” Sam Jones,
America
’s exec pointed out. “Just like for a starship. That rotation might have been a jolt, though.”

“They’re going somewhere in a hell of a hurry,” Koenig said. “Where?”

“I’ve got some data coming up on-screen,” Craig said. “But I’m not sure I believe them.”

“And what the hell is that?” Koenig asked.

A portion of the backdrop of stars had been picked out by a small rectangle within his in-head view, then sharply expanded. An insignificant star, one of millions, suddenly appeared ahead as an ethereal, inexpressibly beautiful artifact—six brilliant blue stars in a perfect hexagon.

“Okay,” Captain Buchanan said. “Why the hell didn’t we see that before?”

“I’m checking, sir,” Craig’s voice said.

“I’ve got it,” Koenig’s AI said. “That artifact was on the visual data sent back by Gray’s message drone. I see it here now. But until the dwarf planet’s motion called attention to it, it was lost in the background. I did not at first notice it.” His AI, Koenig thought, sounded almost contrite at having missed the thing.

“Overwhelmed by detail lost among ten million stars,” Koenig said, nodding. “It’s not surprising. This is unknown territory for all of us.” Even AIs couldn’t keep up with everything the fleet’s sensors were bringing in.

“We would have noticed the anomaly eventually,” Karyn’s voice added.

“Okay, now that we see it, I want a complete analysis of that thing. CAG? We need to put some recon probes in that region. How far away is it?

“Approximately half a light year,” his AI said. “Over four point seven quadrillion kilometers.”

“That means a microshift under Alcubierre Drive, and we launch recon ships when we come out. I don’t want to spend the next six months in transit at
c
.”

“Apparently they’re not waiting around either,” Buchanan pointed out. On the screen, the dwarf planet had just blurred, then winked out, enclosed within the Sh’daar equivalent of an Alcubierre bubble.

“Transponder signals lost,” Jones reported.

“We’ll need to proceed cautiously, sir,” Hargrave suggested. “We don’t have accurate metrics of this space.”

Accurate navigation while traveling enmeshed within a bubble of FTL space, unable to see out, required a good understanding of the gravitic “shape” of the volume of space in which you planned to emerge. “Metric” was the technical term for the gravitometric readings of local space taken by both unmanned probes and recon pilots.

In particular, you didn’t want to try to drop into a volume of space where local mass—such as a planet or one of those giant suns in the distance—was so distorting the region that the emerging ship was ripped apart by the differences in the shapes of space itself. In practice, starships approaching a planetary system would drop into normal space out in the local Kuiper Belt, a region beginning about thirty to forty astronomical units out for sunlike stars, closer in for cooler suns, farther out for giants. Out here, though, the battlegroup was working in the dark despite the brilliance of the surrounding star cloud. No one knew what to expect, or what the norms might be.

“I agree,” Koenig said, answering Hargrave’s statement. “But we’re not going to be so cautious we lose the initiative. We seem to have the bastards on the run. I want to keep it that way.”

“We’ll have the figures run for you in fifteen minutes,” Schuman said.

“Pass the word for the fleet to regroup,” Koenig said. “We accelerate in one hour.”

Trevor Gray

Omega Centauri

1427 hours, TFT

The visual feed from the surface of the planet suddenly went black. “Hey!” Gray said. “What’s going on?”

“The feed is still open,” his AI said, “and we’re still getting some infrared.” As if to show him, the AI stepped up the contrast and dropped in an IR filter, which let Gray see the ice surface in muted swaths of blue and deep purple.

“But the stars went out!” Gray protested.

“I would surmise,” the AI replied, “that the planet has just shifted into the Sh’daar equivalent of Alcubierre Drive.”

Gray blinked, at a loss for words. Finally, he managed to stammer, “The . . . the whole
planet
?”

“That would be consistent with the data we have available.”

Human Alcubierre drives achieved faster-than-light travel by bending a pocket of space around the starship, using projected artificial singularities and a
great
deal of energy. While it was flatly impossible for a material object to travel at the speed of light or faster, there was nothing in the rules that said that
space
couldn’t do so; indeed, the best theories about the early life and growth of the universe after the big bang suggested that during the so-called inflationary period, space was expanding at many times the speed of light. Propelled by an asymmetric twist to the leading edge of the gravitic field, the folded-up pocket of space slid through space at between 1.7 and 1.9 light years per day; the spacecraft inside the bubble remained virtually motionless relative to its immediate surroundings.

Folding up the pocket, however, cut the spacecraft off from all connections with the outside universe. There was no way to see out during an FTL passage, which put something of a strain on the ship’s astrogation department to bring the vessel out within the desired target area.

Manipulating space in order to create a fast-moving bubble around even a single starship the size of the
America
took a staggering amount of power, drawn from the virtual or vacuum energy filling the base state of empty space. But to create fields big enough to move a
planet
, even a “pocket planet” like this one . . .

The idea drove home to Gray just how great the technological gulf between the Sh’daar and the Earth Confederation actually was. With technology like this, hell, the Sh’daar could pick up Pluto and slam it into the Earth, and there wouldn’t be a damned thing Humankind could do to stop them. The Turusch had launched an attack on Earth using high-speed KK projectiles half a year ago. The impact in the Atlantic Ocean 3,500 kilometers from the East Coast of North America had killed an estimated 80 million people on four continents. That technology was nothing,
nothing
compared with this.

Another earthquake shudder rippled through the fighter, and abruptly the lights came on once more, stars in their millions filling a rose-white sky. And there, just above the glacier-edged horizon, blazed six blue-hot pinpoints of searing, actinic light. Gray’s AI swiftly stopped down the intensity of the light flooding through the optical link, and by doing so almost certainly saved Gray’s eyes. Those stars were
hot
, and so bright that even with the stopped-down optics it was impossible to look straight at them, and the sky-dome of stars beyond were almost wiped out of view entirely.

And there were other . . .
things
in that alien sky as well.

“I think,” Gray said softly, “that we’ve arrived.”

CIC

TC/USNA CVS
America

Omega Centauri

1525 hours, TFT

“All departments report readiness for acceleration to Alcubierre microshift,” Captain Buchanan told him. “We just need a final determination of our emergence point.”

“All designated battlegroup ships report readiness for acceleration as well,” Commander Craig added.

Koenig nodded. The fleet had pulled together well, and swiftly, even after its rough handling during the battles around both of the TRGA cylinder’s tunnel mouths. A total of eight capital ships had been destroyed, and another five badly damaged enough that they would not be making the transition with the rest of the battlegroup. Between the casualties on both sides of the tunnel, the ships Koenig had ordered to stay and guard the tunnel mouths, and the various stores and maintenance vessels that were also being left behind, there were just twenty-three Confederation warships left to take this final part of the assault to the enemy.

Koenig had ordered the two large carriers into a tight, side-by-side formation surrounded by their escorts.
America
and the
United States
would lead the assault. The third big carrier,
Lincoln
, which had taken some serious damage after her emergence into the Omega Centauri battlespace, was one of the vessels remaining at the TRGA, making sure the fleet had its lines of retreat open should that become necessary. The light carriers
Jeanne d’Arc
and
Illustrious
, together with the Marine assault carriers
Vera Cruz
and
Nassau
, would follow close behind. Among the larger capital ships accompanying the assault group were the railgun cruiser
Kinkaid
, the heavy cruisers
Groznyy
,
Valley Forge
,
Lunar Bay
, and
Saratoga
, and the bombardment vessels
Cheng Hua
and
Ma’at Mons
. The
Cheng Hua
had been shot up pretty badly after emerging from the tunnel’s mouth, but the ship’s skipper had reported that the ship’s damage-repair facilities had plugged the leaks from her shield cap and that all systems were now nominal. Captain Jiang had told Koenig in no uncertain terms that he would
not
be left behind.

Koenig had been impressed enough by the man’s determination that he’d let the hint of insubordination slide.

He stared into the tactical tank, which showed the battlegroup at one side, the destination, a circle of six tiny blue points of light at the other. Half a light year. “How close can we get to those stars without getting fried?” he asked his AI.

A column of data appeared in a new window opening in his mind. “These stars appear close to the known blue giant Zeta Puppis in size and luminosity,” she explained. Data for Zeta Puppis, also called Naos, streamed through his awareness.

S
TAR
:
Zeta Puppis

C
OORDINATES
:
RA: 08
h
03
m
35.1
s
Dec: -40˚ 00' 11.6" D 335p

A
LTERNATE NAMES
:
Naos, Suhail Hadar, HD 66811

T
YPE
:
O5 Laf

M
ASS
:
40 Sol;
R
ADIUS
:
11 Sol;
L
UMINOSITY
:
360,000 Sol (Optical 21,000 Sol)