Singularity: Star Carrier: Book Three (30 page)

S
URFACE TEMPERATURE
:
~39,000
o
K

A
GE
:
4 million years

A
PPARENT MAGNITUDE
(Sol): 2.21;
A
BSOLUTE MAGNITUDE
:
-5.96

D
ISTANCE FROM
S
OL
:
1,093
LY

P
LANETARY SYSTEM
:
None known

“Damned bright,” Koenig observed.

“Indeed. If Zeta Puppis were as close to Earth as Sol,” Karyn Mendelson’s voice continued, “it would appear to be twenty times larger in the sky and twenty thousand times brighter. Earth’s surface would be heated to around six thousand one hundred degrees Kelvin, and ultimately the planet would be completely vaporized.

“For a planet to enjoy Earthlike temperatures in orbit around Zeta Puppis, it would have to be at least four hundred fifty astronomical units away—about eleven times the distance of Pluto from the sun.”

“And there are
six
giants out there that hot and bright. Does that mean six times the distance for one, if we want to find a zone with habitable temperatures?”

“Not necessarily. We calculate that each star is approximately fifty AUs from its nearest neighbors, in a ring nearly one hundred AUs across. The amount of radiation any given volume of space receives will depend on the aspect of the stellar ring, and the total will not necessarily be cumulative. We estimate that habitable zone temperatures will be found at roughly two thousand to two thousand five hundred AUs from the artifact’s central point.”

Koenig ran the numbers through his in-head math processor. A light year, he knew, measured close to 63,000 astronomical units. “About four one hundredths of a light year.”

“Precisely.”

“CAG? All of our chicks back on board?”

“All fighters recovered or accounted for, Admiral.”

“Punch it,” Koenig said.

And the battlegroup punched.

Even though the final determination of where they were accelerating
to
had not yet been made.

That dwarf planet had accelerated into the distance, together with a huge number of surviving enemy warships, then folded space about itself and slipped off at faster than light, exhibiting yet again the marked superiority, the sheer
elegance
of Sh’daar technology compared to human-designed systems. Some of their client races, notably the H’rulka, showed similar superiorities in style and technique, though they’d never demonstrated anything close to this. The ships of the human fleet would have to accelerate at five hundred gravities for 16.6 hours in order to push close to the speed of light. Only at 0.997
c
could they use their relativistic mass to warp space into the tightly knotted bubbles that would allow them to outpace light itself.

Over sixteen and a half hours.

The assault force hadn’t fully bought into the idea of pursuing that planet . . . and Koenig wasn’t going to phrase this one as an order.

Especially when such monumental questions about the Sh’daar, about who and what they were, were yet staring Koenig in the face.

As the minutes passed and the fleet continued to accelerate, Koenig continued to study the tactical tank. After a time, he pulled in another download of astronomical data, searching through all of the information stored there on the Omega Centauri cluster. What he saw there—or, more precisely, what he
didn’t
see—had been bothering him.

“Astrogation department,” he said.

“Yes, Admiral?” He’d linked through to Dr. Tina Schuman.

“I’ve got a question.”

“We have a lot more questions than answers right now, Admiral. But I’ll take a shot.”

“Six hot, blue Type O stars in a tight grouping just about one hundred AUs across. That must give off a hell of a lot of ultraviolet and X-ray radiation.”

“They do.”

“Enough that they should have been seen by astronomers on Earth studying Omega Centauri.”

There was a long pause on the other end. “Yes, Admiral. They should have been.”

“But I’ve seen nothing about them in the data on the cluster.”

“No, sir. And that’s been bothering us as well.”

“What data do you have that actually identifies this cluster as Omega Centauri?”

He heard her sigh. “Not all that much, actually, Admiral. Mostly it’s the estimated number of stars—about ten million—and the estimated diameter of the cluster—about two hundred thirty light years. The distribution of spectral types is roughly the same as well.”

“You also mentioned stellar markers when we talked before. Stellar fingerprints.”

“Yes, sir. Absorption lines in some of the cooler stars that appear to be unique to those stars. What we saw in Lieutenant Gray’s data—what we’re seeing
now
—appears to match fairly closely with the spectra of several stars in the cluster studied from Earth.”

“But
our
Omega Centauri doesn’t have those six blue stars. I’d have thought they could have been seen pretty easily from Earth.”

He was looking at an astrophotograph taken by an Earth-orbital robot telescope called the Hubble, in the early twenty-first century. It showed the heart of the Omega Centauri cluster, a thick array of multihued suns.

There was no sign of the anomalous hexagon.

“But those six stars are obviously artificial, Admiral. Or at least they were engineered from pre-existing stars by bringing them together, allowing them to merge as artificial blue stragglers. Our assumption is that they were made sometime recently, within the past fifteen thousand years, anyway.”

“So the light from those stars hasn’t had time to reach Earth yet.”

“Exactly, sir.”

“How does that sit with you, Doctor?”

“I beg your pardon, sir?”

“Does that seem to be a likely explanation?”

“Sir, it’s just about the
only
explanation.”

“Is there any way to determine how old those stars are from here?”

“Well, they’re obviously quite young. Definitely less than five million years in terms of stellar evolution. Any older, and they’d have started to evolve toward the red super-giant phase of their life.”

Such intensly hot, massive young stars, Koenig knew, lived fast, furious, and very brief lives, at least as stars measured things. Stars that hot would burn up their stores of hydrogen, evolve through the spectral types from blue to yellow to red, then detonate in a supernova, probably after a total life span of less than 10 million years.

“But you can’t tell if they’re less than fifteen thousand years old.”

“No, sir.”

“And you can’t tell me anything about the stars that were used to form them.”

“No, sir. When two stars merge, that resets the clock. We can assume that the original stars were Population II giants—probably red giants. We’re working on the assumption that whoever manufactured those stars actually brought together a large number of such stars.”

“Why is that?”

“Those stars up ahead each run to about forty solar masses,” she replied. “Rather than bringing together two twenty-solar-mass suns, it seems more likely that they merged a larger number of smaller stars.”

“Maybe tossing in a new star each time the fires started to burn low.”

“Possibly.”

“Except that it would take several million years for the new sun to start to cool. And that means the light would have reached Earth long ago. We’d have seen them from home.”

“Yes, sir. As I said, we have more questions than answers.”

“Thank you, Doctor.”

“There’s something else you should know, sir.”

“What’s that?”

“Well, we’ve been studying this volume of space since we came through the TRGA, of course,” she told him. “And we’ve found another anomaly.”

“What’s that?”

“There appears to be more gas and dust in this cluster than we know exists in Omega Centauri.”

“Gas and dust?”

“Typical globular clusters have almost no gas. They used it all up in a single burst of star formation around twelve billion years ago. Omega Centauri consists of several generations of stars, suggesting that star formation continued for some time after the cluster’s creation, but most of the gas was still used up, oh, nine billion years ago or so.

“Sir . . . it’s quite possible that this isn’t Omega Centauri after all.”

Which left, of course, the question of just where the carrier battlegroup was at the moment.

“Can you figure out where we are?”

“Not with the local stellar density, Admiral. We’re going to need to get outside of the cluster so that we can see the starscape around us, the rest of the galaxy. We should be able to tell from that . . . assuming we’re still within our galaxy, of course.”

There was a chilling thought.

“Very well,” Koenig said. “Keep at it, and let me know if anything turns up I should know about.”

“Of course, Admiral.”

Omega Centauri was distinctive, Koenig knew, in its diameter, its slight flattening at its poles, and in its huge number of stars. It was, he remembered, the second largest cluster ever identified . . . and the largest, Mayall II, was in the Andromeda galaxy, 2.3 million light years away.

Perhaps this cluster was on the far side of Earth’s galaxy, hidden from Earth by the dust and gas of the galactic core.

It shouldn’t matter. So long as they had the tunnel secure, so long as they could find their way back there, it shouldn’t matter.

But God in heaven, where were they?

And how far were they now from home?

Trevor Gray

Omega Centauri

1530 hours, TFT

For almost an hour, Gray had studied that strange, that impossible, sky, trying to make sense of it. The flattened circle of brilliant blue suns, some two degrees across its longest dimension—spanning an area as wide as four full moons seen from Earth—hung low in the sky, casting hard-edged shadows off the glaciers in the distance, and dazzling the eyes with sheets of ice. His Starhawk, he knew, was stopping down the incoming light considerably; the illumination above the planet’s surface was so high that he would have been instantly blinded otherwise.

The ice outside, he noticed, was beginning to steam.

Hanging in the sky were a number of other anomalous objects, each harshly illuminated by the six suns, with hard-edged contrast between light and shadow. It was impossible to get a sense of scale or distance, but two of them, Gray saw, were identical to the TRGA cylinder, hard, tiny knots imbedded in larger, fuzzy glows of gold and blue light twisted by their intense gravitational masses.

There were also planets, several of them, showing as hard-edged crescents bowed away from the intense glare of the stars. And there were other things . . . huge starships, perhaps, or orbital manufactories, or drifting facilities of less easily discernable purpose. The impression Gray had was that whoever had designed this . . . this place had parked ships and worlds and factories and transit systems close enough to the obviously artificial arrangement of suns to draw on their energy, but far enough out to avoid being vaporized.

“AI,” he said. “How far are we from those suns? Must be pretty far out. . . .”

There was no answer, and Gray felt a sharp stab of panic.

“AI!”

There was no one there.

And an instant later, everything went black. Gray was again alone, sitting in the darkness of his Starhawk cockpit, somewhere inside the mobile alien planet.

He took a deep breath, and worked to control the rising fear. There had to be a logical explanation. . . .

His own internal AI, his personal assistant, was intact and operating. A low-end model residing within the nanochelated circuitry implants within his brain and parts of his nervous system, it possessed neither sentience nor a simulated personality. Having been born and raised out in the Periphery, beyond the reach of “proper” North-American civilization, he’d not received one as a child entering the education track. His had been issued to him the first day he’d arrived at basic training. It allowed him to interface with the electronic world around him, communicate with others, download data from local networks, and receive other very basic services, but he couldn’t
talk
to it.