Singularity: Star Carrier: Book Three (32 page)

“The Agletsch claim that no client race has ever confronted the Sh’daar directly. If so, we’ll be the first . . . and I expect that it will come as something of a shock for them. That, at any rate, is what we’re gambling on.

“Our expectation,” Koenig added, “is that the mobile planet is retreating toward those six stars. We will follow them, assess the situation when we arrive, and move to gain the upper hand tactically and locally immediately. We will then use the Seed within one of our tame Agletsch to attempt to get into direct contact with the Sh’daar leadership there.”

“What is the range of those Seeds, anyway?” Aliyev, the dour skipper of the
Groznyy
, put in.

“Dra’ethde and Gru’mulkisch aren’t sure,” Koenig replied. “Certainly they appear to operate over a range of at least several light minutes. They seem to respond to and work off of the local Sh’daar information systems network, if one is available. I suspect that the main limiting factor is the speed of light . . . and the time constraints that imposes on two-sided conversations.”

Koenig studied the group for a moment, gauging its emotional currents. They were excited, he thought, keyed to a high point of expectancy, but they were with him.

“It will take another fifteen hours to reach near-
c
,” Koenig told them, “and a little over six hours more to make the half-light-year microshift. We will emerge some three thousand astronomical units from the gravitational center of the suns. We estimate that that will actually be within the life zone of those stars, far enough out that water is liquid.

“If we can find the mobile planet, General Mathers will land his Marines there and attempt to establish a beachhead, which the fleet can use as a field projection center. That should give us enough breathing room to make contact with them. The fact that that planet retreated before we could approach it suggests that it may be, at the very least, some form of command-control center, and as such would be an appropriate target. It’s a place for us to begin, at any rate.

“Questions?”

“Yes, sir,” Charles Michel, the captain of the Pan-European
Jeanne d’Arc
, said. “What about the rumor that we are no longer within our own galaxy?”

Koenig nodded. He’d been expecting the question. Karyn had told him that rumor to that effect—scuttlebutt, to use the acepted naval terminology—was spreading rapidly throughout the fleet.

“We’ve uploaded what we know to the fleet net,” he replied. “Unfortunately, we don’t know a lot. Inside this cluster, we can’t see out, so we can’t check navigational markers in the Milky Way. We believe we’re quite close to the center of the cluster—the chances are good that the Six Suns mark the actual gravitational center. Once this action is resolved, we may be able to send a reconnaissance mission a hundred or a hundred fifty light years out to have a look around.

“I think the thing to keep in mind is that it doesn’t matter if we’re inside our own galaxy or in some other galaxy halfway across the cosmos. The TRGA provides a quick and efficient shortcut. So long as we control both tunnel mouths, we will be able to make it back to Texaghu Resch. Okay?”

Captain Michel’s image nodded but did not look particularly happy. Koenig couldn’t blame him. If the Sh’daar had some means of switching the TRGA off, CBG-18 would be trapped here, wherever “here” might be. Much worse from a tactical point of view, the TRGA created a tactical bottleneck; if things went bad at the Six Suns, surviving Confederation vessels would have to hightail it back to the tunnel, and the enemy knew this. They could have a fleet there ready and waiting. . . .

Best not to think about that, since there was nothing that could be done about it in any case.

“Sir.” It was Captain Charles Whitlow of the star carrier
United States of North America.

“Yes, Captain?”

“There’s also a rumor that you’re going in after a couple of
America
’s lost pilots. The two beacons on AIS-1.”

“
Not
true. At least, they’re not the primary reason for this deployment. If we can rescue those men, fantastic . . . but our goal is to grab the Sh’daar by whatever they have for balls and hang on until they agree to negotiate.”

He hesitated before continuing. “I think all of you know by now that I put a high premium on the battlegroup’s personnel, on bringing them all back safe and sound . . . but we’re also well aware of the realities of war. It does not make sense to risk fifty thousand men and women for two men. But risking them to stop this war, to preserve what we have back home, to secure the safety of Earth, our families, our species . . .
that
, ladies and gentlemen, is why we’re here.

He paused for a long moment, allowing for any further questions or remarks, but there were none.

“If any of you have problems with
any
of this, or more questions, I urge you to contact me or my staff. While command of a battlegroup—like command of a single ship—is not a democratic process, this will be a volunteer mission. Those of you who do not wish to proceed with the Alcubierre jump can opt out, decelerate, and return to the TRGA.

“You should all know that I have also directed that a complete copy of my log, including all of my decisions and our actions to date, has been placed in one of
America
’s remaining Sleipnirs. By now, it has returned through the TRGA and is on its way to Earth. I intend to dispatch another as soon as we emerge at the Six Suns. The Confederation needs to know what’s going down out here.”

The HAMP-20 Sleipnir-class mail packet was the fastest means of communication available to the fleet. It could manage a thousand Gs of acceleration, and under Alcubierre Drive could cross 5.33 light years per day.

At that rate, starting from Texaghu Resch, it would take the Sleipnir thirty-nine days to cross the 210 light years to Earth.

“Questions?”

There were none.

“We will continue acceleration, shifting to metaspace at 0910 hours tomorrow, and with emergence on target at 1545.

“That is all.”

And the images of the CBG’s senior officers began winking out.

Junior Officers’ Quarters

TC/USNA CVS
America

Omega Centauri

1930 hours, TFT

Shay was hard at work building the city of Washington.

Physically, she was in her occutube in her quarters, linked in through a sim builder. The software was designed to let ship’s personnel create their own private worlds for downtime or relaxation, and included a sizable library of existing sims for most of the North-American metropolis—New New York; Columbus, D.C.; the Newbraska Metroplex; the SanSan Towers. There were international sites like Quito and Geneva, and a number of offworld sites were available as well—Copernicus Under, Chryse, New Egypt, Kore, and others. It didn’t have the Periphery Ruins, though, like Manhattan or the old D.C., and so she was building the sim herself.

She wasn’t sure why she was bothering with it. God, she’d hated the Washington Swamp when she lived there, before her family had finally moved north out of the Periphery to the Bethesda Enclave. Somehow, though, as her tour of duty on board the
America
dragged on, she’d found herself remembering the swamps with something approaching genuine affection.

What the hell was wrong with her?

She’d actually started with a Jurassic sim, a fantasy world of mangrove swamps and brackish water. She’d edited out the wildlife—today’s Washington Swamp didn’t include dinosaurs or pterodactyls—as well as the shrill screams, bellows, and jungle titterings in the background. Using tools from the sim builder, she’d begun adding the shells and island-debris piles of buildings and half-swallowed monuments, working from memory. She was pretty far along, now. She’d finished the stump of the old Washington Monument, thrusting up from its rubble pile and partially shrouded in rampant kudzu. The white husks of the Smithsonian buildings were in place as well, rising like crumbled cliffs to either side of the broad expanse of water that once had been the Mall, and the Capitol Building on its island to the east. The Reagan Trade Tower; the DuPont Arcology; the ruin of the Connecticut Circle Complex, where she’d lived with her family, farming the broad rooftop enclosure with its shattered glass dome—she’d completed all of those, and more. She was working now on modeling the buildings along the Kalorama Heights, rising from thickly wooded land high enough to have escaped the general flooding of the low-lying ground to the south. In her mind’s eye, she painted the rugged hillside along the Rock Creek Estuary, cloaking it in gnarled swamp oaks dripping with Spanish moss. South, past the massive white cylinder of the DuPont, it was all mangroves.

She was having trouble modeling people, though. The standard tool set with the software let her import background people, anything from individual friends to the thronging hordes of Ad Astra Plaza, but they tended to be of a uniform type: squeaky clean and smiling, wearing anything from skin-suit utilities to pure light. You never saw a rooftop farmer with dirty hands and cracked nails . . . or a fish trapper with straggly hair and wearing filthy rags. No oil-stained mechanics, no wrinkled olders, no frollops or polesters, no barge dwellers, no commuwatchers with their handcrafted bows, no
Prims
.

But that was okay, because it wasn’t the people she missed so much as the solitude. Despite the constant danger of raids by Prim rebels from the far side of the Potomac Estuary, Shay had never been happier, she thought, than when she was alone in her skiff, checking the fish traps among the mangrove roots along the placid, dark waters over what once had been the Washington Mall.

Her project, she’d decided, was mostly a means of helping herself get used to her implants. As a non-citizen Prim, she’d not been eligible for even the free and most basic set. That had never been a problem so far as she was concerned. Most folks in the Periphery didn’t want the Authority electronically peering into their business in any case, and if there was no such thing as universal health care or Net access, there were also no taxes, no registration checks, and no security scans. Not until she’d joined the Navy and received the standard military issue implants during basic training had she been able to interface with the electronic world around her. She used her cybernetic implants now, of course, for everything from downloading morning briefings to ordering breakfast to piloting her Starhawk, but it wasn’t until she could express herself with them
creatively
that they truly felt a part of her.

So why this longing for the Washington Swamp?

Most likely, she thought, it was because when she’d lived in the swamp she’d been free. There’d been rules within the community, of course, but for the most part, people had left her alone and she could be herself. As a Navy aviator, she was constantly under someone’s eye—if not that of her squadron leader and the CAG and his staff, then the eyes of her squadron mates who still thought she was a little odd, a little different, just because she was a Prim.

Well, fuck them all, very much. . . .

A light winked within her consciousness. Someone Outside wanted her. She queried, and Lieutenant Rissa Schiff’s name appeared.

Now, what in hell? . . .

Shay saved her work, then disconnected from the program. The humid swamp of the Washington ruins faded away, and she lay once more within the narrow confines of her enclosed rack. The end of the occutube dilated open and she grabbed the handholds and pulled herself out.

Rissa Schiff stood in the middle of the compartment, wearing her Navy grays and looking distraught. Her face was red, the eyes puffy. She’d been crying.

“Ms. Schiff?” Shay said, concerned. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

“I’m sorry,” Schiff said. “I . . . I . . . I don’t know why I’m here. I need to talk, I guess. . . .”

“About what?” But Shay knew the answer before the words were out. “Oh . . . him.”

“Sandy . . . Lieutenant Gray. I’d hoped . . . I’d hoped we’d find him on this side of the Triggah.”

Shay sighed. “I know. So did I.” She thoughtclicked an icon in her mind, and a seat big enough for two people grew out of deck and bulkhead behind them. Shay put her arm around Schiff and sat her down. “You miss him, don’t you?”

“Of
course
I miss him! Don’t you?”

Shay nodded. “Of course I do.”

It was an awkward moment for her. One of the defining cultural characteristics of most Prim communities was a somewhat antiquated belief in monogamy, the close and exclusive pairing of two people sexually, socially, and economically. Social anthropologists liked to point out that in the savage surroundings of many Prim communities, a close-paired couple had a better chance of survival than an individual . . . or than a line or poly grouping. The idea of bonding with just one other person sexually seemed quaint at best, a mild perversion at worst; it was different,
alien
, a break with the accepted civilized norms of civilized North American and European culture.