Singularity: Star Carrier: Book Three (38 page)

“Electronic immortality,” Gray said. “Or as close to immortal as the universe permits.”

“Exactly so.”

“And this is where the ur-Sh’daar went when they transcended?”

“
Some
of them,” the electronic fusion of Thedreh’schul and Dolinar replied. “As I said, many seemed simply to vanish, and may now occupy other dimensional planes of existence or reality that we cannot access . . . or they may be beyond our reach and our awareness for other reasons we cannot begin to comprehend or even imagine.

“The Sh’daar—the Refusers—never understood precisely what happened with the
Schjaa Hok
, the transcendence. They felt . . . abandoned. Even as they rebuilt much of the fallen galactic civilization, they . . . feared what had happened, and they feared what might yet happen if they or other species reached a similar technological singularity and transcended as well.”

“Why?” Gray asked. He gestured at the rock face in front of them, his shadow mimicking both the movement of his arm and his shrug. “It doesn’t look like
they’re
much of a threat!”

“Perhaps not. Especially when one considers how different the flow of time is for them compared to us. They live so slowly that their lives, their thoughts cannot intersect with ours in any meaningful fashion.

“But there were many, many others whom the Refusers feared might still have a presence, watching them, perhaps, from a higher dimension. They became fixated on . . . what the Agletsch call the
dhuthr’a.
You might say ‘ghosts.’

“The idea has terrified the Sh’daar Refusers and their descendents for millennia. The transcendence had a profound effect upon them, and upon how they look at the universe around them. Their attempt to control or limit the technological development of the new species they met within this galaxy, their use of the Sh’daar Seeds to monitor the development of those species . . . all of this was calculated to prevent a new transcendence.”

Gray considered this. “You haven’t been entirely honest with me,” he said after a moment.

The cliff face, the loom of Bifrost, the glaciers and the wan, pinpoint ruby sun all faded away. Gray stood once again beside the spidery form of Thedreh’schul on the surface of a conventionally living world. Millions of brilliant stars cast an illumination as bright as day. Alien towers threaded their way into the glowing, white sky. The Six Suns, Gray thought, must be below the horizon.

For a time, Gray had been assuming that the alien city was an image of the world before it had become dark and ice shrouded. He’d even wondered if it was the same world as the one he’d visited in the docuinteractive—Heimdall, the moon of the gas giant Bifrost circling Kapteyn’s Star.

But what he was being shown simply didn’t fit together right.
Time
, he thought, was seriously out of synch.

“We have told you everything we could, as we understand it,” Thedreh’schul told him.

“And just who do you mean by ‘we’?” Gray asked. “Who’s speaking now? The Sh’daar? Or their Agletsch servants?”

“I represent the Sh’daar.”

“What world is this? The one you’re showing me?”

“The Agletsch call it Gahvrahnetch.”

“Your archives? What you called the ‘Sh’daar operational center’?”

“Yes.”

“And you’ve been lying to me. Or at least not telling me the
entire
truth.”

“We have told you everything we could, as we understand—”

Gray felt the jolt transmitted through the ground. For an instant, the simulation wavered and flickered out, and once again he was sitting within the close, darkened cockpit of his fighter.

Then the alien city reappeared.

“What was that? What just happened?”

“Your fleet has arrived in local spacetime,” Thedreh’schul replied. “They are attacking this world.”

“
Which
world?” Gray demanded. “The mobile planet where you’re keeping me? Or what you called the Sh’daar operational center?”

The imaginal world flickered again, and again Gray sat alone in the darkness.

Lieutenant Shay Ryan

Omega Centauri

1548 hours, TFT

Lieutenant Shay Ryan saw the white flare of a detonating Krait missile on the icy surface ahead just as she loosed a pair of her own Kraits. The objective planet, AIS-1, loomed from tiny to immense in a flash, and for a brief interval blurred past her port side as an immense wall.

After accelerating at fifty thousand gravities for seventy-two seconds, she was traveling at over 36,000 kilometers per second, and the objective world, a dwarf planet barely a thousand kilometers across, had dwindled to a point astern before her human reflexes had time to react.

Her AI, though, had acquired distinct targets on the icy surface and loosed the Kraits precisely on the mark. The targets appeared to be enormous gravitational projectors half buried into the surface, and were probably part of either the dwarf planet’s shielding or the means by which its owners moved it through space. Installation after installation vaporized within the glare of one hundred megaton explosions, however, as the flight of Starhawks flashed past. Her AI, with reflexes far quicker than those of organic beings, captured imagery from the world.

The icy sphere was now a world of horrific storms and violently swirling winds. A kind of cometary tail stretched away from the world now, a pale, white luminescence propelled by the intense light and radiation of the Six Suns.

AIS-1, with a diameter of less than 800 kilometers, was a close twin to the frigid dwarf planets Makemake or Haumea within the Kuiper Belt of Earth’s solar system. Halfway between the dwarf planets Pluto and Ceres in size, its surface temperature while it had been adrift in open space half a light year away had dropped to a few tens of degrees Kelvin. Massive enough to have compressed itself into a spherical body rather than a potato-shaped planetoid, its surface consisted of frozen methane and nitrogen.

In interstellar space, of course, any atmosphere the worldlet possessed had been frozen out, leaving an achingly cold surface beneath hard vacuum. Hours earlier, however, the dwarf planet had emerged from faster-than-light within the liquid-water zone of the Six Suns, and the frozen surface had begun to boil. Already, AIS-1 was surrounded by a tenuous envelope of gaseous methane and nitrogen. As the surface temperature had lifted above 63 degrees K, the nitrogen had begun sublimating directly from solid to gas. At 91 degrees K, the methane had begun to liquefy, then to sublimate directly into the thickening atmosphere.

The surface temperature now was passing 112 degrees Kelvin—minus 161 Celsius—and even liquid methane was beginning to vaporize. The atmosphere was still extremely thin, but the rocketing surface temperatures were generating fierce storms, as the Six Suns continued to blow traces of the warming gas off into space like a comet’s tail.

As she passed the world, Ryan’s AI had flipped her fighter end-for-end and begun to decelerate. Facing now the day side of ASI-1, she targeted another large surface structure and triggered her Starhawk’s PBP-2. Tightly focused proton beams, charged particles moving at just beneath the speed of light, slashed through the turgidly churning white clouds above the surface and clawed at half-buried gravitic projectors and field-bleed towers.

So far, there was no sign of enemy fighters, no indication of a defense. . . .

CIC

TC/USNA CVS
America

Omega Centauri

1549 hours, TFT

“Admiral,” Commander Sinclair said, “the last of the fighters are away.”

It had been a fast drop—just twenty-eight fighters, plus ten recon Shadowhawks from the Sneaky Peaks. Those last would not be engaging in combat, but their eyes and electronic ears would be invaluable in this strange and alien space.

“Very well,” Koenig said. “Captain Buchanan? You may accelerate.”

“Aye, aye, Admiral.
America
is under acceleration.”

At five hundred gravities,
America
would accelerate for eight and a half minutes, then begin decelerating until she arrived at AIS-1 with near-zero relative velocity, a total flight time of 1,023 seconds, or a bit over than seventeen minutes. The
Nassau
should arrive at AIS-1 a minute and a half later.

Other ships were already on their way, and would be arriving at the mobile planet a couple of minutes ahead of
America
. And more ships were dropping into
America
’s radio horizon, now; ships that had emerged four light minutes away—half an AU—were now on the carrier’s screens and receiving her orders.

Ponderously, the fleet was deploying to converge on the tiny dwarf planet.

The tactical tank in CIC showed a curious lack of enemy fighters or capital ships, other than the handful docked at several large, orbital facilities. That wouldn’t last. If, as Koenig thought, AIS-1 was of some strategic importance to the Sh’daar, they would
have
to defend it.

In another twenty minutes, the issue should be decided, one way or the other.

Operation Bright Thunder called for grabbing it so quickly that they didn’t have time to get into position. It was a race now, with both sides attempting to grab the metaphorical high ground around AIS-1.

Trevor Gray

Omega Centauri

1550 hours, TFT

Gray felt the repeated shudders rippling through the rock and ice of a world. CBG-18 was giving the dwarf planet a hell of a shellacking.

He wondered if the Dragonfires were up there, what was left of them—Shay and Rissa and Ben. “Is there any way to communicate with our ships?” he asked his PA.

“Negative,” the AI replied. “I have been sensing radio impulses through the fighter’s emergency beacon transponders. The Fleet almost certainly knows we’re here. But I cannot open a voice or Net communications channel. The Sh’daar are blocking it.”

“Can you pick up the Sh’daar? Can we talk to them?”

“I may have a possible channel to the Sh’daar. There is a signal—what amounts to a carrier channel for the simulation feed. And I can pick up what is almost certainly side bands or leakage from an artificial intelligence on that channel, possibly the same one that was communicating with us a short time ago.”

“What’s your impression?” Gray asked. “That AI . . . is it software? Or some sort of blend of organic intelligence and software?” He knew the feeling was irrational, but he desperately wanted to talk to a person, an organic intelligence, rather than a tool.

At the same time, he knew that AIs like those commonly used in the Confederation were just as intelligent—and quite likely far more so—than any human.

“It is impossible to tell. Remember that human-derived AIs were originally designed to so perfectly mimic specific humans that outside agencies could not tell the difference. We may be facing a similar identity problem here.”

Gray had to accept this pronouncement. In fact, most humans he knew, now, were themselves blends of flesh and blood and of nanochelated carbon, silicon, and synthetics. And when someone else talked to Gray on the Net, in a virtual reality sim, he was in fact interacting with Gray’s electronic avatar,
and it didn’t really matter which was which
.

“See if you can connect with it . . . whatever it is,” Gray said.

A long minute passed.

And then the alien appeared.

It wasn’t an image of Thedreh’schul this time, but of one of the sea-star aliens, the species identified as Groth Hoj. The entire body appeared to be a writhing mass of tendrils a meter or more in length. Some of those tendrils ended in swellings that were probably eyes or other sensory apparatus, while others ended in three-jawed mouths. The vast majority, however, appeared to be manipulatory members. The central mass was a deep, lustrous, almost gleaming black; the tips of the tentacles, however, were rainbow hued and iridescent, and as the tentacles writhed and twisted, the colors changed.

Thedreh’schul had said something about the Groth Hoj communicating by color changes of their tentacles. Gray hesitated. How the hell did you understand something that talked to you by changing body color? And how did you make it understand the sounds coming from your mouth when it might not even have ears, or any concept of what spoken language was?

Then he realized that if he was seeing the Groth Hoj in a simulation, it must have some way of linking in with the local Net . . . and that meant that it could understand Gray if Gray was on that Net as well. He didn’t know how it was done . . . but evidently the Sh’daar had tapped into his electronic presence earlier and learned enough.

He would have to trust the technology, even though he couldn’t understand it.