Singularity: Star Carrier: Book Three (42 page)

Gray’s KK Gatling spoke again, and this time the recoil was savage, shoving the fighter backward like a rocket burst. His AI compensated, juggling the gravitic projection to wrench the ship back under control before it could slam into something; three hi-vel rounds struck the targeted Sh’daar soldier with the sort of energy generally released only in combat in open space, punching through armor with the force of a small detonating warhead.

The armored figure came apart in a haze of vaporizing metal. Gray was already jockeying the fighter around, centering the target cursor on another moving, false-color figure and triggering a second burst. And a third. And a fourth . . .

Colonel John Murcheson

Objective Gold, AIS-1

1618 hours, TFT

“What the fuck was
that
?” a Marine yelled, ducking as fragments of high-velocity metal sparked off the deck and a nearby bulkhead. In front of her, one of the hulking, silver giants had just exploded, the upper half of its body disintegrating in hurtling bits of shrapnel.

“The zorchie’s giving us a hand!” Murcheson yelled back. “Pour it on!”

And the Marines began advancing once more.

Trevor Gray

Omega Centauri

1619 hours, TFT

Gray nudged his Starhawk closer and yet closer to the embattled Marines, using the fighter’s super-human senses to locate pockets of Sh’daar troops and target them. The enemy continued to concentrate their fire on him, but his screens shunted the particle bursts aside.

And then the enemy troops were running, bounding in long, low-G leaps across the deck and vanishing into dilated openings in the bulkheads.

“The Sh’daar wish to speak with us,” his AI told him.

“The fucking Sh’daar can fucking
wait
,” Gray replied. “Open a channel to the Marines.”

“Channel open.”

“This is Lieutenant Gray, Confederation Navy,” he said. “Thanks for coming after me.”

“This is Colonel Murcheson,” a voice replied. “Thank you for the assist. We appreciate you joining the party.”

“Anytime. I’m coming up to your perimeter now.”

“Come ahead. It looks like the black hats have decided to call it quits . . . at least for the moment.”

He let his fighter drift in for a landing in a brightly illuminated circle ringed by armed and black-armored Confederation Marines.

“Wait a sec, guys,” he said as Marines moved forward to help him down from the cockpit. “Someone wants to talk to me.”

And he opened another channel.

CIC

TC/USNA CVS
America

Omega Centauri

1619 hours, TFT

“Admiral Koenig.” The voice of Dra’ethde, one of the Agletsch on board, sounded in Koenig’s mind. “A . . . simulation of an Agletsch that calls herself Thedreh’schul has opened a channel through the Sh’daar Seed residing within Gru’mulkisch and wishes to speak with you. She claims to represent the Sh’daar.”

“I . . . see,” Koenig said. Something inside him sagged. To have come so far . . . “They’re offering us surrender terms?”

“No, Admiral. Unless we are mistaken, it appears that the Sh’daar are surrendering to
you
. Yes-no?”

Trevor Gray

Omega Centauri

1619 hours, TFT

The transition from flat-out combat, with Marines and Navy battling at the ragged edge of survival, to peace was so abrupt as to be disconcerting. Linked through his AI, Gray connected with the Sh’daar mind, and realized that the enemy had ceased fighting throughout the volume of the grounded ship, throughout the volume of local space surrounding AIS-1. A species capable of using
planets
as starships was requesting a cease-fire, requesting negotiations, possibly offering peace.

He stood once again on the barren surface of Heimdall. The simulated image of Frank Dolinar appeared before him, standing in front of the crumbling, rusty cliffs of an ancient Sh’daar computer.

A computer intended to last for eons, to house an artificial world, to create a refuge from the universe for a species capable of manipulating and re-engineering stars.

“It is imperative,” Dolinar said . . . and this time he spoke in his own voice, rather than with that of an Agletsch translator, “that this fighting stop. Your actions threaten the Gateway of Creation.”

And in the simulated sky behind Dolinar’s image appeared the eerie wheel of the Six Suns, their harsh blue light glinting off steaming cliffs of ice.

“Those stars?” Gray asked. “How are we a threat to
those
?”

“Perhaps not to the stars themselves,” Dolinar’s image said, “but to the future beyond them.”

Gray did not understand.

But he would.

4 July 2405

CIC

TC/USNA CVS
America

Omega Centauri

1725 hours, TFT

There were levels, it seemed, of high-tech heaven. Apparently some of those levels could be interpreted as hells by the others. Three days after the Battle of the Six Suns, Koenig was still trying to understand.

The polity of alien civilizations collectively known as the Sh’daar, apparently, was made up of a number of organic species that were already extinct. They—or copies of “they”—existed still as patterns of electronic information, as data residing within a far-flung network of advanced and interconnected computers. The Sh’daar of today were entirely digital.

The young lieutenant, Trevor Gray, had provided the download channels of the Sh’daar. In simulation, Koenig had gone back through a series of virtual worlds, scenes revealing the history of the civilization now designated as the
ur
-Sh’daar, the original, organic forebears of the Sh’daar of today. He’d watched the civilization spanning its tiny, dwarf galaxy during its approach to the vast spiral of the Milky Way, watched its growing concern at having the bright, coherent light of a billion years of history spread out among the larger galaxy’s immensity, scattered, and lost. He’d watched, fascinated, as the
ur
-Sh’daar collapsed entire suns into the fast-rotating cylinders, the inside-out Tipler machines that would give them shortcut access to the looming galactic spiral ahead.

And he watched as the member races of the
ur
-Sh’daar began vanishing, first one by one, then by the thousands, the millions, the billions, and the trillions, the individuals of a galactic culture evaporating into . . . otherness.

There were no clear, hard answers as to where they went, and it was possible that the question itself was meaningless. Higher dimensions, alternate worlds, and timelines, hidden pockets in space or behind space . . . it was probable that language—whether English, Agletsch, or
Drukrhu
, the artificial
Lingua Galactica
of verbal Sh’daar client species—simply didn’t have the words or, more important, the
concept
to frame the reality. The Agletsch phrase was
Schjaa Hok,
the “Time of Change.”

Humans called it transcendence, or the Technological Singularity, the point at which technology and organic intelligence so completely merged that they passed into what amounted to hyper-accelerated evolution, vanishing beyond the ken of those who remained behind.

And there
were
left-behinds. They called themselves, Koenig learned,
V’laa’n Grah
, which meant something approximately like “the Forsaken” or “the Abandoned Ones.” Many were organic beings, but they tended to be flesh-and-blood individuals who’d rejected the accelerating trend of technological advancement in the specific sciences of genetics, robotics, information systems, and nanotechnology—the GRIN driver technologies long thought to be leading to Humankind’s eventual and inevitable transcendence. The biological species left behind after the
Schjaa Hok
had gone into decline and become extinct within a few thousand years of the destruction of their civilization. All that had remained were the digital shadows of once flesh-and-blood intelligences, residing within the computer networks that spanned their tiny galaxy.

That remnant was determined to re-establish the collapsed
ur
-Sh’daar civilization and to keep it safe. To do so, they would establish colonies within the larger galaxy up ahead, make contact with as many civilizations native to that galaxy as possible, and attempt to enforce a certain stability, even
stasis
, in the pace of their technological advancement.

The vast majority of species throughout the larger spiral galaxy, it seemed, were nontechnic. They’d evolved in deep oceans, beneath planet-wide icecaps, or within anoxic atmospheres that forbade fires and the easy smelting of metals. Others, even native to worlds with atmospheres rich in oxygen, developed civilizations emphasizing philosophy or religion rather than science, meditation or contemplation rather than technology, the liberal arts rather than engineering. Those few who developed technic civilizations became the special targets of the Sh’daar infiltration. Most of these accepted computer implants, the Sh’daar Seed, each functioning as a node, a tiny component of a far vaster network intelligence.

And those who rejected the Sh’daar Ultimatum were exterminated. The Sh’daar still remembered, after all, how to gravitationally manipulate the cores of stars.

But what none of those targeted races had understood—none until now, at any rate—was that the Sh’daar’s reach had not only been through space, but through
time
.

Officer’s Lounge

TC/USNA CVS
America

Omega Centauri

1850 hours, TFT

“It was staring at us the whole time,” Koenig said. “We knew that Tipler machines allowed transit vectors through space
and
time.”

“Einstein pointed out that it’s not ‘space and time,’ ” Commander Costigan pointed out. “It’s
spacetime
. You can’t separate the two.”

Koenig was standing in the officers lounge one level below the bridge and CIC in
America
’s command tower. With him were Randy Buchanan,
America
’s skipper, and several members of the CIC command staff—Sinclair, Craig, and others. CAG Wizewski was there too, along with Costigan, who was head of the battlegroup’s intelligence department. Suspended in the intergalactic Void in astonishing and high-resolution detail across the dome overhead glowed the Galaxy of Man.

The viewpoint was that of just 120 light years from
America
’s current position at the core of Omega Centauri. Shortly after the collapse of the Sh’daar defenses, Koenig had dispatched a mail packet to travel that distance, look around, and return.
This
was what it had seen.

“It takes some getting used to,” Buchanan observed. “It doesn’t feel like we’re almost a billion years in the past.”

“What is the past
supposed
to feel like, Randy?” Koenig asked. “It’s just another set of coordinates in spacetime.”

The intergalactic vista they were studying was hidden from the core of Omega Centauri, masked by the thick-packed wall of 10 million suns that comprised the dwarf galaxy’s innermost core. Just 120 light years away from the Six Suns at the core’s heart, the swarming stars thinned out drastically; the outlying reaches of Omega Centauri in this epoch consisted of another billion suns scattered as an irregular cloud 10,000 light years across at its widest.

In this epoch
. A close astronomical survey of the spiral galaxy hanging above their heads had narrowed down “time-now” to a period some 876 million years before humans had evolved on Earth, give or take about a million years. Individual suns were lost among that whirlpool of 400 billion stars, and the actual location of Earth’s sun within that vast swirl of starlight could not be determined. The actual date had been determined by comparing the relative positions of other, more distant, galaxies hanging in the sky—especially M-31 in Andromeda, M-33 in Triangulum, the Greater and Lesser Magellanic Clouds, and the fourteen dwarf galaxies that orbited the Milky Way. Galaxies move with respect to one another, and their relative positions in respect to one another within three-dimensional space were well understood by Confederation astronomers. The positions of M-31 and M-33 established in general where the other, smaller, closer galaxies ought to be to within 50 million years or so; the positions of the dwarfs allowed a closer calibration. During the time of man, one of the dwarfs—the Canis Major Irregular Galaxy—was in the process of being devoured by the Milky Way, while another, the Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical, was 50,000 light years out and headed for an eventual collision. In this sky, both were considerably farther out, perhaps two or three orbits of the main galaxy in the past.