Star Carrier 6: Deep Time (17 page)

“Courier away,” Tsang’s voice added, as he informed Lewis and Dahlquist of the fact.

Of course, those words had been spoken nearly seven hours ago; it had taken that long for the transmission to crawl all the way across fifty astronomical units, from the TRGA, where Tsang’s
Open Sky
was standing guard, to the
Pax
and the
Concord
, drifting 2 million kilometers off the newfound world of Invictus. By now, the courier drone would have long since threaded its way through the TRGA and transmitted its message to the
America
waiting on the other side. It was even possible that the rest of the task force was already through the cylinder and joining the
Open Sky
. The other two High Guard cutters wouldn’t be aware of the fact until seven hours after it had already happened.

Gray, Dahlquist thought, had screwed up again. He should have sent
America
through with the entire task force, not piddled away the three High Guard ships. Had he done so, the task force would now have a better idea of whether they were still in Earth’s present, or sometime in the remote past. The assumption had been that
if
the TRGA transported them into the past, it would be to the N’gai Cloud, as had happened with
America
and her carrier group twenty years ago. From this exquisite vantage point above the galactic plane, there was no sign of the N’gai Cloud. Even though they were currently many thousands of light years away from where the N’gai Cloud had been, it would have taken many hundreds of thousands of years, perhaps even millions of years before the small, irregular galaxy was completely devoured by the hungry and far larger Milky Way. The Cloud’s absence suggested that they were still located in Earth’s time now . . . even though the shift across twenty-five thousand light years made such distinctions essentially meaningless.

“Captain?” Margolis,
Concord
’s communications officer, said. “We have a message coming in from Ambassador Rand.”

“Let me hear.”

The face of Lawrence Rand came up in an in-head window. He looked . . . stressed, his eyes wild. “ . . . calling
Pax
and
Concord
,” he was saying. “Come in, please!”

“This is Captain Lewis of the
Pax
,” another voice replied. “Go ahead, Dr. Rand.”

“Code Alpha! Code Alpha!” Rand shouted. And then his voice began to change, the words deepening in pitch and slowing dramatically. “We’ve . . . got . . . a . . . pro . . . blemmmm. . . .”

“We’ve lost the ambassador,” Margolis said. “Lost his
frequency
.”

Which meant the aliens had just played their time-warp card, cutting Rand off by drastically slowing the frequency of his transmission, possibly . . . or simply by freezing him in time.

And there was a new and bigger problem now. Glothr ships—a dozen of them—were separating from the planetary rings and hurtling toward the two High Guard vessels.

“
Concord!
” Lewis snapped. “Order the fighters to close with us and boost! We’re going back to the Triggah!”

“Roger that,” Dahlquist replied. He was already scanning the ship’s various displays, looking for an immediate threat. It was possible that sequestering Rand was a prelude to an all-out attack. “Commander Ames? Take us to General Quarters.”

“Aye, aye, Skipper.”

“And let’s turn around and get us the hell out of here.”

Concord
spun slowly in place, aligning herself with the distant TRGA, then engaged her gravitic drive, accelerating hard at just over 5,000 gravities.

USNA Star Carrier
America

Unknown Spacetime

1745 hours, TFT

It had been a damned tight squeeze.

America
’s shield cap was fully half the internal diameter of the TRGA cylinder, and there was absolutely no margin for error. The HVK-724 scout-courier drone had emerged at the Beehive cluster end of the thing and transmitted everything the three High Guard vessels had recorded, including—most important—the precise path through twisted spacetime that Charlie One, the fighter squadron, and the cutters had followed in order to reach the other side.

Gray had released a heartfelt sigh of relief, then, when
America
drifted slowly clear of the mouth of the spinning cylinder, closely surrounded by a swarm of her fighters—VFA-31, the Impactors; and VFA-215, the Black Knights—and just astern of the battleship
New York
. Ahead, a few thousand kilometers off, the High Guard watchship
Open Sky
hung motionless in empty space.

“Welcome to Invictus space, Admiral,” the
Open Sky
’s captain called. “You are now officially a long way from nowhere.”

“I see that, Captain Tsang,” Gray replied. His gaze was drawn immediately to the galaxy hanging in the distance, the closest intricacies of its spiral some twenty-five thousand light years away, and yet appearing close enough to touch. “Your report said there was no planetary system here . . . just the one planet by itself.”

“That is correct, Admiral. Invictus, a Steppenwolf rogue. It may have been flung clear out of our galaxy millions of years ago.”

“I’m looking forward to seeing it in person. Anything from the ambassador yet?”

“Not a word, sir. He should have arrived wherever they were taking him . . . oh . . . about five hours ago, at least. It’s all in the drone transmission.”

“I saw it.”

And Gray was concerned about what he’d seen: long-range vids of the black planet with its intricate system of bright glowing rings. The scale alone was daunting. Those rings, so much vaster than the clutter of shipyards and hotels and military bases and manufactories in Earth’s synchorbit, could have comfortably hidden millions upon millions of warships and a population numbering in the hundreds of billions. If this situation went sour, there was no way in hell Task Force One was going to be able to rescue Rand or his people.

Koenig and the Joint Chiefs had been aware of that cold fact when they’d drawn up Gray’s orders. His first responsibility, above everything else, was to get back to Earth with information. Humankind needed to know what they were facing out here.

At the moment, however, there was no indication whatsoever of trouble. As the last of the task force ships slipped clear of the TRGA’s mouth, he gave the orders to form up and commence acceleration. At their maximum boost of ten thousand gravities, with a flip-over at the halfway point for deceleration, they would arrive at Invictus in a little more than eight hours.

“Very well,” Gray announced over the fleet comm network moments after the last ship through the TRGA reported in. “Everyone arrived in one piece? Good. We’ll stick to the plan, no modifications. Destroyers
Lambert
and
Caiden
, you’ll join
Open Sky
and guard the Triggah. That’s our ticket home, so stay on your toes. Everyone else, form up around
America
and prepare for boost.”

It was tempting to leave a larger force guarding the TRGA, but Gray was interpreting his orders conservatively. This was, to put it bluntly, a show of force, even though Glothr technology probably rendered any question of fleet strength moot, so far as the humans were concerned.

“Astrogation,” he went on, changing channels. “This is Gray. I need that time data.”

“This is Donovan, Admiral. We’re working on it. The AI is crunching the numbers now.”

“Good.”

“We do have the velocity figures in, though.”

“Let’s hear ’em.”

“We’re estimating, of course, based on averages pulled from the local hydrogen background . . . but it looks like Invictus and the TRGA both are moving at about three-point-five million kilometers per hour.”

That
was a jolt: 3.5 million kph was
fast
. . . about a third of 1 percent of the speed of light. Some natural objects were faster—Gray knew of one rogue star clocked at almost 50 million kph. It could happen when a pair of planets—or a planet orbiting a star—encountered a black hole, especially the supermassive black hole at the galaxy’s center. If one partner in the pair vanished down the black hole, the other could be slingshotted out across the galaxy at hypervelocity. He wondered if that was the case here.

As Donovan spoke, a graphic drew itself in Gray’s mind, showing the plane of the galaxy—a hundred thousand light years across—their current position a quarter of that distance above the plane, and a straight line running from the rogue back to near the center of the galactic spiral.

“The planet’s origins appear to lie at the edge of the Galactic Core, at a distance of about forty thousand light years from here.”

Gray ran the math through his in-head processors. Forty thousand light years at an average velocity of 3.5 million kph: Invictus had been ejected from the system of its birth some 12 million years ago.

“They called the planet ‘Invictus?’ ” Gray said. “Sounds more like it ought to be
Evict
-us.”

“That, sir,” Donovan told him, “was very bad.”

“Thank you.”

“That number is an approximation, sir. It’s tough using hydrogen as a frame of reference.”

Gray knew what Donovan meant. In space, the idea of speed meant nothing save in relation to something else. It might be possible to pull the spectra of the galaxy itself and determine a red-shift velocity, indicating how fast Invictus was traveling outbound—but that would require an average of billions of stars all traveling on their own orbits of the galactic center, all moving more or less independently. Or, the astrogation department could measure the relative velocity of hydrogen gas in the immediate vicinity, through which the Steppenwolf world was moving. This close to the galaxy proper, that gas—an incredibly thin gas measuring only an atom or two per cubic centimeter—would be moving with and around the galaxy, not Invictus, and so provide the necessary frame of reference.

Close enough. Three and a half million kilometers per hour? Invictus was
booking
.

Gray wondered again about the history of the alien Glothr. If their world had been catapulted out of its home system 12 million years ago, that was enough time for an intelligent species to evolve, certainly . . . but far too short a period for the evolution of life. Earth likely had developed life—single-celled prokaryotes—within 600 to 800 million years of Earth’s formation—as much as 4 billion years ago. For most of that unimaginable gulf of time, Earth’s life had been simple. Eukaryotes—complex cells—had evolved 2 billion years ago, while multicellular life hadn’t gotten started until around 1 billion years ago.

Which meant that when Glothr was kicked out of its home system—back toward the Galactic Core—it had been a
living
world, complete with its own subglacial ecosystem. The Glothr themselves must have evolved during the long voyage outbound across galactic space, probably after their world had already left the galaxy proper.

So . . . where had the TRGA come from? Not from Invictus’s home system, certainly. It must have been constructed on the fly, as it were, as Invictus zipped out of the galaxy at a blistering 3.5 million kph. Somehow, whoever or whatever had built the TRGA had identified Invictus as a world of interest, a world worth visiting.

Or a world for which they’d decided to provide a high-speed transportation system, a part of the galaxy’s transit network.

“Admiral Gray?” It was Commander Eric Bittner, head of
America
’s Astrogation Department, and Lieutenant Donovan’s boss. “We’ve got some . . . information for you.”

He sounded hesitant enough that Gray instantly felt a twinge of alarm. “What is it, Commander?”

“We have the preliminary numbers. On the time problem.”

“Go ahead.”

“Sir . . . we had a lot of trouble nailing this one down. We’ve been trying to identify individual pulsars by their transmission fingerprints. But . . .”

His voice trailed off.

“I’m sure you’re aware that any galactic pulsars we can identify out here are essentially anywhere from twenty-five to eighty thousand years in the past,” Gray said.

“Of
course
, Admiral,” Bittner said sharply. “That’s obvious. No . . . the problem is, we’re in deep time.”

“Eight hundred million years in the past?” Gray asked. So . . . the Glothr had led them back in time to the epoch of the original ur-Sh’daar. . . .

“No sir. We appear to be something like twelve million years
in our own future
.

“My God . . .”

Chapter Fifteen

6 August, 2425

USNA Star Carrier
America

Invictus Space, T+12 MY

1805 hours, TFT

“Twelve million years . . . in the
future
?” Sara Gutierrez,
America
’s skipper, was as shocked as Gray had been. “How is that even possible?”

Gray had called a hurried meeting of the command staff, the team linking in through their in-heads.

“Same way Koenig’s task force ended up almost nine hundred million years in the past,” Gray replied. “Under the right conditions, both space and time are . . . flexible. They can be bent.”

“I know that. I think . . . I think what I was trying to ask is what does this say about the Sh’daar in the future?”

“What do you mean?” Commander Mallory asked.

“She means,” Gray said, carefully, “that the Glothr are Sh’daar . . . and if their home world is located twelve million years in our future, it kind of suggests that the Sh’daar survive—
survived
—our time. So where does that leave Earth and humans? Is that it, Captain?”

“Exactly,” Gutierrez said. “It suggests that maybe Humankind got swallowed up by the Sh’daar. The war—
our
war, in the twenty-fifth century—was lost.”

“There is another possibility,” the voice of
America
’s AI said. Ship AIs rarely engaged in conversation with human crews; conversations tended to be long and inefficient, when the direct transfer of data into human cerebral implants was so much faster and more sure. But Gray had ordered the network to adopt a human persona so that it could interact with the command staff. There were times when that quiet voice could steady the nerves of jittery humans or help the team to stay focused on topic.

“What possibility is that,
America
?” Captain Connie Fletcher, the carrier’s CAG, asked.

“That Humankind won the war, and purchased security for a time—centuries, perhaps. But such a situation would likely not be stable. There would be another war . . . and another . . . and perhaps another . . . and sooner or later Earth’s civilization would be overwhelmed, or it would elect to join the far more powerful and technologically advanced Sh’daar Collective.”

“You,” Gray said, “are just chock full of happy thoughts today, aren’t you?”

“He’s right, though, Admiral,” Commander Roger Hadley said. He was the task force’s intelligence officer, and head of
America
’s Intel Department. “We’ve known all along that the Sh’daar were so very much bigger and more powerful than we were. If the warfare continues, sooner or later we
will
get worn down to nothing, or we will become a part of the system.”

The network continued speaking, relentless. “Other possibilities, though of considerably lower probability, include, first, that the Sh’daar were banished from Humankind’s region of the galaxy, or, second, that the planet Invictus represents a last survival of the Sh’daar after a human victory. A third possibility is that humans—if they still exist as human in this epoch—are in a state of peaceful co-existence with the Sh’daar. A fourth—”

“That’s more than enough for us to chew on for right now,
America
,” Gray said. “Thank you.”

“What does he mean,” Vonnegut asked, “ ‘if they still exist as human?’ ”

“Just what it said,” Dr. George Truitt said. He was the civilian head of
America
’s Xenosophontolgy Department. “Twelve million years is a
long
time. By now, humans may well have evolved into something quite different. We could be in a post-human epoch.”

“So,” Fletcher said, “do we look them up? Our descendents, I mean?”

“For now, we need to focus on the Sh’daar,” Gray told them. “On the
Glothr va-Sh’daar
, rather.” He checked his internal clock. “If we begin boost on sched, in another—make it ten minutes—we should arrive in circum-Invictus space by 0310 hours. At that time, we will make contact with the ambassador and see where we’re at.”

“Anyone else notice an interesting coincidence?” Truitt said.

“What’s that?” Gray asked.

“It took twelve million years for Invictus to get out here, after being flung out of its birth system. And that’s how far in the future we happen to be.”

“Meaning . . . Invictus got the boot back in our present,” Gutierrez said, thoughtful. “Interesting.”

“We’ll file that as ‘interesting but not germane,’ ” Gray said. “Besides, when you’re dealing with millions of years, you tend to overlook a few thousands . . . or tens of thousands . . . or even a couple of
hundred
thousand. Invictus could have gotten kicked out of its system in 50,000 BCE . . . or it might not happen for another hundred thousand years after our own time.”

“I suggest that it will be worth a check, though, Admiral,” Truitt said. “I
always
mistrust coincidences, especially when they’re as blatant as this one.”

“What are you saying, Doc?” Mallory said, chuckling. “That
we
sent Invictus hurtling out of the galaxy? I don’t think our technology is quite up to that just yet!”

An alarm sounded in Gray’s head, a signal relayed through
America
’s main AI. “Heads up, people. We have company!”

The AI was showing him an image—pulled from a battlespace drone—of the mouth of the TRGA cylinder, currently some five thousand kilometers off. And ships were emerging from the opening.

Alien ships.

Lots
of alien ships . . .

VFA-96, The Black Demons

In transit

1812 hours, TFT

The two Starblades accelerated through strangeness, crowding light itself.

Somewhere astern of them,
Pax
and
Concord
had begun accelerating at 1630 hours, boosting at ten thousand gravities. It would take fifty minutes at that acceleration to get up to cruising velocity—.996
c
—and they would then coast the seven light-hours between planet and TRGA, with a turn-around and fifty-minute deceleration at the end. They would approach the TRGA eight hours, forty minutes later . . . at 0110 hours.

Able to boost at fifty thousand gravities, the two Starblade fighters could reach near-
c
in about ten minutes. Though time for the two pilots seemed much shorter under the effects of relativistic time dilation, they’d so far covered eighty light-minutes—10 AUs. They would arrive at the TRGA some forty minutes ahead of their two larger consorts.

“Do you think they can . . . ?” Gregory asked.

“Say again,” Meg Connor replied. “I didn’t copy.”

The words were static-blasted and twisted by speed, acceleration, and the intense warping of spacetime ahead by the fighters’ projected gravitic singularities. At least they
could
communicate, though. Blasting a message by laser com from one fighter to another required miracles of synchronization and wavelength adjustment, techniques long impossible. The Starblades’ AIs could manage the feat, however, so long as the two fighters’ vectors were perfectly matched. Gregory’s voice had a harsh, metallic edge to it, but she could understand him.

“I said, ‘Do you think they can catch up with us?’ ”

Meg Connor considered the question. “The only way they could catch up is to shave some more decimal points off the
c
-value,” she said at last. “We know they can’t go
faster
than that.”

“Not and stay out of metaspace.”

“I don’t think even the Glothr could synch up an Alcubierre bubble with a sub-light fighter,” Connor said. “They wouldn’t even be able to detect us out here from inside the warp bubble.”

“Roger that.”

“Besides, they’d encounter the High Guard ships first. We left them back there in our wakes, remember?”

“So we push on . . . and hope the rest of the task force hasn’t popped through the TRGA yet.”

“If they have?”

“We’ve got big, big trouble.”

“Roger that.”

USNA Star Carrier
America

Invictus Space, T+12 MY

1813 hours, TFT

“I
know
those ships,” Gray said, staring at the display within his mind. “Damn it! They’re
Turusch
!”

Humans had engaged the Turusch more than once. Gray had faced them when he’d been a fighter jock twenty years ago, back in 2404. Their ships, both the big capital warships and their fighters, appeared oddly organic, like lumpy potatoes, painted in broad swaths of either black and green or black and red.

The Turusch were still poorly understood, mostly because communications with them were so difficult. Turusch lived as closely matched pairs, twins connected with each other neurologically. When they spoke, they spoke simultaneously with a kind of buzzing hum; the two voices together generated harmonics that constituted a
third
message revealing deeper levels of meaning. Even with that bit of linguistic code cracked, however, translations of Turusch meaning were problematic. They didn’t think like humans, and following their meaning in a trialogue could be tough.

In any case, the Turusch had been involved at Arcturus and Eta Boötis, but after that they’d vanished, and had been off the human radar for twenty years, except for a couple of brief, chance sightings. No one knew where they’d gone, or why . . . but after Koenig had struck a deal with the Sh’daar of the N’gai Cloud, they’d not been seen again.

Until now.

The immediate question, of course, was whether these newly arrived ships were hostile.

The nearest large Turusch warship opened up with a particle beam, slashing at the battlecruiser
Sonora
.

Question answered.

VFA-31, The Impactors

Invictus Space, T+12 MY

1813 hours, TFT

“We’re under attack!” Lieutenant Commander Edmond St. Clair yelled. “Form up! Form up! Come around and face them!”

The twelve Starblades of VFA-31 whipped around their projected gravitic singularities in unison, still drifting away from the TRGA cylinder, and slowing, but pointed, now, at the sudden, oncoming threat.

Like so many of his shipmates in
America
’s space wing, St. Clair was new to the squadron and to the ship. He’d started off as a short, wiry Scotsman, born and raised in Glasgow and with his alligience sworn to the Scottish Republic. The United Kingdom, consisting of the Irish and Scottish Republics as well as Britain, was still nominally part of the Pan-European Union which, in turn, was part of the Earth Confederation . . . but that membership had never been particularly strong. In fact, Scots, Brits, and Irish alike all felt little loyalty to the old dream of a united Europe, making the argument that they’d been fighting off attempts by the continent to take them over since the Spanish Armada had tried it in 1588. Early in the period of worsening relations between North America and the Confederation, several British squadrons—including Scottish ships—had point-blank refused to attack USNA forces, and there were even cases, not many, but a few, where UK ships had joined North American ships against Confederation units.

Five years before, St. Clair had been stationed on board the Brit pocket star carrier
Centaur
when her captain had defected, ship and all, to the USNA. There’d been no active fighting at the time, nothing hotter than a very warm cold war . . . and both ship and the majority of the crew were returned to Pan-Europe. But a number of officers and men had elected to stay in the USNA, and applied for asylum.

Their new hosts, it had turned out, hadn’t entirely trusted them. Then Lieutenant St. Clair had spent two years flying a Virsim link in Columbus while Military Intelligence dug through records and, eventually, through his brain, looking for even a hint of evasion or deception on his part. He’d been transferred to Oceana just before Columbus had been nano-nuked, though several of his compatriots had been caught in the attack and killed.

Eventually, and after Intelligence had been through his brain damned near one neuron at a time, he’d been allowed to fly again. He’d been flying the older Starhawks with VFA-27, the Red Riders, but he hadn’t seen action. When Pan-European Jotuns had attacked Washington and Boston, the Riders had been held in reserve.

It seemed they still hadn’t trusted the handful of volunteers from the far side of the pond.

But by that time, North America was feeling the bite of ever-increasing casualties, especially among trained pilots. The carrier
America
had been particularly roughed up fighting the Slan and, later, the Grdoch, and at one point had barely been able to put together two combat squadrons. Two months ago, St. Clair had been promoted to lieutenant commander and transferred to VFA-31, the Impactors, as the new squadron CO.

But, damn it, they’d
still
kept him out of the fighting during Operation Fallen Star! He’d ended up escorting Choctaws down from orbit while six of his squadron mates went after the Pan-European gun positions on the ground. St. Clair had been on a slow burn ever since. It wasn’t fair, treating him like some sort of goddamn pariah!

Finally, though,
America
was far away from the stifling petty politics of world government, of civil war, of questions of loyalty to the USNA or to Pan-Europe. He glanced again at the vast, spiraling sheet of stars in the distance, the galaxy, and thought again of just how far away he was right now, in both space and time.

A long,
long
way . . . long enough that the humans of the tiny task force would have to stick together and pull together and
fight
together no matter what their origins or politics. They were fighting as a species, not a nation.

“All fighters, this is Pryfly,” the voice of
America
’s CAG said over the combat channel. “Close with the enemy and synch to full Mach. I say again, get in close at full Mach. It’s your best chance!”