Singularity, p.37
Singularity, page 37
There was no response from the impenetrable darkness.
“Where are they?” he asked his AI.
“Unknown.” The AI seemed to hesitate. “However, you should know that Confederation Marines have penetrated the chamber within which we are being held. A battle is being fought nearby.”
Gray felt an electric thrill at the news. “Let me see!”
A window opened in his mind. The chamber within which the Starhawk had been trapped for the past twenty-two hours remained pitch-black . . . but flashes of light sparked and flickered in the distance, perhaps a hundred meters distant.
“Three Marine boarding craft penetrated the wall surrounding us—likely the hull of the large spacecraft that captured us yesterday. A number of Marines have entered this chamber and are engaged in combat with armored beings of an unidentified species.”
Gray watched for several minutes as the AI directed high-magnification scanners at different scenes of the engagement. From his vantage point, it was difficult to see the Marines, but he did note several of the large defending figures, six-limbed and clad in bulky armor, revealed in infrared false colors.
“Can you pick up the Marine radio channel?”
“Affirmative.”
He heard a click, then a confused tumble of voices. “Over here! Over here!”
“Watch it, Kaminski! Silver clunker moving on your position!”
“Plasgunners! Hit ’em! Hit ’em!”
“Take cover! The fuckers’re getting too close!”
Gray heard a piercing scream that bubbled away into silence.
“Shit! Shit! Dougherty’s down!”
“Corpsman, front!”
“Devon! McBride! Put down some fucking covering fire!”
Gray dialed back the channel volume. It sounded like the Marines were in a hell of a tight spot. “How is auto-repair coming along?” he asked, thoughtful.
“Power plant, life support, and defensive screens are at one hundred percent,” his AI told him. “Our maneuvering thrusters are at one hundred percent, but our gravitic drive projectors are showing readiness at twenty-five percent, no more. Nanomatrix hull morphing is inoperable, and we are frozen in combat mode. All missiles have been expended. PBP weaponry is inoperable. We have 793 KK Gatling rounds remaining.”
“Can we hover?”
A pause. “Affirmative.”
“Can we drift forward . . . turn . . . maybe change altitude?”
“Affirmative. But I would advise against attempting to fly this spacecraft inside the Sh’daar ship.”
“Why? There’s enough room. . . .”
A plan was coming together in Gray’s mind.
But it might mean the end of his attempts to communicate with the Sh’daar.
CIC
TC/USNA CVS America
Omega Centauri
1617 hours, TFT
“Colonel Murcheson is reporting that the Marines have been stopped just inside the hull of Objective Gold,” Sinclair told Koenig. “Major Hegelmen reports slow progress inside Objective Blue.”
But Koenig scarcely heard. He was watching the final destruction of the United States of North America.
The carrier was wheeling end over end, falling past AIS-1, as parts of the hull, wracked by savage internal explosions, continued to fold and crumple into high-G singularities scattered across its broken and ravaged structure. The hab modules had gotten clear before the end, carrying perhaps half of her crew, but for personnel trapped in the spine, there’d been no possible escape. Carrier bridge towers were constructed with jettison rockets allowing emergency evacuations, but the destruction had overcome the United States too quickly for Captain Whitlow and his bridge and CIC crews to abandon ship. The United States of North America was a lifeless hulk.
It was a fate that America might soon share.
Elsewhere, the ships of CBF-18 exchanged fire with enemy warships at practically point-blank range. Fighters continued pursuing the leaf-ship swarms each time the formations began to re-form. Capital ships stood toe-to-toe with Sh’daar vessels, which in space combat meant anything less than ten thousand kilometers, and slugged it out with hivel guns, PBP and plasma cannon, and high-energy lasers.
How much longer should they stand their ground? . . .
Trevor Gray
Omega Centauri
1618 hours, TFT
“Main drive start-up!” Gray said, thoughtclicking an in-head icon. “Give me manual control. Just don’t let me slam into anything.”
“Monitoring attitude,” his AI replied. “You are clear for lift and hover.”
The Starhawk stirred, then lifted off the internal deck of the alien vessel. Local gravity, Gray noted, was only about four hundredths of a G; he needed only a trickle of power from his quantum taps into his drive projectors, focused at a point several meters above his head, to nudge the fighter, massing 22 tons but now weighing only 880 kilos, into the vast, dark emptiness of the huge chamber. He could feel the faint buzz of vibration as the microsingularity flickered on and off thousands of times per second, bootstrapping the fighter along, then holding it perfectly balanced between matching gravitational fields.
Five meters off the deck, he rotated his ship, bringing the prow around to face the combat now raging a hundred meters away. His ship was still in its combat configuration, molded into a flattened, dead-black fuselage with down-sloped wings to either side. His port-side wing had been chewed up pretty badly by the fringe of the Sh’daar matter-compression beam—the likely reason that both his particle beams and hull-morphing capability were down—but he was able to limp forward, silently drifting in the space between decks.
“Targeting! KK cannon!” he called, and a window opened in his mind, showing Sh’daar ground troops in false-color greens and yellows. A red targeting cursor closed on the nearest armored form and locked there, following it as it bounded across the deck in low, sprinting leaps.
“Check me!” he told his AI. “Quarter-second burst,” he ordered. With fewer than a thousand rounds in his mass-shielded magazine, his weapon’s twelve-rounds-per-second cyclic rate would exhaust his ammo in about one minute of steady firing. The AI, with faster reflexes than Gray’s, could limit his bursts and conserve his ammo.
Gray thoughtclicked the trigger. The Starhawk’s spinal-mounted Gatling RFK-90 kinetic-kill cannon spit three 400-gram slugs, each the size of Gray’s little finger, giving the hovering fighter a sharp recoil nudge. In space combat, the weapon’s muzzle velocity of 175 meters per second typically was added to the fighter’s current speed, giving it a substantial load of kinetic energy. In here, with the fighter drifting nearly motionless, 175 mps was a pitifully weak offering . . . considerably less than the velocity of an old-fashioned rifle bullet.
The depleted uranium rounds each were considerably more massive than a rifle bullet, however, and they struck the target almost together, slamming into the armor.
With little effect. The Sh’daar trooper whirled, searching for the source of the triplet of rounds that had struck it. A moment later, Gray’s screens flared with the impact of a bolt of high-energy electrons from the soldier’s weapon. Other Sh’daar soldiers stopped their advance, turned, and added their firepower to the salvo.
“We need to boost muzzle velocity!” Gray yelled. “Dial it up!”
“I recommend against—”
“Just fucking do it! Firing!”
The Starhawk’s KK Gatling could be powered up to slam out projectiles at anything up to five thousand meters per second. In normal space combat, with combatants traveling at tens of thousands of kilometers per second, such a high muzzle velocity was dangerous. It tended to overload critical weapon circuitry, and the recoil could throw a fighter badly out of control. And with the muzzle velocity added to the fighter’s forward vector, the lower number was usually adequate.
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.
