by Ian Douglas
“Recovery under way, sir. We can leave that to the DinoSARs, and divert some tugs from the Jolly Blacks to pick up our pilots.”
“Do it.”
“Aye, aye, Admiral.”
“Sir,” Hargrave said. “I think you should see this.”
Koenig accepted an in-head link, opening a window created by America’s long-range scanners. There was a planet out there . . . the tiny worldlet detected by Gray’s fighter and designated AIS-1.
And it was showing the wink of two emergency transponder beacons.
Trevor Gray
Omega Centauri
1415 hours, TFT
Gray felt the seismic quake, a distant, shuddering rumble that reached his consciousness even while he was deep within the depths of the simulation. The virtual image of Thedreh’schul shimmered, winked on and off several times, and then vanished, along with the simmed view of the planet’s ice-bound surface. He was again within the confines of his Starhawk, immersed in blackness.
“AI,” he called. “What’s going on?”
“Data is conflicting and uncertain,” the fighter’s software replied. “However, the facility within which we are being held appears to be undergoing extreme gravitic acceleration.”
“ ‘Facility.’ Do you mean the ship that picked us up?”
“Yes. However—” The AI hesitated, as if genuinely at a loss for words, or as if uncertain how to interpret the data. “I have tapped into one of the local optical feeds,” the AI continued after a moment, “by piggybacking through RF leakage from nonoptical cryocircuitry. It appears to be a surface view.”
This time he saw the panorama in a window within his mind, rather than a full sim within which he seemed to be standing. It was, once again, the dark and frozen ice plain he’d first experienced in-sim, with the impenetrable cloud of Venus-bright stars filling the bowl of the sky overhead.
But this time, those stars were moving.
Directly ahead, more stars were rising from behind glacier cliffs of frozen methane and nitrogen. Abruptly, then, the drifting motion stopped, and as it did so, Gray felt another sharp, seismic shock.
“Wait a second,” he said. “I thought we were on that big ship that picked us up!”
“Evidently we are,” his AI replied. “But the ship has landed on a planetary surface, most likely the body designated as AIS-1.”
“But we’re moving!”
“Planets move,” his AI replied. “It is in their nature. But I agree that this motion appears to be anomalous.”
“But how are we moving! We started rotating . . . then we stopped!”
“I have no data with which to formulate conclusions. It should be remembered that we cannot necessarily trust incoming data from outside.”
And what, Gray wondered, had that statement cost his AI? Artificial intelligences lived for data, at least in a loose sense of the word.
“I don’t buy that,” Gray replied. “We felt that shock whenever we started rotating.”
“We might simply be on board the starship that picked us up, and it is the ship that rotated.”
“Your data feeds from outside. What do they tell you?”
“That we appear to be on or just beneath the surface of a dwarf planet, and that the planet rotated through eighty-five degrees, then began accelerating toward six particular nearby stars.”
“What stars?”
For answer, a new window opened in Gray’s mind. In it, he saw the backdrop of the cluster’s stars, thickly massed, with only scattered bits of the infinite night beyond visible between some of them. But arrayed against that brilliant wall were six foreground stars, far brighter than the rest and gleaming a brilliant crystalline blue.
The overall color of the background stars tended to be white, shading ever so slightly to a faint orange or red. That was to be expected. Star clusters—as well as galactic cores, such as Omega Centauri was supposed to be—were made of truly ancient stars. Globular clusters, generally, were made up of truly ancient Population II stars, which tended to be red giants. Hotter stars, blue giants, for example, burned up their supplies of nuclear fuel swiftly indeed, dying in spectacular supernovae after a mere 10 million years or so. Even Omega Centauri, though it possessed both Population II and the younger Population I stars, like a galactic nucleus, still tended to be made up of red-hued stars, cooler and slower-burning, and able, therefore, to live throughout the 10 to 12 billion years or so that they’d been in existence.
Those six stars were blue giants, and they were arranged artificially. There could be no doubt of that; they were aligned in a perfect hexagon, a circle of six brilliant stars.
“My God,” Gray said, staring at the circle of stars. “How did we miss that?”
“This is a magnified image,” his AI told him. “Under a routine, nonmagnified scan, these six stars dwindle to an apparent single point, lost among all of the background stars. I noticed them just now only because the planet we are on appears to be accelerating in that direction. I would suggest that those stars are our captors’ destination.”
“They’re . . . beautiful,” Gray said. They looked like some perfect objet d’art, six intensely blue diamonds in an invisible setting.
“Those six stars,” his AI said, “show spectra similar to that of Zeta Puppis and other blue giants. I estimate that they are of spectral type O5, that each has a mass of roughly forty times that of Sol, and that all are relatively young, likely less than four million years old.”
“Four million years,” Gray said. “What are they doing inside a cluster that’s supposed to be ten or twelve billion years old?”
“Unknown.”
“Those have to be artificially put there like that,” Gray said, shaking his head. “They must be in precise gravitational balance. They couldn’t have formed that way naturally.”
“Agreed. And that lends credence to the possibility that the stars themselves are artificial or, at the least, artificially generated from existing suns.”
“How do you mean?”
“They could well be blue stragglers. And to have six of them in a perfect hexagon implies that they all were deliberately created, and that they were created at the same time.”
Gray had to open another inner window and download a definition of blue straggler, a term he’d not heard before. Scanning through the few lines of text stored in his cybernetic hardware, he learned that as much as four centuries earlier, astronomers had recognized blue, apparently very young suns inside the teeming swarms of ancient red stars that made up globular clusters. Because blue stars were much shorter lived than red, dying in spectacular fashion after only a very few million spendthrift years, there was no way that they could possibly exist within clusters of stars a thousand of times older, not when the gas and dust from which new stars were born were generally absent from those clusters.
And yet there they were, gravitationally bound to the clusters as contradictions to established physics and astronomy—the blue stragglers.
Eventually, astronomers had worked out what must be happening. The ancient stars within the swarms of globular clusters did not occupy orderly and precise orbits, but literally swarmed through the cluster, their nearest neighbors a tenth of a light year or less away at any given time, their vectors constantly tugged and twisted by ever-changing gravitational tides. While stellar collisions were rare throughout the rest of the galaxy, in such tight quarters, collisions were actually fairly common. Most collisions, though, were not head-on affairs ending in annihilation; instead, two stars would approach, graze, then slowly come together in a series of tight mutual orbits, until eventually they combined, coalescing.
Where there had been two stars there now was one, but a star of much higher mass than before. The increased mass meant a higher fusion temperature, and that in turn meant not a cooler, redder star, but a much hotter, bluer one. Two ancient stars were reborn as one young one . . . but a young spendthrift destined to squander its hydrogen wealth and, as with all
blue stars, to die within a few million years.
To have six of these young stars in a circle suggested that someone had been deliberately slamming stars into one another, turning old cool stars into young hot suns.
Gray thought about the ramifications of this. The technology required to create not one, but six blue stars, orbiting a common center in perfect balance, to keep them in balance for millions of years as they independently burned their dwindling supplies of hydrogen fuel . . . the thought, the sheer scope and scale, the staggering arrogance of such celestial engineering, beggared belief.
And yet . . . there they were, six stars in a perfect ring, diamond-bright, intensely beautiful.
And completely impossible.
Chapter Nineteen
30 June 2405
CIC
TC/USNA CVS America
Omega Centauri
1422 hours, TFT
The wink of two transponder beacons on the mobile planet was the first proof the battlegroup had had that Lieutenant Gray had survived after being picked up by the enemy. And who was the other? The coding attached to the beacon indicated Lieutenant Schiere’s reconnaissance CP-240 Shadowstar. Better and better.
The fact of the transponders didn’t mean the two pilots had survived, of course, but it was strong evidence in that direction.
Unfortunately, the possibility that they’d survived didn’t mean that the fleet was going to be able to do anything about it. Something strange was happening over there.
“What the hell?” Koenig asked. In the window, the surface temperature of the dwarf planet was rising, and a column of data to one side was changing rapidly.
AIS-1 had rotated in space, and now it was accelerating, and quickly, a most un-planetlike thing for it to do.
“It appears to be projecting an enormous gravitational singularity,” Commander Craig pointed out. “But there still are going to be massive tidal effects.”
“We’re seeing that on the infrared imaging,” Dr. Tina Schuman said. The astrogation-department physicist had been brought into the link just moments before, when the dwarf planet had begun its anomalous rotation. “The surface is heating up. That suggests tidal stress and friction.”
“The straight-line acceleration will be free fall,” Sam Jones, America’s exec pointed out. “Just like for a starship. That rotation might have been a jolt, though.”
“They’re going somewhere in a hell of a hurry,” Koenig said. “Where?”
“I’ve got some data coming up on-screen,” Craig said. “But I’m not sure I believe them.”
“And what the hell is that?” Koenig asked.
A portion of the backdrop of stars had been picked out by a small rectangle within his in-head view, then sharply expanded. An insignificant star, one of millions, suddenly appeared ahead as an ethereal, inexpressibly beautiful artifact—six brilliant blue stars in a perfect hexagon.
“Okay,” Captain Buchanan said. “Why the hell didn’t we see that before?”
“I’m checking, sir,” Craig’s voice said.
“I’ve got it,” Koenig’s AI said. “That artifact was on the visual data sent back by Gray’s message drone. I see it here now. But until the dwarf planet’s motion called attention to it, it was lost in the background. I did not at first notice it.” His AI, Koenig thought, sounded almost contrite at having missed the thing.
“Overwhelmed by detail lost among ten million stars,” Koenig said, nodding. “It’s not surprising. This is unknown territory for all of us.” Even AIs couldn’t keep up with everything the fleet’s sensors were bringing in.
“We would have noticed the anomaly eventually,” Karyn’s voice added.
“Okay, now that we see it, I want a complete analysis of that thing. CAG? We need to put some recon probes in that region. How far away is it?
“Approximately half a light year,” his AI said. “Over four point seven quadrillion kilometers.”
“That means a microshift under Alcubierre Drive, and we launch recon ships when we come out. I don’t want to spend the next six months in transit at c.”
“Apparently they’re not waiting around either,” Buchanan pointed out. On the screen, the dwarf planet had just blurred, then winked out, enclosed within the Sh’daar equivalent of an Alcubierre bubble.
“Transponder signals lost,” Jones reported.
“We’ll need to proceed cautiously, sir,” Hargrave suggested. “We don’t have accurate metrics of this space.”
Accurate navigation while traveling enmeshed within a bubble of FTL space, unable to see out, required a good understanding of the gravitic “shape” of the volume of space in which you planned to emerge. “Metric” was the technical term for the gravitometric readings of local space taken by both unmanned probes and recon pilots.
In particular, you didn’t want to try to drop into a volume of space where local mass—such as a planet or one of those giant suns in the distance—was so distorting the region that the emerging ship was ripped apart by the differences in the shapes of space itself. In practice, starships approaching a planetary system would drop into normal space out in the local Kuiper Belt, a region beginning about thirty to forty astronomical units out for sunlike stars, closer in for cooler suns, farther out for giants. Out here, though, the battlegroup was working in the dark despite the brilliance of the surrounding star cloud. No one knew what to expect, or what the norms might be.
“I agree,” Koenig said, answering Hargrave’s statement. “But we’re not going to be so cautious we lose the initiative. We seem to have the bastards on the run. I want to keep it that way.”
“We’ll have the figures run for you in fifteen minutes,” Schuman said.
“Pass the word for the fleet to regroup,” Koenig said. “We accelerate in one hour.”
Trevor Gray
Omega Centauri
1427 hours, TFT
The visual feed from the surface of the planet suddenly went black. “Hey!” Gray said. “What’s going on?”
“The feed is still open,” his AI said, “and we’re still getting some infrared.” As if to show him, the AI stepped up the contrast and dropped in an IR filter, which let Gray see the ice surface in muted swaths of blue and deep purple.
“But the stars went out!” Gray protested.
“I would surmise,” the AI replied, “that the planet has just shifted into the Sh’daar equivalent of Alcubierre Drive.”
Gray blinked, at a loss for words. Finally, he managed to stammer, “The . . . the whole planet?”
“That would be consistent with the data we have available.”
Human Alcubierre drives achieved faster-than-light travel by bending a pocket of space around the starship, using projected artificial singularities and a great deal of energy. While it was flatly impossible for a material object to travel at the speed of light or faster, there was nothing in the rules that said that space couldn’t do so; indeed, the best theories about the early life and growth of the universe after the big bang suggested that during the so-called inflationary period, space was expanding at many times the speed of light. Propelled by an asymmetric twist to the leading edge of the gravitic field, the folded-up pocket of space slid through space at between 1.7 and 1.9 light years per day; the spacecraft inside the bubble remained virtually motionless relative to its immediate surroundings.
Folding up the pocket, however, cut the spacecraft off from all connections with the outside universe. There was no way to see out during an FTL passage, which put something of a strain on the ship’s astrogation department to bring the vessel out within the desired target area.
Manipulating space in order to create a fast-moving bubble around even a single starship the size of the America took a staggering amount of power, drawn from the virtual or vacuum energy filling the base state of empty space. But to create fields big enough to move a planet, even a “pocket planet” like this one . . .
The idea drove home to Gray just how great the technologica
l gulf between the Sh’daar and the Earth Confederation actually was. With technology like this, hell, the Sh’daar could pick up Pluto and slam it into the Earth, and there wouldn’t be a damned thing Humankind could do to stop them. The Turusch had launched an attack on Earth using high-speed KK projectiles half a year ago. The impact in the Atlantic Ocean 3,500 kilometers from the East Coast of North America had killed an estimated 80 million people on four continents. That technology was nothing, nothing compared with this.
Another earthquake shudder rippled through the fighter, and abruptly the lights came on once more, stars in their millions filling a rose-white sky. And there, just above the glacier-edged horizon, blazed six blue-hot pinpoints of searing, actinic light. Gray’s AI swiftly stopped down the intensity of the light flooding through the optical link, and by doing so almost certainly saved Gray’s eyes. Those stars were hot, and so bright that even with the stopped-down optics it was impossible to look straight at them, and the sky-dome of stars beyond were almost wiped out of view entirely.
And there were other . . . things in that alien sky as well.
“I think,” Gray said softly, “that we’ve arrived.”
CIC
TC/USNA CVS America
Omega Centauri
1525 hours, TFT
“All departments report readiness for acceleration to Alcubierre microshift,” Captain Buchanan told him. “We just need a final determination of our emergence point.”
“All designated battlegroup ships report readiness for acceleration as well,” Commander Craig added.
Koenig nodded. The fleet had pulled together well, and swiftly, even after its rough handling during the battles around both of the TRGA cylinder’s tunnel mouths. A total of eight capital ships had been destroyed, and another five badly damaged enough that they would not be making the transition with the rest of the battlegroup. Between the casualties on both sides of the tunnel, the ships Koenig had ordered to stay and guard the tunnel mouths, and the various stores and maintenance vessels that were also being left behind, there were just twenty-three Confederation warships left to take this final part of the assault to the enemy.