by Ian Douglas
The N’gai Cloud approached the Milky Way spiral from just above the plane of its spiral arms, traveling against the galaxy’s direction of rotation about its hub. Millennia trickled past like seconds within Gray’s consciousness, a kind of time-lapse imagery in which he could actually see the slow and ponderous rotation of the home galaxy in the sky, could see the frenzied swarming of suns within the falling dwarf galaxy of N’gai about its tightly compacted core, could see patterns of disruption forming as the tidal effects of galaxy upon galaxy distorted both.
The ur-Sh’daar knew that their worlds would not be endangered by the coming merging of galaxies. Even during the spectacular collision of the two spirals that had merged into Andromeda, very few, if any, stars had actually collided, and very few star systems had been gravitationally disrupted, so vast are the distances between the drifting motes of a galaxy’s suns.
True, infalling clouds of gas and dust had generated a new eon of stellar genesis, and for a few hundred million years supermassive young stars, spendthrift and short-lived, had died in flaring supernovae, illuminating the colliding galaxies like pulsing strobes. Some thousands of ancient civilizations, caught in those blazing storms of radiation, had perished . . . but what of that? The stellar explosions had enriched the interstellar medium with heavy elements, promising the rise of new worlds and new life across future geologic epochs.
But the ur-Sh’daar watched the apparent approach of that vast spiral in their night skies with growing alarm. If their worlds individually would survive the coming collision of galaxies, their collective culture might not. By now, the ur-Sh’daar represented a pattern of galactic civilization extending back into the distant past some billions of years. Individual civilizations within that pattern faded, turned inward, transformed, or simply died, but each bequeathed to succeeding generations its accumulated history, knowledge, and cultural imprint.
When the N’gai Cloud was finally devoured by that glowing spiral monster looming huge in the sky, it would be torn apart, its nebulae of dust and gas shredded or compressed into new suns, its existing stars scattered, strewn throughout that slow-turning spiral.
As powerful and as far-reaching as the ur-Sh’daar group culture was, it was a network of perhaps a thousand star systems spanning a mere five thousand light years. Each member world was, on average, a couple of thousand light years from its nearest neighbors, a distance considerably reduced in toward the more densely crowded core. If those member systems were evenly distributed throughout the looming spiral, some twenty times wider than the N’gai Cloud, ultimately, each member world would be well over twenty thousand light years from its nearest neighbor.
For the varied species of the ur-Sh’daar, technological advancement long before had fallen into a kind of somnambulant balance. A high rate of technological advancement had been discouraged, for too much innovation too quickly might upset the long-standing balance of cultural identity and order. With the unrelenting approach of the alien galaxy, the culture’s leaders feared their confederation of species would fall apart. As the density of their cultural network thinned, each world would ultimately lose touch with the others and with the group’s shared history and cultural imperative over the course of the next hundred million years or so.
Within Gray’s mind’s eye, he watched the passing of eons, as the home galaxy of Humankind grew larger and larger and still larger, spanning the entire night sky of one of the teeming worlds of the ur-Sh’daar.
It was sobering to realize that what he was seeing must have taken place as much as a billion years ago, in the depths of the Proterozoic, when life on Earth was only just evolving from single-celled to multicellular organisms. . . .
Primary Flight Control
TC/USNA CVS America
Omega Centauri
0930 hours, TFT
Moments before, America had tucked in her skirts and dropped into the black isolation of a metaspace bubble, traveling now at very nearly two hundred times c. In another six hours and some, they would be emerging in the heart of the Sh’daar’s innermost sanctum, and God alone knew what they would find.
In his head, CAG Wizewski scrolled down through his roster of active-duty pilots yet again, wondering what more could be done.
Suicide, he thought. It’s fucking suicide.
And suicide was against his religion.
He never discussed it, of course, thanks to the White Covenant, in force for more than 330 years, now. Discussing his religious beliefs with others, though not illegal, was considered a matter of very bad taste. But Barry Wizewski was unusual within America’s officer complement. Sixty years old, he actually looked it, with a lean and leathery face, graying hair, and wrinkles around his eyes.
There was a simple reason for this. He was a Purist, a member of the Rapturist Church of Humankind, an outgrowth of the old-time Pentecostals who believed that, with Christ about to return soon, it would be best if His people were fully human when He came.
Unlike some members of the RCH, Wizewski wasn’t a neo-Ludd. He had the usual military-issue cybernetic implants inside his brain and other parts of his central nervous system. Nowadays, to function within modern culture, you had to have that stuff grown inside you, for everything from ordering a meal to opening an automatic door to pulling down data from the Net. But he and others of his faith tended not to accept nano implants for purely cosmetic reasons—and that included anagathics, the various anti-aging treatments. Where most of the others on board America could look forward to another century or two of active life, Wizewski, with the benefit of modern medical technology short of anagathic regimens, might live another fifty or even sixty years.
It was, his belief-set taught him, how he lived the years he had, not how many he survived. Suicide in any form was a hideous waste of precious life, besides being an affront against God, Who’d granted that life in the first place.
The suicides he was considering at the moment were those of the surviving pilots of CVW-14, America’s carrier space wing.
The campaign so far had been rough on the fighters. America had departed from the Sol system six months ago with six combat squadrons, a total of seventy fighters and ninety qualified pilots. After the battles at Arcturus, Alphekka, Texaghu Resch, and here in Omega Centauri, he could barely scrape together forty fighters, and just twenty-five pilots.
The discrepancy was partly the result of new or recycled fighters coming in from the fleet’s manufactory vessels, and partly because some of the pilots had been grounded with injuries or with severe psychological stress. Right now, he could put together just two full squadrons, and that was it. Half of those were the old SG-55 War Eagles, too, antiquated spacecraft that had trouble holding their own against the far more advanced Sh’daar ship designs and weapons.
And Koenig was about to throw them all into the meat grinder.
He respected Koenig. He was the best senior officer Wizewski had served under, and by far the ballsiest. But the fighters, those of America and those with the other carriers in the battlegroup, were the key to modern space-naval combat, the fleet’s first line of defense against enemy attacks, and the means of smashing the enemy fleet or local defenses so that the battlegroup’s capital ships could come in and mop up. As a result, Koenig had been using his fighter assets hard, and casualties had been horrific.
Two squadrons . . .
“Barry,” a woman’s voice said in his head.
“What is it, Sophia?”
Sophia was the name Wizewski had assigned to his PA. A small measure of personal rebellion, that. Historically, Sophia was a figure representing wisdom among the Gnostics, as well as in esoteric Christianity and Christian mysticism—all heretical belief systems so far as the Purists were concerned. It was Wizewski’s private joke, shared with no one.
“Two pilots wish to speak with you.”
“Very well. Put them through.”
“They wish to see you in person, Barry.”
“Ah.” He sighed, and cut h
is link with the crew rosters. He was sitting in the command chair of America’s PriFly, her Primary Flight Control Center, a large, round room with a low overhead and broad viewall screens encircling the compartment. Twenty officers and enlisted personnel sat at console workstations around him, preparing for the upcoming launch. “Very well. Send them up.”
He spun the seat to face an open deck hatch behind him, with steps leading down to the higher-G deck below. PriFly was located in one of the rotating hab modules, slowly spinning to provide artificial gravity.
Two women in flight utilities came up the steps.
Wizewski was surprised. Both of them—Commander Marissa Allyn and Lieutenant Jen Collins—had been in sick bay since the fight at Alphekka. Collins had been badly chewed up by a high-G spin around a loose singularity from a Turusch fighter she’d killed an instant before, and ended up with twelve broken bones and bad internal injuries. Allyn had been the skipper of the Dragonfires until she’d gone streaker. A SAR tug had brought her back on board three days later in an oxygen-starvation coma. Wizewski hadn’t expected to see either woman up and about for a long time, yet, and doubted that they ever would be able to strap on a Starhawk again. Those kinds of injuries could scar the mind worse than the body.
“Allyn and Collins, sir,” Commander Allyn said, “requesting permission to return to duty.”
Wizewski opened an in-head window, checking personnel status. “I don’t see a clean chit from sick bay,” he told them.
“No, sir,” Allyn replied. “There must have been a screwup, somewhere.”
“Uh-huh.”
“It would be a damned shame,” Collins said, “if a freaking clerical error kept two good Navy pilots out of the fight, wouldn’t it? Sir.”
Wizewski studied the two for a long moment. Both of them looked drawn and weak. Allyn was trembling slightly, though she was doing a pretty good job of hiding it. Collins looked like she was about to fall over.
“Unless you’ve been cleared by the chief medical officer, I can’t—”
Allyn interrupted him. “How many active-duty pilots do you have on the flight line, CAG?”
“Twenty-five.”
“Not enough. How many of those are checked out on Starhawks?”
“Maybe half.”
“So stow it, CAG, and give us a couple of ships.”
“Neither of you is fit to fly. If either of you pulls more than a couple of Gs, your AI is going to end up flying you home. If you don’t stroke out.”
“And until that happens, sir,” Collins said, “we can each take out some bad guys. This is too important for us to be left behind.”
“How do you know how important it is?”
“We’ve been following the scuttlebutt,” Allyn said. “And our AIs have been riding the Net. We know what the admiral’s trying to do, and we know you need every fighter pilot you can scrape up and pack into a Starhawk cockpit.”
He looked at Allyn hard. “Last I heard, you were in a coma, Commander.”
She shrugged. “I came out last week. And I’m damned tired of lying in sick bay. Give me a Starhawk, CAG. Let me fly.”
“You,” he said, turning to Collins, “had a punctured lung, a ruptured spleen, internal hemorrhaging, and enough broken bones to keep an entire osteo ward busy.”
“It’s amazing,” she replied evenly, “what modern medical technology can do. A few medinano injections . . .” She stretched out her left arm, flexing the hand. “Good as new.”
“Damn it, CAG,” Allyn added, “we know you’ve been dragging in volunteers from every other department on board. By now you must be scraping the bottom of the storage tank. Besides, a skill-set download and a few hours of sims don’t measure up to experience.”
After Alphekka, Wizewski had put out a call for people who wanted to volunteer as replacement pilots in order to keep the squadrons flying. At Texaghu Resch, the casualty rate for the newbies had been over twice that of personnel who’d been flying fighters for a year or more. There just wasn’t any way to cram that much link time into the trainees’ schedules.
“Look, I appreciate the offer,” Wizewski said. “But why put yourselves on the line now? We have just twenty-five pilots, and we’re going to be throwing them against odds I don’t even want to think about. It’s crazy.”
“Not twenty-five,” Collins said. “Twenty-seven.”
“Twenty-eight, actually,” Wizewski said. “I’d just about decided that I was going to have to strap on a Starhawk too.”
“We have to show these kids how it’s done, CAG,” Allyn said, grinning.
“Get the hell out of here,” Wizewski said, scowling. “I’ll clear you with sick bay. You just both make sure you bring your ’hawks back intact, you hear me? If either of you passes out and gets yourself killed, I will chew you a new one. Got it?”
“Why, CAG,” Collins said, “we didn’t know you were into that kinky stuff.”
“Out.”
As they turned to descend the stairs, Wizewski said, “Collins.”
“Yeah, CAG?”
“Did you hear who brought you back at Alphekka?”
She made a face. “Yeah. Prim.”
“You know he’s MIA?”
“I heard.”
“How do you feel about that?”
A shrug. “Shit happens.”
“Not good enough, Lieutenant. He was your squadron mate. I didn’t expect you to share a rack with him, but I did expect you to show him basic respect.”
She appeared to consider this, and then seemed to sag a little. “Look, CAG, I never liked the monogie little bastard. But he was a Dragonfire, and he was a pretty fair pilot. He hauled my ass back to the carrier when I got crunched, and I’m grateful. I’d do the same for him. It’s a family thing, y’know?”
“Just so you remember that, Lieutenant. See you at high-G.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
The bad blood between those two, Collins and Gray, had caused Wizewski endless problems over the past year. At one point, he’d even tried to get Gray to transfer to another squadron. The trouble was that Navy aviators were a pretty clannish bunch, and a lot of them didn’t like the idea that Prims could come in and join their exclusive, purebred club. As a group, Navy pilots could be incredibly close and supportive . . . but they could also be arrogant, self-centered and snobbish bastards who would close ranks against anyone who didn’t measure up to their standards.
And that could include anyone who was different.
Sex, Wizewski decided, most likely was at the root of the problem.
It often was. Sexual relationships among officers and enlisted crew alike were not officially condoned, but neither were they forbidden. So long as each person acted like an adult, kept the drama to an absolute minimum, and didn’t cause trouble with petty jealousies, rivalries, or coercion, they could pretty much do what they liked.
And, in fact, pilots in particular tended to swap around quite a bit, forming close bonds that extended well beyond the flight deck and into the occutubes during off-duty hours. When he’d first come on board, Trevor Gray had still been recovering from losing his . . . wife. Wizewski made an unpleasant face as he thought that unfamiliar word. He’d probably kept himself out of the general mix of squadbay camaraderie and social mixing, and so stood out all the more as an outsider, someone who didn’t belong.
He wondered if Collins had made a pass at a newbie, and the newbie had rejected her. That would have skewed her programming, but good. Might explain the bad blood there, at least.
Wizewski wasn’t a monogie, but he knew very well what it felt like to be an outsider, not quite in synch with the local cultural norms.
Gray was gone, but Collins would be flying with another Prim, Ryan, from the Washington Swamps. And she’d damned well better suck in her bigotry and act professional, or Wizewski would break her all the way down to civilian.
Assuming they survived this afternoon.
Twenty-eight against the Sh’daar flee
t. . . .
Suicide.
Trevor Gray
Omega Centauri
1015 hours, TFT
“I don’t understand,” Gray said, interrupting the march of unfolding images. “That’s why the Sh’daar don’t believe in advanced technology? It would upset the order of their civilization?”
“No,” Thedreh’schul told him. “In fact, the imminent collision of galaxies spurred technological development to an unprecedented degree. If the member worlds of the N’gai Cloud civilization were to maintain some level of coherence or cultural unity, they would have to advance technologically, and advance to an enormous degree. Ships that could cross twenty thousand light years within a brief span of time, perhaps. Portals, doorways that would allow a being to step from one world to another as if from one room to another. Life spans so long that a thousand-year voyage meant nothing. Forms of communication involving entangled quantum particles allowing messages to pass instantaneously across a hundred thousand light years. All of these were considered, yes-no? All were tried. Ur-Sh’daar technologies exploded in number and in accelerating advancement.
“The ur-Sh’daar learned to re-engineer stars.”
“The Six Suns,” Gray said.
“Among other engineering feats, yes. What you call the Six Suns created a unique gravitational environment for some of the ur-Sh’daar experiments, as well as a kind of cultural beacon designed to unify and focus the member civilizations. In a more immediately practical development, they also learned to take the mass of a star and collapse it into a state of neutronium hyper-matter, shaping it into a cylinder rotating at close to the speed of light.
“The Texaghu Resch gravitational anomaly,” Gray said quietly.
“Yes. Created in pairs tuned together, they formed artificial wormholes that could span tens of thousands of light years. The ur-Sh’daar began exploring, probing into the looming spiral galaxy, creating a network of far-flung gateways—what you call the TRGA cylinders or tunnels. We Agletsch heard of them only as legends. For us, they were the Kir’ghalleg v’nroth. You would say . . . ‘Across the Depths,’ yes-no?”