by Ian Douglas
“I think I like ‘TRGA’ better,” Geray said. “Easier to pronounce.”
“Either way it is only a name,” Thedreh’schul told him. “No matter what these devices were called, they were intended to link together a scattered ur-Sh’daar union, yes-no?
“And more . . .”
T hough life on Earth had only begun blossoming into multicellular forms over the past couple of hundred million years or so, though terrestrial life had only recently discovered the key biological masterstroke of sex that would end an evolutionary bottleneck and lead ultimately to the evolution of intelligence, Earth’s galaxy nevertheless teemed with sentient species. The galaxy had first coalesced out of vast collapsing clouds of dust and gas and newborn stars perhaps a billion years after the big bang. Though several successive generations of exploding stars were required to enrich individual galaxies to the point where solid worlds could be formed that could give rise to life, to intelligence, and to technology, the first technological civilizations must have begun exploring their galactic neighborhoods as much as 2 billion years before the birth of Earth’s sun.
By the time the ur-Sh’daar began exploring the new galaxy, that spiral was home to perhaps 50 million intelligent species.
The majority of these, for one reason or another, never developed a technic culture. Some evolved within the deep abyssal realms of their world oceans, or in oceans locked away beneath planet-wide ice caps on worlds like Europa or Pluto in Earth’s solar system. Many evolved in the atmospheres of gas giants, with no solid surface and no means of mining metals or creating plastics or developing any of the other accoutrements and necessities of technic civilization. Many evolved in reducing atmospheres or carbon dioxide or methane-ammonia or other exotic but common gas mixes, where fire—hence smelting—was impossible. And so, tragically, many species ended their own existence as their technological development was still aborning, through miscalculation, through cosmic accident, to asteroid impacts and nearby supernovae, and all of the myriad other catastrophes that threaten any planetary species.
But at least one tenth of 1 percent of those intelligent species managed to survive. They’d developed on worlds with oxygen atmospheres, permitting fire, metals smelting, and the development of primitive technologies. Or they developed through advancements in exotic chemistries that bypassed the need for open flame, or learned to extract metals from the throats of hot volcanic vents in the deep ocean or on worlds with unoxygenated, reducing atmospheres. A few were helped by more advanced others, the technically gifted descending to help those trapped in technological bottlenecks—
Gray thought of the gas-giant dwelling H’rulka.
Fifty thousand technic civilizations, a very great many of them star faring, spreading out through the length and breadth of the Milky Way 6.5 billion years before the rise of Humankind.
And then the N’gai Cloud had descended upon the galaxy, bringing with it the ur-Sh’daar. . . .
Chapter Twenty-Three
1 July 2405
CIC
TC/USNA CVS America
Omega Centauri
1510 hours, TFT
At long last, America approached her Emergence point.
Koenig sat in his command chair in the carrier’s Combat Information Center, watching, expressionless, as the CIC team sat strapped down and linked in. The tactical tank showed the expected positions of the other ships of the CBG; how good a guess that projection was would be determined in another few moments.
A very great deal depended on the accuracy of that guess.
The process of moving faster than light within an Alcubierre gravitational warp bubble had been compared to squeezing a watermelon pit tightly between thumb and forefinger and shooting it across a room. Technically, the bubble of folded-up space no longer existed inside the universe proper, but was skimming along the surface in a hyper-dimensional sense, within an eldritch realm physicists called metaspace. In another sense, the focused gravitational singularities embracing the ship contracted the fabric of spacetime ahead while expanding it astern.
No matter what metaphors were applied, precise navigation within metaspace was difficult, a matter for the extremely powerful sentient AIs running in the astrogation department of each ship. Those AIs had linked with one another during the initial acceleration so that all of the ships shared a precise directional vector, but even so, there would be a certain amount of scatter within the fleet, even across so short a distance as half a light year.
Within metaspace, human starships could manage between 1.7 and 1.9 light years per day, the lower values applying to freighters, stores ships, and the like. The assault force Koenig had organized here consisted entirely of combat vessels, all capable of the faster rates.
Even so, it had taken more than six hours to travel half a light year. Even across so relatively short a distance, there was certain to be a fair amount of scattering at the other end, both in space and in time. The battlegroup was operating in completely unknown territory here. There’d been no opportunity to send out reconnaissance probes to record the local metric, and while a ship was folded up within metaspace, there was no way to take sightings of nearby stars.
With normal interstellar jumps, it was possible for ships to emerge from Alcubierre Drive scattered across several astronomical units, so far that it took ten or twenty minutes or more for the light of each emerging vessel to reach the others, allowing them to coordinate their movements. For that reason, battlegroups tended to emerge well out on the fringes of a target star system. The metric there would be flatter than in close to the system’s core, where the gravity of the local star twisted space and made emergence dangerous. And tactically, that gave the emerging ships the room they needed to look at the dispositions of enemy ships and to formulate a plan of attack.
Koenig had absolutely no idea what they were about to jump into now, however. The Sh’daar—if in fact that was who they were facing here, and not simply another client species—possessed a level of technology undreamed of by human science, whole planets capable of faster-than-light travel, and the astonishing stellar engineering displayed by the Six Suns.
He was counting, however, on one point. The Six Suns were so bright that they illuminated a vast region of space, one so large that not even the Sh’daar would be able to guard all of it all the time. Koenig’s hope was to emerge at one point within that sphere, threaten whatever appeared to be both vulnerable and important, and use that threat to force the Sh’daar to negotiate.
It was, Koenig had to admit to himself, the longest of long shots. With no hard intelligence, with no understanding of the enemy or his defensive capabilities, the America battlegroup could easily find itself cut off, surrounded, and overwhelmed.
But it was all they had. The alternative had been to back off, return to Earth, and go back on the defensive, a strategy that ultimately meant defeat.
Ten more minutes to go. . . .
Thirty-three ships.
Of the forty-one that had come through the tunnel to deploy within the Omega Centauri cluster, five, all of them with serious battle damage, had been left on guard at the TRGA—the OCGA, Koenig corrected himself. The astrogation department had dubbed the artifact on this side of the shortcut the Omega Centauri gravitational anomaly, or OCGA. Pronounced with a soft C, as in Centauri, the term had swiftly devolved into “Oscah,” a parallel with “Triggah.”
After Koenig’s discussion with the assembled CBG captains, three of the ships—two of them Pan-European and one the North-American destroyer Azteca—had opted out, decelerated, and returned to Oscah, where they were now waiting with the others.
That only three ships in the fleet had balked at making this final assault was nothing less than a miracle, Koenig knew. That the rest had stayed with him was an astonishing declaration of both solidarity and trust.
He prayed that the trust was not misplaced.
“Karyn,” he said, then stopped himself, and said instead, “Personal assistant.”
“I’m here, Admiral.”
The voice was emotionlessly androgynous. But it was better this way.
“Final pre-Emergence checklist, please.”
“All stations report readiness for Emergence,” the PA replied. “CAG Wizewski states that all fighters are ready for rotational drop, as soon as you give the word. America’s launch tubes are configured for high-G KK bombardment.”
“Very well.”
“Readiness of the other ships is, of course, conjectural, pending Emergence. However, our last communications with the other carriers in the CBG stated that they were readying their fighters, and that General Mathers and Colonel Murcheson were preparing for a possible Marine assault on either the mobile planet or upon such other targets as you might designate.”
“How long?”
“Seventeen minutes, twenty-one seconds, Admiral.”
“Okay. I want a full sensory sweep as soon as we emerge. Emphasis on tracking those two transponders. If we come out anywhere close to them, I want to know.”
At the planning conference yesterday, Koenig had told the battlegroup’s command staff and ship captains that they were not here primarily to find the fleet’s missing pilots, that to do so simply did not make sound military sense. Nonetheless, those two pilots, Gray and Schiere, were very much on Koenig’s mind.
If they were alive, prisoners on that mobile alien planet as those briefly intercepted transponder signals had suggested, he was going to rescue them if there was any way to do so.
He could imagine no colder and more lonely an isolation than to be left behind in enemy hands almost 17,000 light years from home. The distance might be far, far greater than that if the speculation about this being someplace other than Omega Centauri was correct, but the difference between 16,500 light years and millions of light years was purely academic, and could have no real meaning for the human psyche. Abandoned was abandoned, and it would mean a bleak and despairing death for those two if the fleet couldn’t, in fact, reach them.
He wouldn’t risk the entire battlegroup solely on that rescue.
But if there was a way to pull it off, he would do so.
“Scanners are set. However, Admiral, you should be aware that our chances of emerging within close proximity of that planet are remote.”
“I know.”
So far as was possible, America and the rest of CBG-18 were following the track of that fleeing and unplanet-like planet, but they were going to try to emerge around three thousand astronomical units from the center of the Six Suns, within what humans thought of as the habitable zone for six stars of that incredible brightness.
There was no reason to think that what humans found “habitable” would apply to the Sh’daar, however. If the planet had emerged ten thousand AUs from those blue-hot beacons, or if it had continued on to, say, just two thousand AUs out, the battlegroup would emerge many hours, many days away from it.
“I know,” Koenig said, repeating himself. “But sometimes miracles happen.”
“I do not understand.”
Koenig smiled at that. Karyn Mendelson would have understood.
But she had been human, not an artificial intelligence.
“No,” he said. “You wouldn’t.”
Flight Deck
TC/USNA CVS America
Omega Centauri
1520 hours, TFT
Lieutenant Shay Ryan stepped out onto the flight deck, a vast and echoing chamber ringing with the harsh bray of a klaxon announcing the imminent drop. She hit the touchpatch on her skin suit, which immediately began transforming itself over her body, growing the link points she would need to connect with her fighter. Her helmet was in her ship.
Guided through the labyrinthine confusion of flight-deck personnel, machinery, and waiting fighters by an in-head beacon, she found her Starhawk resting above its nanosealed drop hatch, in the middle of a line of identical fighters. Here, the fighters were in their load configuration, their light-drinking black hulls shaped like loaves of bread, featureless save for their hull numbers picked out in glowing white nanomatrix, their cockpits melted open to give the pilots access.
Her number was 836.
“Hey, Shay!” a voice called. “Luck!”
It was Rissa Schiff, standing next to her fighter a few hatches down.
“Thanks!” Shay called back, grinning. “Let’s grab some hard Gs!”
Shay still wasn’t sure how she felt about the previous night. She and Schiffie had ended up together inside Shay’s rack. It had started out as a cuddle and gone further.
She’d never married, and her Prim monogamous preferences had never been seriously tested. She knew a majority of people from the Periphery were monogamous, and that they tended to collide in a fairly messy way when they mixed with citizens and their more normal social mores. Shay didn’t care about normal, but she did care about fitting in with the squadron. The problem was, she wasn’t about to start sleeping with every other pilot on the flight line just to prove she was “normal.” Worse, she was wondering, now, how she would handle it if anything happened to Schiffie.
She pushed the thought away. That was monogie thinking. Sex was fun, superb recreation, a way to bond with friends.
It wasn’t possession.
She climbed into her cockpit, picking up the lightweight bubble of her helmet, setting it over her head, and letting its rim merge with her utilities. As she connected with her fighter, the AI flooded her in-head display with incoming data and graphics, showing ship readiness, squadron status, and tacsit.
Ten minutes to Emergence.
Ten minutes of waiting.
“Hey, Dragons!” That was Ben Donovan’s voice. “We’ve got VIPs with us!”
“Hey, CAG!” Schiff called. “What are you doing, slumming with the peasants?”
“I just figured you could use my years of experience,” Wizewski’s voice came back. “A steadying influence, right?”
“And Commander Allyn!” Calli Loman called. “What are you doing back on the flight deck?”
“Looking out for you newbies,” Allyn replied.
“Do I relinquish command to you, Commander?” Donovan asked. “Or to Captain Wizewski?”
“I’ll take it,” the CAG replied.
“And Lieutenant Collins too,” Lawrence Kuhn said. “Man, this is like old-home week.”
“What would you know about it, newbie?” Collins called back.
Shay listened to the banter, realizing just how serious things must be. The CAG was senior command staff; his presence in a fighter was only a little less astonishing than if Captain Buchanan or Admiral Koenig himself were to come down here and strap on a Starhawk. And Allyn and Collins . . . those two had been so badly wracked up at Alphekka. What the hell were they doing here?
The fact of their presence was not exactly reassuring. From the scuttlebutt she’d been hearing over the last couple of days, this assault deployment was going to be rough—rougher than anything America had seen yet in this war.
But at the same time, the fact that they were here made her feel . . . accepted. Part of the team.
Almost as warm and wanted and needed as she’d felt with Schiffie last night.
“Dragonfires!” CAG called over the squadron channel. “Five minutes to Emergence! Stand by for drop!”
Trevor Gray
Omega Centauri
1525 hours, TFT
“They invaded the Milky Way galaxy,” Gray said, interrupting again the narrative and the flow of accompanying images. “Is that what you’re saying? Your damned ur-Sh’daar came into the galaxy and began destroying any civilizations they found, anyone who might have posed a threat to their cockeyed sense of ‘order’!”
He was thinking of the Chelk. He’d heard scuttlebutt, before the Battle of Texaghu Resch, about how the Agletsch had identified a star-faring species destroyed thousands of years ago by the Sh’daar. “Glassed over” was how the Agletsch had referred to the Chelk homeworld, somewhere i
n the vicinity of the Sh’daar wormhole tunnel.
“Not at first,” Thedreh’schul told him. “And not the ur-Sh’daar. They did open a number of gateways from the N’gai Cloud to our galaxy, and they began establishing relations, peaceful relations, with a number of local star-faring civilizations. After all, it was possible that many of those cultures, once contacted peacefully, might be folded into the ur-Sh’daar polity, become a part of that order.
“But after only a few million years, a disaster wrecked . . . everything.”
“What disaster?”
“An . . . event. What you refer to as the Technological Singularity. In rapid succession, the member species of the ur-Sh’daar milieu . . . changed.”
“What happened? They changed how?”
For answer, the images began flowing once again.
He walked the streets of a civilization far in advance of his own. Intricate structures towered into the sky, or floated serenely overhead. Enormous domes enclosed hidden facilities kilometers across, and fluted, sponsoned, twisted towers of alien design stretched tens of kilometers into the air. Gray saw a dozen cities on a dozen worlds, the products of a dozen mutually alien minds, from the subsurface crystal caverns of the troglodytic Zhalleg to the shape-shifting nanotechnic dreamscapes of the Adjugredudhra to the etched cliff faces of the Baondyeddi.
He saw . . . beings, intelligences utterly unlike anything with which he was familiar, save that all possessed keen and curious minds, and all used various forms of technology to shape and reshape their environment . . . and themselves.
One species bore the Agletsch name of Groth Hoj, though their own name for themselves was based on subtle changes in the colors and luminescence of certain of their cephalic tentacles. The Groth Hoj had pioneered the use of robotics beginning some 300,000 years earlier, and now possessed bodies of advanced plastics and ceramics that never died and never wore out. Some few Groth Hoj were ultra-traditionalists, however, who’d never made the transition from organic bodies to invulnerable robotic shells. The assumption, as the millennia passed, was that these Refusers, as they were known, would pass into extinction.