by Ian Douglas
“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 manipu
late 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.
The viewpoint was that of just 120 light years from America’s current position at the core of Omega Centauri. Shortly after the collapse of the Sh’daar defenses, Koenig had dispatched a mail packet to travel that distance, look around, and return. This was what it had seen.
“It takes some getting used to,” Buchanan observed. “It doesn’t feel like we’re almost a billion years in the past.”
“What is the past supposed to feel like, Randy?” Koenig asked. “It’s just another set of coordinates in spacetime.”
The intergalactic vista they were studying was hidden from the core of Omega Centauri, masked by the thick-packed wall of 10 million suns that comprised the dwarf galaxy’s innermost core. Just 120 light years away from the Six Suns at the core’s heart, the swarming stars thinned out drastically; the outlying reaches of Omega Centauri in this epoch consisted of another billion suns scattered as an irregular cloud 10,000 light years across at its widest.
In this epoch. A close astronomical survey of the spiral galaxy hanging above their heads had narrowed down “time-now” to a period some 876 million years before humans had evolved on Earth, give or take about a million years. Individual suns were lost among that whirlpool of 400 billion stars, and the actual location of Earth’s sun within that vast swirl of starlight could not be determined. The actual date had been determined by comparing the relative positions of other, more distant, galaxies hanging in the sky—especially M-31 in Andromeda, M-33 in Triangulum, the Greater and Lesser Magellanic Clouds, and the fourteen dwarf galaxies that orbited the Milky Way. Galaxies move with respect to one another, and their relative positions in respect to one another within three-dimensional space were well understood by Confederation astronomers. The positions of M-31 and M-33 established in general where the other, smaller, closer galaxies ought to be to within 50 million years or so; the positions of the dwarfs allowed a closer calibration. During the time of man, one of the dwarfs—the Canis Major Irregular Galaxy—was in the process of being devoured by the Milky Way, while another, the Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical, was 50,000 light years out and headed for an eventual collision. In this sky, both were considerably farther out, perhaps two or three orbits of the main galaxy in the past.
The galaxy that one day would be known as Omega Centauri was at this point just skimming above the sweep of the Milky Way’s spiral arms, a few thousand light years above the galactic plane, and a mere hundred thousand years or so from collision. An exact demarcation in time was impossible, of course, since the star clouds that comprised entire galaxies didn’t have sharp boundaries. The outer stars of both galactic systems were already merging, in fact, and Koenig could see where tidal interactions were sharply warping a portion of the Milky Way spiral, and were already seriously disrupting parts of Omega Centauri.
When the final coalescence occurred, most of Omega Centauri’s suns and dust and gas would be stripped away, leaving the naked core to orbit through the Galaxy of Man as an apparent globular cluster.
Koenig was looking at the Humankind’s galaxy as it had appeared almost 900 million years ago. Somewhere in that frozen maelstrom of stars and curling tentacles of interstellar gas and dust, of glowing nebulae and evolving suns overhead, lay hidden Sol and her retinue of planets. On Earth, at this moment, living cells in shallow, warm seas were learning how to congregate into multicellular colonies, the stromatolite reef builders were beginning to go into a long decline, and a few adventurous organisms were just at the point of inventing sex. Those two linchpins of evolutionary creativity would make possible the entire astonishing panoply of life on Earth that would follow. From here, the dinosaurs lay another 626 million years in the future, and humans some 250 million years after that. Such a stunning abyss of time left Koenig awed and a feeling a little lost.
And perhaps that’s why the Sh’daar had elected to extend their reach through time, to an epoch in the remote future, when Omega Centauri had evolved—or devolved, rather—into a globular cluster orbiting within the hundreds of billions of stars of the Milky Way’s galactic spiral.
The fact that the AIs had been able to identify Omega Centauri with the infalling dwarf galaxy of a billion years before remained an astonishing technological leap. Even across a billion years, it turned out that many of the cluster’s stars retained the spectral fingerprints necessary to make the identification . . . that, and the cluster’s unusual size. Even so, the leap felt more like intuition than science.
And AIs weren’t supposed to indulge in such human ways of viewing the cosmos.
There’d been endless speculation about the true nature of the Sh’daar, of course, ever since their Ultimatum in 2367. An advanced civilization ruling the galaxy, existing for millions, even for hundreds of millions of years . . . no. Koenig never had liked the term Sh’daar Empire. The galaxy was simply too vast to permit such shallow and shortsighted terminology. Evidently, the Sh’daar had agreed with him. They’d hoped to infiltrate the future by bypassing almost a billion years, pruning away those species that threatened their plans, co-opting the rest into nonthreatening acquiescence. Koenig strongly suspected that the enigmatic Six Suns were a part of that, but he couldn’t prove it. One interesting fact, though, had been pointed out by the astrogation department: the Six Suns no longer existed in Omega Centauri, the future version of the Sh’daar galaxy.
Stars that massive would die after a few million years, of course, going supernova. Still, the life spans of those artificially enhanced stars could have been extended by feeding in more stars. What had changed?
What were the Sh’daar—or the ur-Sh’daar, for that matter—really up to?
“What I want to know,” Wizewski said, “is whether the bastards can be trusted.”
“I’m not sure it’s possible to trust another species,” Koenig said.
“My, but aren’t we cynical today,” Buchanan said, laughing.
Koenig shrugged. “Hell, we still have trouble trusting members of our own species. And as for the alien . . . with an entirely different way of looking at the universe, a different concept of the natural order of things . . .”
“Exactly,” Wizewski said. “Things we take for granted, they don’t. Things they take for granted are sheer fantasy, aren’t even conceivable, to us.”
“But they seem willing to talk,” Koenig said. “That’s the important thing, at least for right now.”
“I’m still trying to get a handle on the idea of us joining the Sh’daar,” Katryn Craig said. “Becoming a part of their civilization.”
“I suppose it makes sense,” Wizewski said. “We’re in on their secret. If we can’t beat ’em, join ’em. And share the galaxy.”
Koenig had his own ideas about that. How does an enemy bent on your absolute annihilation become a friend, an ally, almost literally within the blink of an eye?
After almost four decades of fighting the Sh’daar, could Humankind accept them as allies?
; Should Humankind accept them as allies?
Ultimately, it would be the Confederation government that upheld the hastily cobbled-together treaty he’d presented to the Sh’daar . . . or struck it down. He suspected they would accept; after all, those government factions set on accepting peace at any price, including that of giving up GRIN technologies, had been in the majority back home. When the Fleet returned to Earth, Koenig would be giving them an option, a chance for peace without hobbling human technological advancement.
Koenig knew he would still resign his commission, though . . . and that they might well court-martial him before that happened.
Time would tell.
“It’s not over yet by a long shot,” he said after a long moment. “We don’t know how all of the Sh’daar client races are going to react to upstart humans suddenly hobnobbing with their galactic masters. The Turusch, the Nungiirtok, the H’rulka . . . none of them think like humans. And there’s a lot we still don’t know about the Sh’daar themselves. Or the ur-Sh’daar, for that matter.”
“We know they’re afraid of our being here,” Buchanan said. “Here and now, a billion years in our own past. We’re going to need to learn more about that.”
Three days ago, the battlegroup had been at the point of final defeat when the Sh’daar had linked in through the fleet’s Agletsch liaisons and the fighter pilot, Lieutenant Gray, who’d been a prisoner within the ship designated as Objective Gold. They’d requested a cease-fire—“an immediate and unconditional end of all military operations,” as they’d put it—in order to protect the integrity of spacetime.
The Sh’daar, it seemed, were as terrified of temporal paradox as they were of technological singularities.
The grandfather paradox. It was as well established in the realm of scientific myth as Schrödinger’s cat. Build a time machine. Travel back to the past and kill your grandfather. You are never born, hence you can not travel back in time and your grandfather lives, so you do build the time machine and you do kill him, and on and on and irreconcilably on.