Singularity: Star Carrier: Book Three (23 page)

There was a lot more, but Gray broke off reading, closing the window. Old news. He remembered going over much of this with the Frank Dolinar avatar, in the Heimdall docuinteractive. Looking up, he stared at and through the dome of stars behind the sky, wondering if this was a recorded image from an era, eons ago, when the dwarf galaxy was still
outside
Sol’s far larger galaxy, before it had been captured and devoured.

It would have been incredible to be able to see the Milky Way’s spiral from outside . . . but he could see nothing but the cluster’s stars. Either the Milky Way was hidden by the bulk of the planet itself, or the local star background was just too thick.

But there was something else. . . .

Gray walked a few meters forward, looking for something—and found it behind a nearby mass of feathery purple vegetation. As he pushed the plants aside, he revealed one of Heimdall’s cliff faces, just a meter and a half tall, polished and smoothed into a gleaming wall of silver, with what appeared to be circuitry diagrams imprinted in the metallic face. In his era, this cliff was much higher, heavily eroded, and looked like nothing more dramatic than a shelf of exposed rock with odd patterns of metallic stains, only just recognizable as the product of technology. But
this
 . . .

He reached out and touched the surface, his fingers dragging lightly across the imprints. The face felt very slightly warm. Though he’d said as much to Schiere moments before, he was only just beginning to realize, to really
feel
that what he was seeing here was alien data somehow superimposed on the docuinteractive in his memory.

And that meant . . . the aliens were communicating with him.
Telling
him something. Showing the two humans something about themselves or their civilization as it looked a billion years ago.

“Gray?” Schiere said. “I think you should turn around and see this.”

Gray turned.

The sim of Frank Dolinar had vanished. In its place was an alien.

Gray felt a shiver of anticipation . . . mingled with fear, and a bit of wonder as well. Was
this
one of the Sh’daar, revealed at last?

The entity was small, if the simulation was scaled appropriately for Gray’s electronic avatar—about a meter high, or so, and perhaps thirty centimeters wide. It was radially symmetrical, looking, he thought, like a stack of six or eight terrestrial starfishes the size of dinner plates, but with flexible arms that looked like shredded yellow leaves, twisting branches, and weaving tendrils. Its overall color was a pale cream-yellow, with black splotches throughout and with the outermost tips shading to a dark rust. Within the tangle of arms, he saw, were some tendrils that might be tipped by bright red eyes, some ending in suckers, some with highly mobile appendages that might be hands or might be flattened tentacles. The being oozed along on its lowest set of arms; Gray had the impression that it could also have stretched out on the ground and inched along horizontally as well, like a worm or a millipede.

There was nothing at first glimpse to suggest intelligence . . . but then Gray saw the glint of metal and plastic—a finger-sized device of unknown purpose apparently embedded in the thing’s flesh against its central column between two sets of arms. The thing was technic . . . or, at least, had been given some sort of technological prosthesis.

“Are you one of the Sh’daar?” Gray asked.

He didn’t hear the answer in words. Indeed, how the creature communicated with its own kind was anyone’s guess. But a dozen or so of those weirdly stalked berries that might be eyes twisted around to point in his direction, quivering, and he wondered if it was responding to his question somehow.

An image appeared in his field of view . . . a tightly packed mass of colored dots, each one a different hue. One dot, a bright blue one, emerged from the rest, standing apart, and then the image faded away.

One out of many . . .

The thought was Gray’s, not words from an alien mind, but Gray had the impression that it had just answered him with the animated diagram. The meaning, though, was still ambiguous. Was it saying that there were lots of Sh’daar, and that this entity was one individual? Or that many distinct
species
made up the Sh’daar, and the entity represented one member species of a larger group?

As if in direct answer to his unvoiced question, Gray saw other . . . beings.

They winked into existence in front of the two humans, dozens of them. He
thought
they were all living beings, members of an array of alien biologies, though they might have been trying to show him something else entirely, something indescribable that he simply was not capable of grasping. The display of mutually alien entities was both awe inspiring and bewildering.

There was something like an immense garden slug eight meters long and three high—but covered with fur striped red and gold, its front end identified only by a semicircle of seven obsidian-black organs that might be eyes. There was a two-meter-wide pancake on myriad feet, with weaving pale tendrils and sky-blue eye-spots around the leathery rim, like the sensory apparatus of a terrestrial scallop. There was a tight knot of small, dark-colored flying creatures, a close-knit swarm of birdlike or fishlike or flying buglike
things
writhing together to form a rough sphere, which appeared to be trying to turn itself inside out as the schooling life forms moved. There was a tripod-thing with dangling tentacles and what might have been stalked eyes. None of the entities looked anything like any alien species with which Gray was familiar.

Each entity was so . . . different that Gray was having trouble even recognizing what he was seeing. Most were evidently
alive
—well, all save one thing that looked more like a branching lump of crystalline quartz than anything biological—but some were so alien that his mind stubbornly resisted making out the details. None of the things was even remotely like a human.

But after a churning moment, his gaze swung back to that one twisting, dark swarm of flying creatures. There was something . . .

It was difficult trying to understand them out of context. He couldn’t even be certain of the size. The writhing sphere of organisms appeared to be a meter across, but could as easily have been a few centimeters wide, and magnified, or kilometers, with the image reduced. The twisting, organic knot reminded him most of schooling swarms of closely packed fish . . . but were they actually swimming, like fish, their image projected into air? Or were they truly flying in air, like birds? The outer surface of each was dark gray, but as they turned their surfaces caught the light en masse, showing waves of reflected light sweeping across the collective surface of the school as it turned and writhed. The movement reminded him strongly of something, something other than a school of fish, and it took him a moment to realize what it was.

The clouds of flashing, silvery alien spacecraft in front of the TRGA opening, then again after he’d emerged in this new and star-crowded space—the creatures moved, they
felt
like these aliens, somehow.

“All of these . . . these beings together,” Gray said after a moment, “are the Sh’daar. An entire
galaxy
of worlds and civilizations, working together in something like our Confederation, but a billion years ago.”

A small, bright blue disk appeared against Gray’s vision. A moment later, a second disk, identical in every way, appeared alongside the first, and both began moving back and forth in perfect unison before vanishing again.

“Does that mean yes?” Gray asked. “An agreement?”

The blue disks repeated their performance.

“Does
what
mean yes?” Schiere asked.

“I think they’re trying to communicate,” Gray replied. “But not with spoken language. When I said that I thought these beings together were the Sh’daar, they showed me a blue circle, then a second blue circle exactly like it. I think that’s supposed to be agreement. Identity. Ah. They’re showing the circles to me again.”

“I don’t see anything.”

“Maybe because your AI was damaged. Or maybe they just singled me out for some other reason, or even just by random chance.” He grinned. “I don’t think they’re deliberately ignoring you.”

Schiere gave a nervous-sounding laugh. “Yeah, I don’t think they
want
to talk to me.”

Gray looked again at the silently waiting ranks of alien beings in front of them. That dinner-plate stack of tendriled segments—how did it communicate with its own kind, to say nothing of communicating with that writhing mass of fish-bird-insect things, or with that lump of crystal . . . or with the thing like a mottled brown-and-white octopus balanced precariously on three partly coiled tentacles?

“You know, when you think about it,” he said, thoughtful, “the biggest problem in communications between mutually alien species may simply be finding a common mode for transmitting information. Even just on Earth, we have humans using speech . . . while some whales share stuff through song, squids use changes of color in their skins, and honeybees communicate inside the hive through a kind of waggling dance that shows both the direction and distance to a food source. We’re partial to making sounds that carry meaning . . . but that’s due to a chance twist of evolution.”

“Yeah.” Schiere nodded. “Even with species that use spoken language—words—it can be tough to match sound with meaning. The Agletsch can talk with us using those electronic translators they wear, but I downloaded once that their actual speech is made by burping air directly from their stomachs through their abdominal mouths. They can’t form a lot of the sounds we use in English . . . and they’d be completely lost trying Mandarin.”

“Most
people
I know are lost with Mandarin,” Gray pointed out, “including me. That’s why we have translator software.”

“Maybe we need an Agletsch here,” Schiere suggested. “They seem to be the galaxy’s universal linguists.”

“Maybe so.” Gray kept staring at the virtual-sim aliens. “We know there are Agletsch inside Sh’daar space. Maybe they can get one, bring her here.”

“Her?”

“Agletsch males are tiny parasites on the females, like leeches. Not intelligent.”

“Oh. How do we tell them that?”

Gray was already searching through his implant memory. He had some recordings in there somewhere. . . .

There. He used his implant to pull up a memory recorded . . . was it only yesterday? His AI took the memory and projected it into the virtual reality around them.

A number of humans in naval uniforms stood in a semicircle around two Agletsch. Avatar images of himself and Shay Ryan approached.

“Hey, Dra’ethde,” Gray’s twin said. “What brings you down here?”

The Agletsch on the right twisted two of its eye stalks around for a look. “Ah! You are the fighter pilot Trevor Gray, yes-no?”

“Yes. We met at SupraQuito, remember?”

“We do. We are delighted to see you again. And Shay Ryan as well! We remember you as well.”

Gray let the simulation focus on the two Agletsch. The sim froze, and the human figures vanished, leaving only the two spider-like aliens. After a moment, Gray had his AI zoom in on one of the translator units imbedded in the leathery skin of one alien’s thorax.

A blue disk appeared, superimposed over one of the Agletsch, matched a moment later by a second, identical disk. Both jittered back and forth in perfect synch.

“Okay,” Gray said. “I’d say we’ve just been given a ‘message received.’ ”

“I wonder how long it will take, though.”

“You sound worried.”

“I am. We know the TRGA provides a shortcut back to our vicinity of space—Texaghu Resch, right?”

“Yes.”

“Suppose that’s the
only
shortcut?”

Gray saw what Schiere was getting at. He’d been assuming that the TRGA cylinder was one isolated part of an extensive intragalactic transportation system, possibly built by the Sh’daar, possibly merely used by them. But only one was known, connecting the Texaghu Resch system with the heart of the Omega Centauri cluster. And the other end of that cylinder was now under attack by the carrier battlegroup.

If there were no other cylinders, the Sh’daar here might be cut off from the rest of their empire. Their client races possessed faster-than-light drives roughly as efficient as those used by the Confederation; without one of the spinning cylinders,
America
, capable of traveling at around 1.9 light years per day on her Aclubierre Drive, would require twenty-seven years to cross 18,500 light years.

He sincerely hoped that he and Schiere wouldn’t have to wait that long while their captors imported an Agletsch from some other distant part of their empire.

Chapter Fifteen

30 June 2405

CIC

TC/USNA CVS
America

TRGA, Texaghu Resch System

1224 hours, TFT

“A
dmiral Koenig? The last of the SAR tugs is coming on board now.”

The voice was CAG Wizewski’s. On one of the CIC monitors, Koenig could see the UTW-90 space tug, a clumsy, black beetle with a crippled Starhawk grasped tightly in its forward gripping arms, approaching Landing Bay Three.

“Who is that?” Koenig asked.

“Lieutenant Ryan, Dragonfires,” Wizewski replied. “SAR snagged her from a trajectory that was taking her into the sun.”

“God. Is she okay?”

“Should be, sir. The tug’s med-AI reports radiation exposure and dehydration, but they’ll have her in sick bay in a few minutes.”

“Good. Keep me informed.” This was the eighth streaker brought back by the SAR tugs after the fighter assault on the TRGA defenders. The Search and Rescue teams were reporting no more contacts out there . . . none still living, in any case.

It was time to initiate “Trigger Pull.”

That was the operation name with which the battlegroup tactical departments had come back. Koenig had given them a problem: Was there a way to get through the TRGA bottleneck without subjecting the fleet to devastating and concentrated fire?

And his staff had come back with an unqualified . . .
maybe
.

The actual idea had come from General Joshua Mathers, in command of the fleet’s Marines. “What we need,” Mathers had said, “are some door-kickers.”

The Marines of MSU-17 were there to seize enemy orbital fortifications, bases on moons or planetoids, or even, if necessary, grab a beachhead on an alien planet. Trained in CCBT—close combat boarding tactics—they could also be employed to storm enemy hard points, capture weapons positions, secure landing zones, or rescue prisoners. “Door-kicker” was a term from centuries before, referring to the man on point who would take down a locked door so the rest of the assault team could storm through. Tactics varied with the situation and the door; historically, they included the use of explosives, a shotgun, a battering ram, or a low-tech application of shoulder or foot.

What Mathers had suggested was the use of explosives—specifically of high-yield nuclear explosives. CBG-18 possessed three ships designated as heavy missile carriers, or bombardment ships. The
Ma’at Mons
was a veteran of the battles of Arcturus and Alphekka, under the command of Captain John Grunmeyer.

The other two had joined the fleet after the confrontation with Grand Admiral Giraurd at HD 157950. There was the Pan-European missile carrier
Gurrierre
, Captain Alain Penchard in command.

And there was the Chinese Hegemony vessel
Cheng Hua
, officially designated as a cruiser, but in fact designed as a missile bombardment ship. She was under the command of Shang Xiao Jiang Ji.

A typical missile bombardment vessel was a third the length of the
America
—around 350 meters long and massing perhaps 100,000 tons. The Chinese cruiser was a little smaller—312 meters in length. All had the same general layout dictated by the physics of high-velocity travel—a forward cap filled with water that served both as reaction mass and as a shield against particulate radiation—and a relatively slender spine mounting drives and a set of rotating habitation modules tucked into the cap’s shadow. Each ship housed massed batteries of launch tubes and carried some hundreds of nuclear-tipped missiles. The Confederation arsenal included both VG-92 Krait space-to-space missiles and the larger, more powerful, and heavily shielded VG-120 Boomslang, for space-to-ground bombardment. The Hegemony had their own versions of nuke-tipped smart missiles that filled the same niches.

Each missile possessed a limited-purview AI, making it smart enough to evade enemy defenses and choose the best moment for detonation. They carried variable-yield nuclear warheads—up to a megaton for Kraits, and a hundred times that for Boomslangs. And the bombardment vessels’ fire control suites could fire, track, and direct hundreds of missiles simultaneously.

The
Ma’at Mons
had used up much of her missile inventory at Alphekka, but reloads had been cranking through from the fleet’s manufactories on board the various stores and munitions ships with the fleet. The
Ma’at
’s tubes were up to 70 percent readiness, now, while the
Gurrierre
and the
Cheng Hua
both were at 100 percent.

Usually, a bombardment vessel had plenty of room in which to operate. Her missiles had a range of anywhere up to 100,000 kilometers, and were designed to steer themselves on wide sweeps around the flanks of battlespace, in order to come in on the enemy from as many different directions as possible. This time, however, they would be firing their warloads while hurtling down the narrow confines of the tunnel.

There’d be precious little room for error. The bombardment vessels would have to guide their missiles ahead of them into the tunnel’s opening, keep them tightly corralled as they traversed the tunnel’s length, then detonate them with absolutely precise timing instants before the ship emerged at the other end.

“Admiral Koenig,” his AI said.
Karyn’s voice
 . . .

“Yes.”

“All battlegroup elements report readiness to accelerate,” the voice told him. “However, Admiral Liu and Captain Jiang are requesting that you include the
Cheng Hua
in the vanguard assault.”

“I see. . . .”

“Liu requested that I forward to you a message.”

“Very well. Let’s hear it.”

“ ‘Admiral Koenig,’ ” Karyn’s voice continued, “ ‘this is Admiral Liu of the Hegemony contingent. Please consider this: the outcome of this action will affect us as much as you, will save or destroy the Hegemony to the same degree that it will save or destroy the Confederation. Please reconsider. Captain Jiang and his crew have volunteered to be with the vanguard of the assault. This operation, by rights, should be one for all humans, for the
survival
of all Humankind.’ Message ends.”

“I see. It’s just the
Cheng Hua
they want to send with us?”

“Yes, Admiral.”

“Damn . . . I need to think about that.”

Admiral Koenig didn’t like the Chinese.

Since they’d joined the battlegroup at HD 157950, the Chinese had posed a problem for him. They were, in a sense, outcasts. . . .

The Chinese Hegemony was not a full member of the Confederation. They sent representatives to Geneva, but they were nonvoting, with observer status only. The reason for this was enmeshed in history, and in the creation of the Confederation itself.

More than two and a half centuries earlier, in 2132, the Chinese had launched the first-ever asteroid strike against nations of the Earth. The Second Sino-Western War was winding toward a close, with the Chinese colonies on the moon overrun, Japan in rebellion, and invading armies advancing on Beijing itself. A Hegemony ship, the
Xiang Yang Hong
, had detonated nuclear weapons to nudge three small asteroids onto a collision course with the Earth.

The Hegemony government claimed that the vessel’s captain, Sun Xueju, had gone rogue, that he’d not been operating under Beijing’s orders. Whatever the true story, a U.S.-European attempt to deflect the oncoming mountains had succeeded with two of the mountains, but failed with the third.

The media called it Wormwood, from the Bible’s description of Armageddon. A two-kilometer-wide boulder had slammed into the Atlantic Ocean between Africa and Brazil. Half a billion people had died, tidal waves had smashed cities from New York and Washington to Cape Town and Rio, and sea levels, already on the rise with global warming, had surged precipitously. Coastal cities had flooded—and with a further rise in temperatures, the flood waters did not fully recede. The half-submerged ruins of Washington and New York City and Boston and thirty other major cities all dated from the Fall of Wormwood.

The vengeance wreaked by the Allies on Beijing, itself partially flooded by the rising seas, had been terrible.

With the war’s end, the victors had established the
Pax Confeoderata
, creating the Earth Federation. The High Guard had been created specifically to protect Earth against future attempts to use asteroid missiles against Earth, and to attempt such would be deemed the ultimate crime against Humankind. Foreign troops had occupied Chinese territory for fifty years longer . . . and even now the Hegemony was viewed with mistrust—the nation-state that had attempted to destroy the Earth.

For her part, China, savaged by brutal trade embargoes and commerce legislation, blocked from Confederation membership, treated as a pariah among nations, had responded in kind. There’d been numerous skirmishes and brushfire wars with China or with China’s clients, from Africa and Indonesia to their extrasolar colony at Everdawn.

And so, when Admiral Liu had requested to join the Battlegroup
America
after the clash with Giraurd, Koenig had accepted, but with serious reservations. He’d had to assume that the Chinese were operating with their own agenda, that they wanted to keep an eye on the rogue battlegroup, since CBG-18’s actions out here beyond the limits of human galactic exploration might well have a direct impact on Earth, one far greater and potentially more devastating than Wormwood.

As his tactical teams had put together the details for Operation Trigger Pull, Koenig had decided that the Hegemony contingent would remain on this side of the tunnel—a rear guard, along with a dozen Confederation ships. It was important that the portion of the fleet that went through the tunnel to the other side have a safe avenue of retreat should things go bad over there. Admiral Liu had protested, and Koenig had overridden him.

And now Liu was making a final plea, asking that Hegemony forces be included in the assault.

Why? To keep an eye on the battlegroup’s actions on the other side? The problem with that was that the first ships through—the bombardment vessels—were quite likely on a suicide mission. If the enemy concentrated on the other end of the tunnel didn’t destroy them the instant they came through, the door-kickers might well perish in the nuclear fury they themselves were about to unleash.

“Patch me through to Admiral Liu,” he said.

“Yes, Admiral.”

A window opened in Koenig’s mind. Admiral Liu’s face appeared, bland, expressionless. “Admiral Koenig. You heard my request?” The movement of his lips appeared to match the English words. The translation software took care of appearances as well as language.

“I did, Admiral.” He hesitated. “Admiral Liu . . . you
do
realize that this may well be a death sentence for every man and woman on board the
Cheng Hua
?”

“Do you realize, Admiral, that this attempt may be a death sentence for every man and woman alive? If we do not exterminate the Sh’daar, they may well decide we are too dangerous to incorporate into their empire. They will exterminate us.”

“Are you arguing against the attempt?”

“No, Admiral. As it happens, I agree with you. That is why I . . . why
we
are here.”

“For honor?”

Liu frowned. “Honor has little to do with it. Pride, rather, perhaps. And because we are human. Whether this expedition saves humanity or witnesses humanity’s destruction, we will be a part of it.”

Koenig nodded. “Then thank you, Admiral.
America
’s AI will feed you the updated tactical plan, so that you can coordinate with the other missile carriers.”

“Thank you, Admiral.” Liu nodded a dignified bow. “And death to our enemies.”

Over the next hour, the fleet continued maneuvering in preparation for the assault. The
Cheng Hua
threaded her way through the mass of gathering starships to take her place astern of the
Ma’at Mons
and the
Gurrierre
, positioned now in line ahead, at the van of the fleet. Behind the
Cheng Hua
, the destroyers
Trumbull
,
Ishigara
,
Santiago
, and
Fletcher
formed up two by two. They would follow the
Cheng Hua
through the TRGA tunnel in order to exploit whatever gains the bombardment vessels made.

And behind them . . .

“CAG,” Koenig said. “You may commence fighter launch operations. . . .”

VFA-44

Hangar Deck, TC/USNA CVS
America

TRGA, Texaghu Resch System