Singularity: Star Carrier: Book Three

by Ian Douglas

  Despite this, there was life, masses of ropy, orange polyps in sprawling patches on the ground, and methane-breathing floaters like wisps of wind-blown cellophane adrift in the thin and poisonous air. More, though, there was evidence of past life, technic life, imbedded in the rock. A cliff face nearby showed geometric patterns resembling the straight-line traceries of a huge circuit board, apparently etched into basalt with nanotechnic tools.

  Exposed by the retreat of a glacier only a few years before, the tracings were crisp, sharp, and enigmatic. They were huge, spanning an ice-polished wall of rock eighty meters long and fifteen high. Who had made them? Not the wispy cellophane creatures, surely, which were as insubstantial as soap bubbles and showed roughly as much promise of tool-use or industry as the terrestrial jellyfish that they resembled.

  “The problem, clearly,” Dolinar was saying, “is whether Heimdall evolved its own native life, life that in time developed sentience and a technology of high order, or whether these patterns were created by . . . visitors, representatives of a space-faring technic species from someplace else.”

  “The Sh’daar?” Gray asked.

  “Unlikely,” was the sim’s reply. “Based on radiometric dating, these pattern are at least a billion years old. Given what we think we know about technically oriented sentience, it is unlikely that any culture could survive for anything nearly that long. They either pass into decay and ultimate extinction, or their technology evolves to the point where they no longer interact with or even occupy what we think of as normal reality. They go . . . someplace else.”

  Gray reached out and touched one part of the structure—something like a flattened bagel or donut imbedded in the pattern of straight lines. The surface was cool to his touch, gritty, and flaked a bit, like rusty iron. Grasping its edges, he was able to pull it free, but the shape crumbled into dust and fragments as soon as it came free. “It’s like rust,” Gray observed. “But there’s no oxygen in the atmosphere.”

  “The atmosphere may have contained an appreciable level of oxygen in the remote past. We’re still puzzling out the geochemical history of this world. We know that a billion years ago there were oceans of liquid water, thanks to the warming effects of tidal interaction with Bifrost. But planets age, change, and die. Like the civilizations that occasionally inhabit them.

  “The Heimdall artifacts are important, though, because Kapteyn’s Star is only twelve light years from Sol. That wasn’t the case a billion years ago, of course. Both Sol and Kapteyn’s Star pursue separate orbits around the galactic center, and a billion years ago—that’s four times around for Sol—they were probably on opposite sides of the galaxy from each other. But the fact that, by chance, this system is here now, so close to the Sol System, still means that technic civilizations must arise on a fairly common basis throughout the galaxy and across at least a billion years.”

  “So you’re saying that intelligent life will become technic life, given half a chance.”

  “Precisely. We know several sentient species that do not make tools or create technological infrastructures. The Hasturs of Beta Hydri. The Gnomen of Thoth. The Troads of Barnard IIc. The Hasturs and the Troads never discovered fire, of course, so they’re at something of a disadvantage to begin with, the Hasturs being deep-sea dwellers, and the Troads living in a methane-carbon dioxide atmosphere . . . a lot like this one, in fact. The Gnomen . . . we don’t know. They seem content to contemplate their equivalent of navels and act like terrestrial trees. But as near as we can tell, these are the exceptions, not the rule.”

  “The Turusch couldn’t have had fire,” Gray pointed out. “They evolved in a CO2 atmosphere too. And the H’rulka are floaters in the atmospheres of gas giants.”

  “Which proves my point. We think someone gave the H’rulka their technology before they met the Sh’daar, but they may have learned to filter metals out of the gas-giant atmospheres and developed a working knowledge of exotic chemistry. The Turusch probably learned to refine metals around volcanic fumaroles or lava flows. Planets with oxygen-nitrogen atmospheres are in the distinct minority, remember. And yet intelligence continues to evolve, sentient species continue to develop tool-using technology, and technic species continue to reach for the stars.”

  “Which must mean the Sh’daar have their hands full,” Gray mused. “If they have hands.”

  “Indeed. In fact—”

  The simulation froze. Gray had time to think, What the hell? . . . and then a voice came through his cerebral link. “Now hear this, now hear this. VFA-44 Dragonfires, scramble, scramble, scramble. Launch in ten minutes, repeat, launch in ten minutes.”

  Gray bookmarked the sim and killed it, returning in a blink to the softly lit interior of his occutube. He palmed a contact and the end cap dilated open. He grabbed the hand holds to either side of the opening and hauled himself out.

  Schiffie, Nathum, and Mallory, the other pilots in this compartment, were clambering out of their tubes as well, in various states of undress, reaching for their uniforms and letting them flow into place. A touch and a thoughtclick could tailor the nanomatrix as anything from full-dress blacks to utility grays. The flight-utility format—the slang term was jackies—served as flight suits, with connections for flight control, life support, and waste recycling.

  Mallory was first out the door and Gray was close behind her. The descent tubes were just down the passageway outside.

  It was hours too early for the fleet to have reached their objective, the thing labeled TRGA in close orbit around its sun. A scramble meant either that the fleet was under attack—unlikely this far out—or that the brass had decided to put a fighter force in close to the TRGA and that this needed to be done now.

  Gray slid down the tube pulled by the hab module’s half G of acceleration, emerging on the flight deck one level out/down. Twelve Starhawk fighters awaited them on the drop line, as flight crews completed final inspections and equipment checks. Gray vaulted up the steps beside his ship, snatched up his helmet, and stepped into the cockpit, which smoothly closed in around him. As the helmet sealed itself to his jackies, the squadron channel opened in his implant, bringing his in-head display on-line.

  Three squadrons, the Dragonfires, plus the Hellstreaks off the Lincoln and the Meteors off the United States were launching together. The CBG had been traveling toward Texaghu Resch for just over an hour at five hundred gravities; currently, they were 9.4 AUs from the star and traveling at eighteen thousand kilometers per second.

  Pushing fifty thousand gravities, it would take the fighters almost seventy-two minutes objective to cross that remaining distance and come to a relative halt near the TRGA.

  There was still no sign, the data feed from CIC told him, of enemy forces in the system. The fighters were being deployed as insurance against the possibility that enemy units might come through the TRGA before the battlegroup reached it.

  Gray’s cockpit sealed itself above his head, and he felt the movement as the fighter dropped through the nanoseal decking beneath and into hard vacuum. The fighter rotated within its magnetic grapples, facing down, now, as the hab module around him continued its stately, twice-per-minute rotation.

  “This is Dragonfire One,” Gray said. “On line.” Red lights flickered to green within his inner display, as other fighters in the squadron linked in.

  “Dragon One, PriFly,” a voice said. “Stand by for drop.”

  “PriFly, Dragon One. Twelve Dragons are lit and ready for drop. At your discretion.”

  “Wait one,” the voice of PriFly told him. “The ship is cutting acceleration.”

  When the fighters dropped clear of the carrier, they would do so with the carrier’s current forward velocity. It could be very bad if the carrier was changing that velocity—accelerating or decelerating—at the same time the fighters were being released.

  “Acceleration suspended, Dragonfires. Drop in three . . . and two . . . and one . . . release!”

  Gray felt his stomach jump as he went into
free fall.

  And the stars exploded into view around him.

  Chapter Eight

  29 June 2405

  CIC

  TC/USNA CVS America

  Outer System, Texaghu Resch System

  1645 hours, TFT

  “The fighters are away, Admiral,” Wizewski told him. “The Dragonfires just handed off to CIC.”

  “I heard them, CAG. Thank you.”

  He looked into the tactical tank. Over the past hours, the battlegroup had formed up for its passage to the TRGA, adopting one of several standard fleet formations—carriers grouped together in an elongated cluster behind the battleships and railgun cruisers. The destroyers out in front and in a protective cloud around the big boys, and with the support and logistical vessels to the rear. The frigates and gunships, the smallest of the capital ships, held the outermost perimeter, ahead, on all flanks, and astern. The idea was to focus firepower forward, while providing detection and defense in-depth in all directions.

  Of course, no fleet formation could adequately protect against enemy vessels or kinetic-kill projectiles zorching in at near-c velocities, but this one, dubbed “spearhead,” provided a fair balance between focused offense and general defense.

  And there was still no sign of enemy forces within the Texagu Resch system. Unmanned recon drones were on the way to each of the planets for a close look, but so far, nothing had turned up, not even the power signatures of zero-point energy emissions. The system appeared to be undefended.

  And why not? Even the Sh’daar couldn’t be everywhere, covering every system with defensive fleets or bases, not in a galaxy of 400 billion suns.

  It couldn’t be that easy, could it?

  In Koenig’s estimation, it never was.

  If it was impossible to base crewed naval forces in every system, it was possible to leave behind detector satellites and drones. They could be powered by batteries or local sunlight, and didn’t need quantum power taps, at least not until they had to accelerate to high velocity. They could be completely static, orbiting the local star and transmitting a signal when anything unusual—like the arrival of a carrier battlegroup—took place. Like the low-power signals used by the Sh’daar Seeds implanted in the Agletsch, the signals might not be detectable at all if you didn’t know where to listen, or what to look for.

  Koenig had to assume that the enemy knew they were coming.

  Assuming, of course, that the TRGA artifact was indeed a part of some sort of interstellar Sh’daar transport system—the likeliest explanation for the thing, he thought. It could belong to someone else, of course . . . and might even be left over from some other star-faring civilization now long extinct.

  But according to the Agletsch, this region of space was known to and traversed by the Sh’daar. The vanished Chelk had been here twelve thousand years ago, defied the Sh’daar ban on advanced GRIN technologies, and been exterminated.

  Koenig had questioned Gru’mulkisch and Dra’ethde closely about the Chelk, wondering if perhaps they had created the TRGA object. According to them, the Chelk homeworld was somewhere close by, but not here. “The Eye of Resch”—evidently, their name for this star—was visible in their night sky, a part of one of their constellations. The star was similar in most respects to Sol . . . and to human eyes a G2 star was only visible for a distance of about ten parsecs—roughly 32 light years. The Chelk might have had more efficient light-gathering organs than did humans, true, but the likelihood was that the Chelk homeworld had been relatively close by—say within ten or fifteen light years.

  It would be interesting to survey the nearby star systems in an attempt to find the Chelk homeworld. It should be easy enough to locate. Gru’mulkisch had told him that the planet had been glassed over by the Sh’daar. That meant most of the evidence of their technology had been erased, but surely something had survived, on a moon or another planet, if not on the homeworld itself.

  He suppressed a shudder. The Chelk and their fate had been preying on his mind now for some days, ever since he’d learned about them from the Agletsch.

  What, Koenig wondered, had been the sin of the Chelk, a sin so grievous that billions of living souls had been extinguished?

  And was that what the Sh’daar had planned for Humankind?

  In any case, the two Agletsch had been certain that the Chelk had not been responsible for the Texaghu Resch gravitational anomaly. The physics boys had gone over the data transmitted back from America’s recon probe and suggested that the object, obviously artificial, had been created by taking a star of the same mass as Earth’s sun—Texaghu Resch must once have been a double star—and somehow crushing it down into a rotating, hollow cylinder.

  Worse, a star was composed mostly of hydrogen. The TRGA appeared to be . . . well, not solid, but not a gas, either. A black hole wasn’t comprised of anything recognizable as one of the traditional states of matter, since, technically, the mass had collapsed into a singularity. Was the TRGA a singularity—by definition a dimensionless point—somehow unfolded, stretched into a hollow needle twelve kilometers long?

  That was advanced technology, a technology so advanced as to seem literally godlike.

  “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” ran the old aphorism.

  Was that what the Sh’daar feared?

  Was that why the Chelk had been exterminated . . . because they had been exercising such magic? Or perhaps they’d simply been about to reach this system and perhaps the Sh’daar had feared they would learn something they weren’t supposed to know?

  Surely, if the Chelk had possessed such technology, the Sh’daar would not have been able to wipe them out.

  “Karyn?” he said.

  “Yes, Admiral?” The voice was that of his electronic personal assistant, a simulation of his dead lover. God, I miss her. . . .

  “Take over for me here. I need to grab something to eat, then crash for a couple of hours.”

  He’d skipped lunch, as he often did, and was just realizing that he was hungry. And the battlegroup would be arriving at the gravitational anomaly at around 0100 hours, ship’s time, so he wasn’t going to be getting a full night’s sleep. He’d already told Commander Jones, America’s exec, to pass the word to all hands on the day watch to get their sleep ahead of time. He needed to do likewise.

  “Very good, Admiral. I’ll alert you if anything comes up.”

  Karyn’s simulation would keep a practiced electronic eye on things in CIC. Koenig released himself from his seat and floated toward the hatchway leading to hab module access and his quarters.

  VFA-44

  En route to TRGA

  Texaghu Resch System

  1650 hours, TFT

  For Gray, only seconds had passed since the fighters had stopped their high-G boost. For just less than ten minutes, the Dragonfires had boosted at fifty thousand gravities. Coasting, now, at 99.7 percent of the speed of light, they hurtled in-system as subjective time, squeezed down to nearly nothing by the effects of relativistic time dilation, flashed past. For them, the coast phase of their flight would last just less than six minutes instead of more than seventy-one.

  With acceleration, the universe around them had grown strange, with all incoming light compressed into a glowing band encircling the heavens forward, the light itself sorted by wavelength from blue on the band’s leading edge to red on the trailing, the gorgeous starbow that traditional physics said should not be, but was.

  But they were just beginning their c run. In another five minutes and some seconds, as the fighters were measuring the quickly passing time, they would flip end for end and throw out the drive singularities in their wakes for the ten-minute deceleration in to the objective.

  “Lieutenant?” his fighter said to him. “I’m parsing out some anomalous signals from directly ahead.”

  Gray felt a cold chill prickle at the back of his neck. “What kind of signals?”

  “They appear to be drive signatures. I am also det
ecting what may be power-plant signatures.”

  The starbow was an artifact of Gray’s near-c velocity. Just as a flier moving through a rainstorm on Earth creates the illusion that the raindrops are coming from ahead, not above, incoming electromagnetic radiation—light, among others—appeared to be compressed forward until even light from directly astern seemed to be coming from ahead, although even visible wavelengths were stretched into the radio portion of the spectrum, just as visible light from dead ahead was compressed into ultraviolet and X-ray frequencies.

  Because of this distortion, it was extremely difficult to pick out individual signals and make sense of them. The AI running Gray’s Starhawk, however, was tasked with doing just that, sampling thousands of discrete frequencies, teasing them out of the compressed mash of stretched and squeezed wavelengths, and converting them back to their originals. The distortion was too severe for ships traveling at near-c to pick up radio or laser-com transmissions and make sense of them—fighters traveling at a hairsbreadth beneath c were all but cut off from the rest of the universe—but some data could be discerned.

  Drive signatures were ripples in space caused by relativistic moving objects—like high-velocity fighters or kinetic-kill rounds moving at a fair percentage of c.

  Power-plant signatures were different. Mere fusion or antimatter power was insignificant when it came to the energy needed to boost a spacecraft to near-c velocities. That sort of speed required vacuum energy, the all-but-infinite energy fluctuations occurring in the quantum foam of what was laughingly known as “empty space.” Quantum power taps—and the enemy appeared to use an identical technology here—used paired artificial microsingularities to pull a fraction of this energy out of hard vacuum. Inevitably, there was some leakage—and distinct ripples in spacetime created by the fast-orbiting black-hole pairs that could be detected across vast distances.

  Despite his fighter’s velocity, Gray’s AI was picking up those ripples from directly ahead, and reading them as evidence of ships using quantum power taps and traveling at high speeds.