by Ian Douglas
Koenig had ordered the two large carriers into a tight, side-by-side formation surrounded by their escorts. America and the United States would lead the assault. The third big carrier, Lincoln, which had taken some serious damage after her emergence into the Omega Centauri battlespace, was one of the vessels remaining at the TRGA, making sure the fleet had its lines of retreat open should that become necessary. The light carriers Jeanne d’Arc and Illustrious, together with the Marine assault carriers Vera Cruz and Nassau, would follow close behind. Among the larger capital ships accompanying the assault group were the railgun cruiser Kinkaid, the heavy cruisers Groznyy, Valley Forge, Lunar Bay, and Saratoga, and the bombardment vessels Cheng Hua and Ma’at Mons. The Cheng Hua had been shot up pretty badly after emerging from the tunnel’s mouth, but the ship’s skipper had reported that the ship’s damage-repair facilities had plugged the leaks from her shield cap and that all systems were now nominal. Captain Jiang had told Koenig in no uncertain terms that he would not be left behind.
Koenig had been impressed enough by the man’s determination that he’d let the hint of insubordination slide.
He stared into the tactical tank, which showed the battlegroup at one side, the destination, a circle of six tiny blue points of light at the other. Half a light year. “How close can we get to those stars without getting fried?” he asked his AI.
A column of data appeared in a new window opening in his mind. “These stars appear close to the known blue giant Zeta Puppis in size and luminosity,” she explained. Data for Zeta Puppis, also called Naos, streamed through his awareness.
STAR: Zeta Puppis
COORDINATES: RA: 08h 03m 35.1s Dec: -40˚ 00' 11.6" D 335p
ALTERNATE NAMES: Naos, Suhail Hadar, HD 66811
TYPE: O5 Laf
MASS: 40 Sol; RADIUS: 11 Sol; LUMINOSITY: 360,000 Sol (Optical 21,000 Sol)
SURFACE TEMPERATURE: ~39,000oK
AGE: 4 million years
APPARENT MAGNITUDE (Sol): 2.21; ABSOLUTE MAGNITUDE: -5.96
DISTANCE FROM SOL: 1,093 LY
PLANETARY SYSTEM: None known
“Damned bright,” Koenig observed.
“Indeed. If Zeta Puppis were as close to Earth as Sol,” Karyn Mendelson’s voice continued, “it would appear to be twenty times larger in the sky and twenty thousand times brighter. Earth’s surface would be heated to around six thousand one hundred degrees Kelvin, and ultimately the planet would be completely vaporized.
“For a planet to enjoy Earthlike temperatures in orbit around Zeta Puppis, it would have to be at least four hundred fifty astronomical units away—about eleven times the distance of Pluto from the sun.”
“And there are six giants out there that hot and bright. Does that mean six times the distance for one, if we want to find a zone with habitable temperatures?”
“Not necessarily. We calculate that each star is approximately fifty AUs from its nearest neighbors, in a ring nearly one hundred AUs across. The amount of radiation any given volume of space receives will depend on the aspect of the stellar ring, and the total will not necessarily be cumulative. We estimate that habitable zone temperatures will be found at roughly two thousand to two thousand five hundred AUs from the artifact’s central point.”
Koenig ran the numbers through his in-head math processor. A light year, he knew, measured close to 63,000 astronomical units. “About four one hundredths of a light year.”
“Precisely.”
“CAG? All of our chicks back on board?”
“All fighters recovered or accounted for, Admiral.”
“Punch it,” Koenig said.
And the battlegroup punched.
Even though the final determination of where they were accelerating to had not yet been made.
That dwarf planet had accelerated into the distance, together with a huge number of surviving enemy warships, then folded space about itself and slipped off at faster than light, exhibiting yet again the marked superiority, the sheer elegance of Sh’daar technology compared to human-designed systems. Some of their client races, notably the H’rulka, showed similar superiorities in style and technique, though they’d never demonstrated anything close to this. The ships of the human fleet would have to accelerate at five hundred gravities for 16.6 hours in order to push close to the speed of light. Only at 0.997 c could they use their relativistic mass to warp space into the tightly knotted bubbles that would allow them to outpace light itself.
Over sixteen and a half hours.
The assault force hadn’t fully bought into the idea of pursuing that planet . . . and Koenig wasn’t going to phrase this one as an order.
Especially when such monumental questions about the Sh’daar, about who and what they were, were yet staring Koenig in the face.
As the minutes passed and the fleet continued to accelerate, Koenig continued to study the tactical tank. After a time, he pulled in another download of astronomical data, searching through all of the information stored there on the Omega Centauri cluster. What he saw there—or, more precisely, what he didn’t see—had been bothering him.
“Astrogation department,” he said.
“Yes, Admiral?” He’d linked through to Dr. Tina Schuman.
“I’ve got a question.”
“We have a lot more questions than answers right now, Admiral. But I’ll take a shot.”
“Six hot, blue Type O stars in a tight grouping just about one hundred AUs across. That must give off a hell of a lot of ultraviolet and X-ray radiation.”
“They do.”
“Enough that they should have been seen by astronomers on Earth studying Omega Centauri.”
There was a long pause on the other end. “Yes, Admiral. They should have been.”
“But I’ve seen nothing about them in the data on the cluster.”
“No, sir. And that’s been bothering us as well.”
“What data do you have that actually identifies this cluster as Omega Centauri?”
He heard her sigh. “Not all that much, actually, Admiral. Mostly it’s the estimated number of stars—about ten million—and the estimated diameter of the cluster—about two hundred thirty light years. The distribution of spectral types is roughly the same as well.”
“You also mentioned stellar markers when we talked before. Stellar fingerprints.”
“Yes, sir. Absorption lines in some of the cooler stars that appear to be unique to those stars. What we saw in Lieutenant Gray’s data—what we’re seeing now—appears to match fairly closely with the spectra of several stars in the cluster studied from Earth.”
“But our Omega Centauri doesn’t have those six blue stars. I’d have thought they could have been seen pretty easily from Earth.”
He was looking at an astrophotograph taken by an Earth-orbital robot telescope called the Hubble, in the early twenty-first century. It showed the heart of the Omega Centauri cluster, a thick array of multihued suns.
There was no sign of the anomalous hexagon.
“But those six stars are obviously artificial, Admiral. Or at least they were engineered from pre-existing stars by bringing them together, allowing them to merge as artificial blue stragglers. Our assumption is that they were made sometime recently, within the past fifteen thousand years, anyway.”
“So the light from those stars hasn’t had time to reach Earth yet.”
“Exactly, sir.”
“How does that sit with you, Doctor?”
“I beg your pardon, sir?”
“Does that seem to be a likely explanation?”
“Sir, it’s just about the only explanation.”
“Is there any way to determine how old those stars are from here?”
“Well, they’re obviously quite young. Definitely less than five million years in terms of stellar evolution. Any older, and they’d have started to evolve toward the red super-giant phase of their life.”
Such intensly hot, massive young stars, Koenig knew, lived fast, furious, and very brief live
s, at least as stars measured things. Stars that hot would burn up their stores of hydrogen, evolve through the spectral types from blue to yellow to red, then detonate in a supernova, probably after a total life span of less than 10 million years.
“But you can’t tell if they’re less than fifteen thousand years old.”
“No, sir.”
“And you can’t tell me anything about the stars that were used to form them.”
“No, sir. When two stars merge, that resets the clock. We can assume that the original stars were Population II giants—probably red giants. We’re working on the assumption that whoever manufactured those stars actually brought together a large number of such stars.”
“Why is that?”
“Those stars up ahead each run to about forty solar masses,” she replied. “Rather than bringing together two twenty-solar-mass suns, it seems more likely that they merged a larger number of smaller stars.”
“Maybe tossing in a new star each time the fires started to burn low.”
“Possibly.”
“Except that it would take several million years for the new sun to start to cool. And that means the light would have reached Earth long ago. We’d have seen them from home.”
“Yes, sir. As I said, we have more questions than answers.”
“Thank you, Doctor.”
“There’s something else you should know, sir.”
“What’s that?”
“Well, we’ve been studying this volume of space since we came through the TRGA, of course,” she told him. “And we’ve found another anomaly.”
“What’s that?”
“There appears to be more gas and dust in this cluster than we know exists in Omega Centauri.”
“Gas and dust?”
“Typical globular clusters have almost no gas. They used it all up in a single burst of star formation around twelve billion years ago. Omega Centauri consists of several generations of stars, suggesting that star formation continued for some time after the cluster’s creation, but most of the gas was still used up, oh, nine billion years ago or so.
“Sir . . . it’s quite possible that this isn’t Omega Centauri after all.”
Which left, of course, the question of just where the carrier battlegroup was at the moment.
“Can you figure out where we are?”
“Not with the local stellar density, Admiral. We’re going to need to get outside of the cluster so that we can see the starscape around us, the rest of the galaxy. We should be able to tell from that . . . assuming we’re still within our galaxy, of course.”
There was a chilling thought.
“Very well,” Koenig said. “Keep at it, and let me know if anything turns up I should know about.”
“Of course, Admiral.”
Omega Centauri was distinctive, Koenig knew, in its diameter, its slight flattening at its poles, and in its huge number of stars. It was, he remembered, the second largest cluster ever identified . . . and the largest, Mayall II, was in the Andromeda galaxy, 2.3 million light years away.
Perhaps this cluster was on the far side of Earth’s galaxy, hidden from Earth by the dust and gas of the galactic core.
It shouldn’t matter. So long as they had the tunnel secure, so long as they could find their way back there, it shouldn’t matter.
But God in heaven, where were they?
And how far were they now from home?
Trevor Gray
Omega Centauri
1530 hours, TFT
For almost an hour, Gray had studied that strange, that impossible, sky, trying to make sense of it. The flattened circle of brilliant blue suns, some two degrees across its longest dimension—spanning an area as wide as four full moons seen from Earth—hung low in the sky, casting hard-edged shadows off the glaciers in the distance, and dazzling the eyes with sheets of ice. His Starhawk, he knew, was stopping down the incoming light considerably; the illumination above the planet’s surface was so high that he would have been instantly blinded otherwise.
The ice outside, he noticed, was beginning to steam.
Hanging in the sky were a number of other anomalous objects, each harshly illuminated by the six suns, with hard-edged contrast between light and shadow. It was impossible to get a sense of scale or distance, but two of them, Gray saw, were identical to the TRGA cylinder, hard, tiny knots imbedded in larger, fuzzy glows of gold and blue light twisted by their intense gravitational masses.
There were also planets, several of them, showing as hard-edged crescents bowed away from the intense glare of the stars. And there were other things . . . huge starships, perhaps, or orbital manufactories, or drifting facilities of less easily discernable purpose. The impression Gray had was that whoever had designed this . . . this place had parked ships and worlds and factories and transit systems close enough to the obviously artificial arrangement of suns to draw on their energy, but far enough out to avoid being vaporized.
“AI,” he said. “How far are we from those suns? Must be pretty far out. . . .”
There was no answer, and Gray felt a sharp stab of panic.
“AI!”
There was no one there.
And an instant later, everything went black. Gray was again alone, sitting in the darkness of his Starhawk cockpit, somewhere inside the mobile alien planet.
He took a deep breath, and worked to control the rising fear. There had to be a logical explanation. . . .
His own internal AI, his personal assistant, was intact and operating. A low-end model residing within the nanochelated circuitry implants within his brain and parts of his nervous system, it possessed neither sentience nor a simulated personality. Having been born and raised out in the Periphery, beyond the reach of “proper” North-American civilization, he’d not received one as a child entering the education track. His had been issued to him the first day he’d arrived at basic training. It allowed him to interface with the electronic world around him, communicate with others, download data from local networks, and receive other very basic services, but he couldn’t talk to it.
His Starhawk’s AI was far more powerful and flexible. A standard Gödel 900 series, it was, technically, sentient, but only within certain, very tightly defined parameters, “of limited purview,” as the techies said. It was very good at what it did—directing and overseeing the fighter’s systems, correlating data, operating weapons, and performing maneuvers at super-human speed—but it wasn’t exactly a brilliant conversationalist.
Gray had always felt somewhat ambivalent about his AI. Most other pilots he knew named their fighter AIs, established emotional bonds with them, even thought of them as fellow pilots. Gray had never been able to manage that, not that he’d tried all that hard. The fighter AI was a tool. It interfaced directly with Gray’s personal AI and with the fighter’s electronics, allowing Gray, in a quite genuine sense, to become the fighter when he engaged the connections between his brain and the ship.
And now it was gone.
His personal AI maintained its link with his fighter systems. He could still download data, monitor system function, and the like. If he’d wanted to, he could have opened the cockpit and gone outside, not that he saw any point to doing so. His fighter’s external sensors indicated a temperature of minus 200 Celsius, no light, and no atmosphere, and if there were machines out there—like automatic doors—his implant circuitry wouldn’t be able to operate them. His jackies, his flight utility suit, could keep him breathing for a while with the helmet closed, but they wouldn’t hold off that bitterly frigid cold for more than a few moments.
He was far better off staying where he was. His fighter still had power—at low, barely maintenance levels for life support, but power enough to keep him warm and alive. His communications systems were still operating, in case Lieutenant Schiere surfaced again.
But Trevor Gray had never felt so inexpressibly alone as now, sitting there in the dark, imbedded in the close-fitting embrace of a high-tech fighter cockpit
that was now little more than inert nanomatrix and dead electronics.
He waited. There wasn’t anything else he could do.
And the wait stretched out longer . . . and longer . . . and still longer, and he wondered if this was where he would die when his power gave out and his heat and atmosphere finally failed.
Chapter Twenty
30 June 2405
Admiral’s Office
TC/USNA CVS America
Omega Centauri
1700 hours, TFT
It had been one hour since the assault group had begun accelerating. The magnified view of their destination—the tiny, slightly flattened hexagon of six suns—gleamed against the backdrop of massed cluster suns on their forward screens.
Fifteen hours to go. . . .
The image was repeated on one viewall of Koenig’s office, where he’d retreated shortly after the battlegroup had commenced acceleration.
“Admiral,” Karyn’s voice said, “the virtual conference is ready.”
“Very well.” Leaning back, he closed his eyes and placed his left palm on the contact plate of his chair. The reality of office, of viewscreen and desk and waiting reports of combat damage and tactical assessments all faded away, and Koenig sat at a virtual copy of a certain conference room at the Ad Astra Confederation government complex in Geneva. Outside one in-slanting wall of green glass, sunlight, the light of Earth’s sun, sparkled on the waters of Lake Geneva out beyond the broad, labyrinthine Plaza of Light, with its towering epic statue, Ascent of Man, by Popolopoulis.
Koenig had chosen the simulated venue for the conference of ship commanders and staff carefully and with great deliberation. He’d discussed it at length with Karyn—with Karyn’s electronic ghost, rather—and it had been she who’d first suggested the towering green pyramid of the Ad Astra complex.
It was all rather elemental human psychology, actually.
