by Ian Douglas
“Well, we can assume that the civilization we’re calling stargods intervened here in some pretty major ways, right? They gave them enough technology—including things like metals smelting—so that they could move out of their dark ocean and into the ice layers above. And maybe later they would have helped the Glothr deal with the cold and vacuum at the surface of their world.”
“And it looks like they’ve developed a solid space-faring civilization since then. I wonder how long that took?”
“That ring took a long time to build, if it went up piece by piece, like synchorbit back home. I’d also be willing to bet a lot of raw material was imported.”
“Why’s that?”
“Just a feeling. We don’t know how rich Invictus’s subocean crust is in metals or in fossil fuels for plastics. But any marine species is going to have major problems if they can’t use fire.”
“Gotcha. You’re right. And . . . I think we can finally safely say that the stargods, whoever they are, are the ones responsible for the TRGAs. Not the Sh’daar.”
“Probably.”
“You’re not convinced?”
“Not a hundred percent.”
It was an old debate, one waged with considerable heat ever since the discovery of the first TRGA two decades before. According to Agletsch records, there were thousands of TRGA cylinders scattered across much of the galaxy, creating a kind of instantaneous transport system across hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of cubic light years. For a long time, the Sh’daar were presumed to have been the builders, if only because it was known that they used them, and America had spotted a number of them at the core of the N’gai Cloud, the home space of the original ur-Sh’daar.
Over the years, however, that identification had become more and more unlikely. That either the Sh’daar or their ur-Sh’daar forebears used the cylinders didn’t mean that they’d built them. More and more, circumstantial evidence acquired over the decades suggested that whoever had constructed those enigmatic artifacts had done so long before the arrival of the Sh’daar, and with a technology light years beyond anything the Sh’daar had revealed in almost sixty years of contact.
Connor wasn’t completely convinced, though. There were other ways, she thought, of explaining the appearance of the cylinders without invoking yet another culture of god-powerful aliens. Perhaps the ur-Sh’daar had been powerful enough to create them almost a billion years ago, but their cultural offspring—the Sh’daar remnant that had failed to achieve Singularity—had lost the technical know-how.
In the long run, though, it didn’t matter. The TRGA had brought the Concord and the Black Demons here, to this volume of space beyond the edge of the galaxy, and it was up to them to make the best of this new alien contact.
Together, the two Starblade fighters skimmed in toward the dark and alien world. The Glothr ship, Charlie One, had vanished hours ago into the geometric complexities of the artificial ring, taking Ambassador Rand and his staff of volunteers with it. Connor’s AI was holding a targeting reticule on the spot, though whatever structure the ship had entered was vanishingly small.
Sweeping past the planet, they bent their vectors around to take them on a long, curving arc back toward the Concord.
“What about the time factor, Don?” she asked her wingman. “Everybody’s talking about it. When the hell are we?”
“Beats me, Meg. The problem may be beyond Concord’s computers. But when America comes through, her AI ought to crack it in pretty short order.”
There’d been endless speculation in the squadron ready room about that. Since TRGA cylinders worked through time as well as space, the question of when they’d emerged here, out beyond the galaxy’s edge, was at least as important as the question of where.
Connor hoped that America would be coming through soon.
It was so damned lonely out here on the empty edge of Forever. . . .
USNS/HGF Concord
Unknown Spacetime
1619 hours, TFT
The question of time—the when of the spacetime where the squadron had emerged, was very much on Dahlquist’s mind as well.
“Launch courier,” Captain Tsang’s voice ordered. And the telemetry playing in Dahlquist’s head showed the HVK-724 high-velocity scout-courier robot streaking from Open Sky’s Number 2 launch bay and dwindling toward the twisting, golden haze of the TRGA.
“Courier away,” Tsang’s voice added, as he informed Lewis and Dahlquist of the fact.
Of course, those words had been spoken nearly seven hours ago; it had taken that long for the transmission to crawl all the way across fifty astronomical units, from the TRGA, where Tsang’s Open Sky was standing guard, to the Pax and the Concord, drifting 2 million kilometers off the newfound world of Invictus. By now, the courier drone would have long since threaded its way through the TRGA and transmitted its message to the America waiting on the other side. It was even possible that the rest of the task force was already through the cylinder and joining the Open Sky. The other two High Guard cutters wouldn’t be aware of the fact until seven hours after it had already happened.
Gray, Dahlquist thought, had screwed up again. He should have sent America through with the entire task force, not piddled away the three High Guard ships. Had he done so, the task force would now have a better idea of whether they were still in Earth’s present, or sometime in the remote past. The assumption had been that if the TRGA transported them into the past, it would be to the N’gai Cloud, as had happened with America and her carrier group twenty years ago. From this exquisite vantage point above the galactic plane, there was no sign of the N’gai Cloud. Even though they were currently many thousands of light years away from where the N’gai Cloud had been, it would have taken many hundreds of thousands of years, perhaps even millions of years before the small, irregular galaxy was completely devoured by the hungry and far larger Milky Way. The Cloud’s absence suggested that they were still located in Earth’s time now . . . even though the shift across twenty-five thousand light years made such distinctions essentially meaningless.
“Captain?” Margolis, Concord’s communications officer, said. “We have a message coming in from Ambassador Rand.”
“Let me hear.”
The face of Lawrence Rand came up in an in-head window. He looked . . . stressed, his eyes wild. “ . . . calling Pax and Concord,” he was saying. “Come in, please!”
“This is Captain Lewis of the Pax,” another voice replied. “Go ahead, Dr. Rand.”
“Code Alpha! Code Alpha!” Rand shouted. And then his voice began to change, the words deepening in pitch and slowing dramatically. “We’ve . . . got . . . a . . . pro . . . blemmmm. . . .”
“We’ve lost the ambassador,” Margolis said. “Lost his frequency.”
Which meant the aliens had just played their time-warp card, cutting Rand off by drastically slowing the frequency of his transmission, possibly . . . or simply by freezing him in time.
And there was a new and bigger problem now. Glothr ships—a dozen of them—were separating from the planetary rings and hurtling toward the two High Guard vessels.
“Concord!” Lewis snapped. “Order the fighters to close with us and boost! We’re going back to the Triggah!”
“Roger that,” Dahlquist replied. He was already scanning the ship’s various displays, looking for an immediate threat. It was possible that sequestering Rand was a prelude to an all-out attack. “Commander Ames? Take us to General Quarters.”
“Aye, aye, Skipper.”
“And let’s turn around and get us the hell out of here.”
Concord spun slowly in place, aligning herself with the distant TRGA, then engaged her gravitic drive, accelerating hard at just over 5,000 gravities.
USNA Star Carrier America
Unknown Spacetime
1745 hours, TFT
It had been a
damned tight squeeze.
America’s shield cap was fully half the internal diameter of the TRGA cylinder, and there was absolutely no margin for error. The HVK-724 scout-courier drone had emerged at the Beehive cluster end of the thing and transmitted everything the three High Guard vessels had recorded, including—most important—the precise path through twisted spacetime that Charlie One, the fighter squadron, and the cutters had followed in order to reach the other side.
Gray had released a heartfelt sigh of relief, then, when America drifted slowly clear of the mouth of the spinning cylinder, closely surrounded by a swarm of her fighters—VFA-31, the Impactors; and VFA-215, the Black Knights—and just astern of the battleship New York. Ahead, a few thousand kilometers off, the High Guard watchship Open Sky hung motionless in empty space.
“Welcome to Invictus space, Admiral,” the Open Sky’s captain called. “You are now officially a long way from nowhere.”
“I see that, Captain Tsang,” Gray replied. His gaze was drawn immediately to the galaxy hanging in the distance, the closest intricacies of its spiral some twenty-five thousand light years away, and yet appearing close enough to touch. “Your report said there was no planetary system here . . . just the one planet by itself.”
“That is correct, Admiral. Invictus, a Steppenwolf rogue. It may have been flung clear out of our galaxy millions of years ago.”
“I’m looking forward to seeing it in person. Anything from the ambassador yet?”
“Not a word, sir. He should have arrived wherever they were taking him . . . oh . . . about five hours ago, at least. It’s all in the drone transmission.”
“I saw it.”
And Gray was concerned about what he’d seen: long-range vids of the black planet with its intricate system of bright glowing rings. The scale alone was daunting. Those rings, so much vaster than the clutter of shipyards and hotels and military bases and manufactories in Earth’s synchorbit, could have comfortably hidden millions upon millions of warships and a population numbering in the hundreds of billions. If this situation went sour, there was no way in hell Task Force One was going to be able to rescue Rand or his people.
Koenig and the Joint Chiefs had been aware of that cold fact when they’d drawn up Gray’s orders. His first responsibility, above everything else, was to get back to Earth with information. Humankind needed to know what they were facing out here.
At the moment, however, there was no indication whatsoever of trouble. As the last of the task force ships slipped clear of the TRGA’s mouth, he gave the orders to form up and commence acceleration. At their maximum boost of ten thousand gravities, with a flip-over at the halfway point for deceleration, they would arrive at Invictus in a little more than eight hours.
“Very well,” Gray announced over the fleet comm network moments after the last ship through the TRGA reported in. “Everyone arrived in one piece? Good. We’ll stick to the plan, no modifications. Destroyers Lambert and Caiden, you’ll join Open Sky and guard the Triggah. That’s our ticket home, so stay on your toes. Everyone else, form up around America and prepare for boost.”
It was tempting to leave a larger force guarding the TRGA, but Gray was interpreting his orders conservatively. This was, to put it bluntly, a show of force, even though Glothr technology probably rendered any question of fleet strength moot, so far as the humans were concerned.
“Astrogation,” he went on, changing channels. “This is Gray. I need that time data.”
“This is Donovan, Admiral. We’re working on it. The AI is crunching the numbers now.”
“Good.”
“We do have the velocity figures in, though.”
“Let’s hear ’em.”
“We’re estimating, of course, based on averages pulled from the local hydrogen background . . . but it looks like Invictus and the TRGA both are moving at about three-point-five million kilometers per hour.”
That was a jolt: 3.5 million kph was fast . . . about a third of 1 percent of the speed of light. Some natural objects were faster—Gray knew of one rogue star clocked at almost 50 million kph. It could happen when a pair of planets—or a planet orbiting a star—encountered a black hole, especially the supermassive black hole at the galaxy’s center. If one partner in the pair vanished down the black hole, the other could be slingshotted out across the galaxy at hypervelocity. He wondered if that was the case here.
As Donovan spoke, a graphic drew itself in Gray’s mind, showing the plane of the galaxy—a hundred thousand light years across—their current position a quarter of that distance above the plane, and a straight line running from the rogue back to near the center of the galactic spiral.
“The planet’s origins appear to lie at the edge of the Galactic Core, at a distance of about forty thousand light years from here.”
Gray ran the math through his in-head processors. Forty thousand light years at an average velocity of 3.5 million kph: Invictus had been ejected from the system of its birth some 12 million years ago.
“They called the planet ‘Invictus?’ ” Gray said. “Sounds more like it ought to be Evict-us.”
“That, sir,” Donovan told him, “was very bad.”
“Thank you.”
“That number is an approximation, sir. It’s tough using hydrogen as a frame of reference.”
Gray knew what Donovan meant. In space, the idea of speed meant nothing save in relation to something else. It might be possible to pull the spectra of the galaxy itself and determine a red-shift velocity, indicating how fast Invictus was traveling outbound—but that would require an average of billions of stars all traveling on their own orbits of the galactic center, all moving more or less independently. Or, the astrogation department could measure the relative velocity of hydrogen gas in the immediate vicinity, through which the Steppenwolf world was moving. This close to the galaxy proper, that gas—an incredibly thin gas measuring only an atom or two per cubic centimeter—would be moving with and around the galaxy, not Invictus, and so provide the necessary frame of reference.
Close enough. Three and a half million kilometers per hour? Invictus was booking.
Gray wondered again about the history of the alien Glothr. If their world had been catapulted out of its home system 12 million years ago, that was enough time for an intelligent species to evolve, certainly . . . but far too short a period for the evolution of life. Earth likely had developed life—single-celled prokaryotes—within 600 to 800 million years of Earth’s formation—as much as 4 billion years ago. For most of that unimaginable gulf of time, Earth’s life had been simple. Eukaryotes—complex cells—had evolved 2 billion years ago, while multicellular life hadn’t gotten started until around 1 billion years ago.
Which meant that when Glothr was kicked out of its home system—back toward the Galactic Core—it had been a living world, complete with its own subglacial ecosystem. The Glothr themselves must have evolved during the long voyage outbound across galactic space, probably after their world had already left the galaxy proper.
So . . . where had the TRGA come from? Not from Invictus’s home system, certainly. It must have been constructed on the fly, as it were, as Invictus zipped out of the galaxy at a blistering 3.5 million kph. Somehow, whoever or whatever had built the TRGA had identified Invictus as a world of interest, a world worth visiting.
Or a world for which they’d decided to provide a high-speed transportation system, a part of the galaxy’s transit network.
“Admiral Gray?” It was Commander Eric Bittner, head of America’s Astrogation Department, and Lieutenant Donovan’s boss. “We’ve got some . . . information for you.”
He sounded hesitant enough that Gray instantly felt a twinge of alarm. “What is it, Commander?”
“We have the preliminary numbers. On the time problem.”
“Go ahead.”
“Sir . . . we had a lot of trouble nailing
this one down. We’ve been trying to identify individual pulsars by their transmission fingerprints. But . . .”
His voice trailed off.
“I’m sure you’re aware that any galactic pulsars we can identify out here are essentially anywhere from twenty-five to eighty thousand years in the past,” Gray said.
“Of course, Admiral,” Bittner said sharply. “That’s obvious. No . . . the problem is, we’re in deep time.”
“Eight hundred million years in the past?” Gray asked. So . . . the Glothr had led them back in time to the epoch of the original ur-Sh’daar. . . .
“No sir. We appear to be something like twelve million years in our own future.
“My God . . .”
Chapter Fifteen
6 August, 2425
USNA Star Carrier America
Invictus Space, T+12 MY
1805 hours, TFT
“Twelve million years . . . in the future?” Sara Gutierrez, America’s skipper, was as shocked as Gray had been. “How is that even possible?”
Gray had called a hurried meeting of the command staff, the team linking in through their in-heads.
“Same way Koenig’s task force ended up almost nine hundred million years in the past,” Gray replied. “Under the right conditions, both space and time are . . . flexible. They can be bent.”
“I know that. I think . . . I think what I was trying to ask is what does this say about the Sh’daar in the future?”
“What do you mean?” Commander Mallory asked.
“She means,” Gray said, carefully, “that the Glothr are Sh’daar . . . and if their home world is located twelve million years in our future, it kind of suggests that the Sh’daar survive—survived—our time. So where does that leave Earth and humans? Is that it, Captain?”
“Exactly,” Gutierrez said. “It suggests that maybe Humankind got swallowed up by the Sh’daar. The war—our war, in the twenty-fifth century—was lost.”
“There is another possibility,” the voice of America’s AI said. Ship AIs rarely engaged in conversation with human crews; conversations tended to be long and inefficient, when the direct transfer of data into human cerebral implants was so much faster and more sure. But Gray had ordered the network to adopt a human persona so that it could interact with the command staff. There were times when that quiet voice could steady the nerves of jittery humans or help the team to stay focused on topic.
