by Ian Douglas
Modern quantum theory suggested that killing Granddad simply created a new universe, one in which the murderer had never been born. Paradox resolved.
But at the heart of Omega Centauri, under the fierce and unrelenting glare of the Six Suns, there was the possibility that the invading humans of CBG-18 would cause unexpected and unplanned-for havoc with the Sh’daar vision of the future. Exactly what that havoc might be was unknown, and the Sh’daar, understandably, were reluctant to discuss it. Perhaps there were other gates here, leading still further into the past—those two new TRGA wormholes in the skies of AIS-1, perhaps. Reinforcements had come through those gates; suppose the knowledge of the battle here and now changed decisions made in the past? The here and now Sh’daar might fear the possible resultant changes.
Or perhaps there was the possibility of making contact with the ur-Sh’daar. If the present Sh’daar feared transcendence and yet possessed time travel, why hadn’t they gone back and talked things out with their ancestors?
Perhaps they had.
And what would changes in the here and now mean for that part of the Sh’daar intelligence living in the Milky Way in the far future, the era of Humankind, of the annihilation of the Chelk and how many other species, of the alliances with far-long civilizations like the Nungiirtok and the Agletsch, of the rise of Humankind itself and its expansion through the galaxy?
In any case, the presence of the human fleet here, at what appeared to be the central nexus of travel in both space and time that might win the Sh’daar immortality, had abruptly kindled their interest in working with humans, rather than trying to suppress them.
Koenig wasn’t sure that Humankind was ready for this.
And yet, after thirty-seven years, peace . . .
Or at least a truce, and an opportunity to get to understand the longtime enemy a bit better. What Humankind needed now was time.
The new science of sophontology, he knew, had within the past few centuries acknowledged that there were more intelligent species upon the Earth than Homo sapiens, many more. There were, for instance, various species of monkeys showing the beginnings of evolutionary development first demonstrated by humans a few millions of years before. Monkeys. Not Humankind’s closest living relatives, the apes, but monkeys. Certain species living in open savannah had learned to walk upright, at least for a few seconds at a time, in order to see above the high and all-encompassing seas of grass. Others had learned how to crack the husks of large, tough nuts with hammer stones in order to get at the soft meat within, and passed the knowledge down to the young of those species from generation to generation.
For the Sh’daar to agree to work with humans was roughly akin to humans sitting down with those tribes of clever monkeys and deciding together how best to run the world.
No matter. All the monkeys needed was some time.
And Carrier Battlegroup America had just purchased that time in blood.
“I wonder,” Koenig said quietly, “what Geneva is going to think about this?”
“They’ll call it,” Buchanan told him, “Independence Day.”
“Eh?”
“Look at the date.”
Koenig had to query the fleetnet. July Fourth was not widely celebrated in the United States of North America nowadays, but it had been significant in the history of the old United States. Koenig read the download and chuckled. A union at any level with the Sh’daar might force a divided Humankind to unite at last. They would have to as they attempted to understand their new and still mysterious partners in spactime.
Union, and, at long last, freedom from war.
It was something worth fighting for.
Epilogue
15 September 2405
Trevor Gray
Manhattan, USNA
Earth
0815 hours, EST
They’d waved him off when he approached the Statue of Liberty.
In the old days, he’d sometimes flown up there and found a perch on the statue’s corroded head, overlooking the Ruins. But no longer, apparently. Things had changed.
Trevor Gray floated now above the calm and ancient expanse of New York Harbor not far from the submerged reef that had been Governor’s Island, sitting astride a rented Mitsubishi-Rockwell gravcycle. North lay the Manhattan Ruins, once home, now a strangely alien expanse of vegetation-covered mounds and cliffs of crumbling concrete. A kilometer to the west, the Statue of Liberty gleamed in a clear, bright morning sun. The nanostructor crew hadn’t let him approach because they were restoring her. Her upraised arm had already been recovered from the waters of the bay and mounted once again on the stump of her shoulder, and a crawling skin of nanobots were busily cleaning corroded copper, filling in the cracks and pits and bringing back the golden luster of new metal.
Lady Liberty. She carried the promise of restoration for Manhattan as well.
Four days ago, the battlegroup had returned from Omega Centauri T-Prime and, after a nervous confrontation with a waiting Confederation fleet near the orbit of Neptune, had been at last cautiously welcomed back to Earth as returning heroes. There was still talk of a court-martial for Admiral Koenig, but Gray doubted that anything would come of that other than an official pardon. The general public, at least, had not seemed to mind CBG-18’s sudden change in status from rebels to victorious heroes. And the Confederation Senate knew good publicity when it saw it.
For Admiral Koenig had ended the interminable war with the alien Sh’daar, and he and those with him were being feted with parades and official receptions, with speeches, with medals, with full interactive netcasts, and with spectacular celebrations that promised to be going strong for the rest of the year. A big ceremony had been scheduled for the 21st at the Eudaimonium Arcology overlooking the Palisades. Gray was supposed to receive a medal from President DuPont himself—the Star of Earth. Koenig would be receiving the newly created Order of the Galactic Star, while Lieutenant Schiere, Lieutenant Ryan, and a dozen others would receive the Navy Cross. Even the two Agletsch, Dra’ethde and Gru’mulkisch, would be getting special commendations created by fiat by the Confederation Senate just for this occasion.
There would be posthumous awards as well, for so very, very many. . . .
Bewilderingly, astonishingly, the Sh’daar War was over.
And with the War’s end, a feverish period of rebuilding and reconstruction had begun, as though both North America and the Pan-European Federation had suddenly decided to emerge from a long and groggy malaise. Mail packets had brought word of the Battle of Omega Centauri back to Sol weeks before, and the news appeared to have galvanized the civilian governments. The Periphery was to be reclaimed, and the rebuilding had begun. Eight kilometers to the south, the centuries-old Verrazano Sea Gates were being repaired. When they were operating once more, they would rise above the surface of the lower bay and, together with the Throgs Neck Dam north of Long Island, they would block off the Atlantic and allow the ruins of New York City—half submerged for over three centuries, scoured by tidal waves in 2132 and again in 2404—to be drained.
And then the real rebuilding could begin.
Gray had mixed feelings about the whole project. The people he’d known, the Prims he’d grown up with in the Manhat Ruins, all were gone. Angela, his former wife, was gone. His old life as a Prim was gone.
And maybe it was all for the best.
“Hey, Sandy!”
He turned at the call. Two more gravcycles were approaching out of the south—and astride them were Shay and Rissa Schiff. He waved.
“What the hell are you doing up here, Sandy?” Rissa wanted to know.
“I came up for a look at the old haunts,” he said. “They won’t be here much longer, they say.”
“They’re doing the same to cities throughout the Periphery,” Shay told him. A fresh breeze off the Atlantic tugged at her short hair. “Washington. Boston. There’s even talk of raising Miami.”
“Think you’ll go back to Washington, Shay?”
&nb
sp; She shook her head. “Shit, I’m never going back. Home is here. With you guys.”
“You’re staying in, aren’t you Sandy?” Rissa asked. “In the service, I mean.”
The nickname still felt . . . odd. Some of the others in the squadron had started calling him Sandy after his sandcaster tactic last year, but it hadn’t really caught on until his return from AIS-1 with the Marines.
Now everyone was calling him that. Even his old nemesis Collins.
“I haven’t decided yet,” he told her.
With the end of the war, there’d been, naturally, talk about downsizing the fleet. Gray could get an early out, resign his commission. He’d be a civilian again—this time a full citizen of the United States of North America.
But what, he thought, would he do? Oh, he’d be able to download a new career of some sort, to be sure. There’d be plenty of work available with Reconstruction. But the really interesting stuff going on now was out there. With liaison teams headed out to Omega Centauri, both at T-Primus, in the distant past, and T-Nunc, the Omega Centauri of the present day. There were rumors of a Sh’daar civilization in the present-day cluster, and even scuttlebutt about attempts to contact the slow-lived digital inhabitants of Heimdall and other scattered Sh’daar worlds.
The exploration of new worlds, civilizations, and concepts promised to take centuries.
Civilizations, Gray thought, change. They grow, they age, they decay, and eventually, inevitably, they die, passing into extinction. The lucky ones are able to transmit their heritage, their history, their culture, and their science and art on to the younger cultures that come after them. The Confederation, he knew, had very nearly grown old before its time, grown old, acquiescing to decay and going under. The victory, the stunning, impossible victory at Omega Centauri Primus 900 million years in the past appeared to have given the Confederation the promise of a bright, new future.
It remained to be seen what they would do with it.
And, he thought, people changed as well. Sometimes the change, as with Angela, his once-wife, hurt.
But it was possible to grow out of the pain and into joy, too.
Gray looked at the two women and grinned at them. During the past months, out at Omega Centauri Primus and during the voyage back, Trevor Gray had managed to lose his old prejudice against the polyamory of Earth’s culture. Maybe that meant he wasn’t a Prim any longer.
“I haven’t decided,” he said, repeating himself, “but I’m with Shay. I feel like I belong here. Let’s go home.”
And the three turned on their gravcycles and arrowed toward the Giuliani Spaceport, north of Manhat.
A shuttle was waiting there to take them back to the Quito Synchorbit, and star carrier America.
Home.
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