Singularity: Star Carrier: Book Three (35 page)

“Some of us valued freedom more than gee-whiz high-tech.”

“ ‘Freedom,’ ” the Agletsch said. “As in ‘personal freedom’? The freedom for an individual to do what she desires, yes-no?”

“That’s right.”

“For the Agletsch, freedom is simply being what you are. We might say to follow our nature, yes-no? I do not see how this applies to you.”

“Our . . . nature,” Gray said, “is to pursue what we think is best for us, first, for our families and those close to us, second, and only then do we get around to social groups as big as the city we live in, or the country, or the planet. Sometimes there’s conflict between what’s good for us and what’s good for someone else. Sometimes we have to make compromises, trying to find something that’s the best possible for everyone concerned. And sometimes humans are just selfish bastards who don’t care about anything or anyone else. And that’s when we get into trouble.”

“So some of you refused to accept the new technology.”

“I suppose so. Mostly, they didn’t like being forced to fit into a larger system that they hadn’t chosen for themselves. Not everyone wanted a computer inside their brain, but the way things were going, pretty soon everyone needed that computer just to open automatic doors or to pay for dinner or to talk to a friend in another city. Those people stayed behind, living in the Ruins. They called us Prims. Primitives.”

“I . . . comprehend. The Sh’daar Masters seem to comprehend as well.”

“They do?”

“It seems that those whom you call Sh’daar are also what you would call Prims.”

Gray had not seen that one coming.

Chapter Twenty-Two

1 July 2405

Trevor Gray

Omega Centauri

0825 hours, TFT

T
revor Gray was awash in imagery.

The scenes had been tumbling into his mind for hours, now, unbidden, uncontrollable, a kind of free-flowing dreamscape of alien and often disconnected sights, sounds, and impressions. Much of it he couldn’t understand at all, since he had no idea what it was he was seeing. The Agletsch, Thedreh’schul, was a kind of narrator in the background, trying to explain the scenes as they unfolded.

Sometimes her explanations left Gray more in the dark than he’d been before.

But the view was . . . spectacular.

A
star cloud dropped slowly through intergalactic space, a dwarf galaxy just a few percent the size and mass of the Milky Way, but still including within its embrace several hundred million stars in a diffuse and irregular cloud some five thousand light years across. Five billion years before, the galaxy—known to its star-faring inhabitants as the N’gai Cloud—had been ejected from the cataclysmic collision of two larger galaxies that had merged, spectacularly, into the twin-cored spiral humans knew as Andromeda.

That collision had initiated an intense period of new star formation within the cloud, new stars, new worlds, and, ultimately, new life and new civilizations. Civilizations rose and fell, engaged in war and negotiated peace, came into being and passed into extinction. Perhaps a dozen species, ultimately, forged an alliance that held technological sway over the entire N’gai Cloud.

A term, a prefix dredged from a download within Gray’s cybernetic memory, supplied a name for this galactic culture—the
ur-Sh’daar
.

By this far-off epoch, the night skies of the ur-Sh’daar worlds were spectacular indeed. The N’gai Cloud was falling into the glowing sprawl of a neighboring spiral galaxy, the home galaxy of Humankind, the Milky Way.

Within his mind, Trevor Gray became the first of his species to see the home galaxy from Outside. He could see clearly the hazy, grainy sweep of blue-hued spiral arms wrapped around the barred central bulge of ancient, reddish core stars, could see the clotted curve of light-drinking dust clouds, night-black, between the pressure-wave flare of bright, hot newborn suns demarcating the spiral arms.

The N’gai Cloud approached the Milky Way spiral from just above the plane of its spiral arms, traveling against the galaxy’s direction of rotation about its hub. Millennia trickled past like seconds within Gray’s consciousness, a kind of time-lapse imagery in which he could actually see the slow and ponderous rotation of the home galaxy in the sky, could see the frenzied swarming of suns within the falling dwarf galaxy of N’gai about its tightly compacted core, could see patterns of disruption forming as the tidal effects of galaxy upon galaxy distorted both.

The ur-Sh’daar knew that their worlds would not be endangered by the coming merging of galaxies. Even during the spectacular collision of the two spirals that had merged into Andromeda, very few, if any, stars had actually collided, and very few star systems had been gravitationally disrupted, so vast are the distances between the drifting motes of a galaxy’s suns.

True, infalling clouds of gas and dust had generated a new eon of stellar genesis, and for a few hundred million years supermassive young stars, spendthrift and short-lived, had died in flaring supernovae, illuminating the colliding galaxies like pulsing strobes. Some thousands of ancient civilizations, caught in those blazing storms of radiation, had perished . . . but what of that? The stellar explosions had enriched the interstellar medium with heavy elements, promising the rise of new worlds and new life across future geologic epochs.

But the ur-Sh’daar watched the apparent approach of that vast spiral in their night skies with growing alarm. If their worlds individually would survive the coming collision of galaxies, their collective culture might not. By now, the ur-Sh’daar represented a pattern of galactic civilization extending back into the distant past some billions of years. Individual civilizations within that pattern faded, turned inward, transformed, or simply died, but each bequeathed to succeeding generations its accumulated history, knowledge, and cultural imprint.

When the N’gai Cloud was finally devoured by that glowing spiral monster looming huge in the sky, it would be torn apart, its nebulae of dust and gas shredded or compressed into new suns, its existing stars scattered, strewn throughout that slow-turning spiral.

As powerful and as far-reaching as the ur-Sh’daar group culture was, it was a network of perhaps a thousand star systems spanning a mere five thousand light years. Each member world was, on average, a couple of thousand light years from its nearest neighbors, a distance considerably reduced in toward the more densely crowded core. If those member systems were evenly distributed throughout the looming spiral, some twenty times wider than the N’gai Cloud, ultimately, each member world would be well over twenty thousand light years from its nearest neighbor.

For the varied species of the ur-Sh’daar, technological advancement long before had fallen into a kind of somnambulant balance. A high rate of technological advancement had been discouraged, for too much innovation too quickly might upset the long-standing balance of cultural identity and order. With the unrelenting approach of the alien galaxy, the culture’s leaders feared their confederation of species would fall apart. As the density of their cultural network thinned, each world would ultimately lose touch with the others and with the group’s shared history and cultural imperative over the course of the next hundred million years or so.

Within Gray’s mind’s eye, he watched the passing of eons, as the home galaxy of Humankind grew larger and larger and still larger, spanning the entire night sky of one of the teeming worlds of the ur-Sh’daar.

It was sobering to realize that what he was seeing must have taken place as much as a billion years ago, in the depths of the Proterozoic, when life on Earth was only just evolving from single-celled to multicellular organisms. . . .

Primary Flight Control

TC/USNA CVS
America

Omega Centauri

0930 hours, TFT

Moments before,
America
had tucked in her skirts and dropped into the black isolation of a metaspace bubble, traveling now at very nearly two hundred times
c
. In another six hours and some, they would be emerging in the heart of the Sh’daar’s innermost sanctum, and God alone knew what they would find.

In his head, CAG Wizewski scrolled down through his roster of active-duty pilots yet again, wondering what more could be done.

Suicide
, he thought.
It’s fucking suicide.

And suicide was against his religion.

He never discussed it, of course, thanks to the White Covenant, in force for more than 330 years, now. Discussing his religious beliefs with others, though not illegal, was considered a matter of very bad taste. But Barry Wizewski was unusual within
America
’s officer complement. Sixty years old, he actually
looked
it, with a lean and leathery face, graying hair, and wrinkles around his eyes.

There was a simple reason for this. He was a Purist, a member of the Rapturist Church of Humankind, an outgrowth of the old-time Pentecostals who believed that, with Christ about to return soon, it would be best if His people were fully human when He came.

Unlike some members of the RCH, Wizewski wasn’t a neo-Ludd. He had the usual military-issue cybernetic implants inside his brain and other parts of his central nervous system. Nowadays, to function within modern culture, you
had
to have that stuff grown inside you, for everything from ordering a meal to opening an automatic door to pulling down data from the Net. But he and others of his faith tended not to accept nano implants for purely cosmetic reasons—and that included anagathics, the various anti-aging treatments. Where most of the others on board
America
could look forward to another century or two of active life, Wizewski, with the benefit of modern medical technology short of anagathic regimens, might live another fifty or even sixty years.

It was, his belief-set taught him, how he lived the years he had, not how many he survived. Suicide in any form was a hideous waste of precious life, besides being an affront against God, Who’d granted that life in the first place.

The suicides he was considering at the moment were those of the surviving pilots of CVW-14,
America
’s carrier space wing.

The campaign so far had been rough on the fighters.
America
had departed from the Sol system six months ago with six combat squadrons, a total of seventy fighters and ninety qualified pilots. After the battles at Arcturus, Alphekka, Texaghu Resch, and here in Omega Centauri, he could barely scrape together forty fighters, and just twenty-five pilots.

The discrepancy was partly the result of new or recycled fighters coming in from the fleet’s manufactory vessels, and partly because some of the pilots had been grounded with injuries or with severe psychological stress. Right now, he could put together just two full squadrons, and that was it. Half of those were the old SG-55 War Eagles, too, antiquated spacecraft that had trouble holding their own against the far more advanced Sh’daar ship designs and weapons.

And Koenig was about to throw them all into the meat grinder.

He respected Koenig. He was the best senior officer Wizewski had served under, and by far the ballsiest. But the fighters, those of
America
and those with the other carriers in the battlegroup, were the key to modern space-naval combat, the fleet’s first line of defense against enemy attacks, and the means of smashing the enemy fleet or local defenses so that the battlegroup’s capital ships could come in and mop up. As a result, Koenig had been using his fighter assets hard, and casualties had been horrific.

Two squadrons . . .

“Barry,” a woman’s voice said in his head.

“What is it, Sophia?”

Sophia was the name Wizewski had assigned to his PA. A small measure of personal rebellion, that. Historically, Sophia was a figure representing wisdom among the Gnostics, as well as in esoteric Christianity and Christian mysticism—all heretical belief systems so far as the Purists were concerned. It was Wizewski’s private joke, shared with no one.

“Two pilots wish to speak with you.”

“Very well. Put them through.”

“They wish to see you in person, Barry.”

“Ah.” He sighed, and cut his link with the crew rosters. He was sitting in the command chair of
America
’s PriFly, her Primary Flight Control Center, a large, round room with a low overhead and broad viewall screens encircling the compartment. Twenty officers and enlisted personnel sat at console workstations around him, preparing for the upcoming launch. “Very well. Send them up.”

He spun the seat to face an open deck hatch behind him, with steps leading down to the higher-G deck below. PriFly was located in one of the rotating hab modules, slowly spinning to provide artificial gravity.

Two women in flight utilities came up the steps.

Wizewski was surprised. Both of them—Commander Marissa Allyn and Lieutenant Jen Collins—had been in sick bay since the fight at Alphekka. Collins had been badly chewed up by a high-G spin around a loose singularity from a Turusch fighter she’d killed an instant before, and ended up with twelve broken bones and bad internal injuries. Allyn had been the skipper of the Dragonfires until she’d gone streaker. A SAR tug had brought her back on board three days later in an oxygen-starvation coma. Wizewski hadn’t expected to see either woman up and about for a long time, yet, and doubted that they ever would be able to strap on a Starhawk again. Those kinds of injuries could scar the mind worse than the body.

“Allyn and Collins, sir,” Commander Allyn said, “requesting permission to return to duty.”

Wizewski opened an in-head window, checking personnel status. “I don’t see a clean chit from sick bay,” he told them.

“No, sir,” Allyn replied. “There must have been a screwup, somewhere.”

“Uh-huh.”

“It would be a damned shame,” Collins said, “if a freaking clerical error kept two good Navy pilots out of the fight, wouldn’t it? Sir.”

Wizewski studied the two for a long moment. Both of them looked drawn and weak. Allyn was trembling slightly, though she was doing a pretty good job of hiding it. Collins looked like she was about to fall over.