Singularity: Star Carrier: Book Three (36 page)

“Unless you’ve been cleared by the chief medical officer, I can’t—”

Allyn interrupted him. “How many active-duty pilots do you have on the flight line, CAG?”

“Twenty-five.”

“Not enough. How many of those are checked out on Starhawks?”

“Maybe half.”

“So stow it, CAG, and give us a couple of ships.”

“Neither of you is fit to fly. If either of you pulls more than a couple of Gs, your AI is going to end up flying you home.
If
you don’t stroke out.”

“And until that happens, sir,” Collins said, “we can each take out some bad guys. This is too important for us to be left behind.”

“How do
you
know how important it is?”

“We’ve been following the scuttlebutt,” Allyn said. “And our AIs have been riding the Net. We know what the admiral’s trying to do, and we know you need every fighter pilot you can scrape up and pack into a Starhawk cockpit.”

He looked at Allyn hard. “Last I heard, you were in a coma, Commander.”

She shrugged. “I came out last week. And I’m damned tired of lying in sick bay. Give me a Starhawk, CAG. Let me fly.”

“You,”
he said, turning to Collins, “had a punctured lung, a ruptured spleen, internal hemorrhaging, and enough broken bones to keep an entire osteo ward busy.”

“It’s amazing,” she replied evenly, “what modern medical technology can do. A few medinano injections . . .” She stretched out her left arm, flexing the hand. “Good as new.”

“Damn it, CAG,” Allyn added, “we know you’ve been dragging in volunteers from every other department on board. By now you must be scraping the bottom of the storage tank. Besides, a skill-set download and a few hours of sims don’t measure up to
experience
.”

After Alphekka, Wizewski had put out a call for people who wanted to volunteer as replacement pilots in order to keep the squadrons flying. At Texaghu Resch, the casualty rate for the newbies had been over twice that of personnel who’d been flying fighters for a year or more. There just wasn’t any way to cram that much link time into the trainees’ schedules.

“Look, I appreciate the offer,” Wizewski said. “But why put yourselves on the line now? We have just twenty-five pilots, and we’re going to be throwing them against odds I don’t even want to think about. It’s crazy.”

“Not twenty-five,” Collins said. “Twenty-seven.”

“Twenty-eight, actually,” Wizewski said. “I’d just about decided that I was going to have to strap on a Starhawk too.”

“We have to show these kids how it’s done, CAG,” Allyn said, grinning.

“Get the hell out of here,” Wizewski said, scowling. “I’ll clear you with sick bay. You just both make sure you bring your ’hawks back intact, you hear me? If either of you passes out and gets yourself killed, I
will
chew you a new one. Got it?”

“Why, CAG,” Collins said, “we didn’t know you were into that kinky stuff.”

“Out.”

As they turned to descend the stairs, Wizewski said, “Collins.”

“Yeah, CAG?”

“Did you hear who brought you back at Alphekka?”

She made a face. “Yeah. Prim.”

“You know he’s MIA?”

“I heard.”

“How do you feel about that?”

A shrug. “Shit happens.”

“Not good enough, Lieutenant. He was your squadron mate. I didn’t expect you to share a rack with him, but I did expect you to show him basic respect.”

She appeared to consider this, and then seemed to sag a little. “Look, CAG, I never liked the monogie little bastard. But he was a Dragonfire, and he was a pretty fair pilot. He hauled my ass back to the carrier when I got crunched, and I’m grateful. I’d do the same for him. It’s a
family
thing, y’know?”

“Just so you remember that, Lieutenant. See you at high-G.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

The bad blood between those two, Collins and Gray, had caused Wizewski endless problems over the past year. At one point, he’d even tried to get Gray to transfer to another squadron. The trouble was that Navy aviators were a pretty clannish bunch, and a lot of them didn’t like the idea that Prims could come in and join their exclusive, purebred club. As a group, Navy pilots could be incredibly close and supportive . . . but they could also be arrogant, self-centered and snobbish bastards who would close ranks against anyone who didn’t measure up to their standards.

And that could include anyone who was
different
.

Sex, Wizewski decided, most likely was at the root of the problem.

It often was. Sexual relationships among officers and enlisted crew alike were not officially condoned, but neither were they forbidden. So long as each person acted like an adult, kept the drama to an absolute minimum, and didn’t cause trouble with petty jealousies, rivalries, or coercion, they could pretty much do what they liked.

And, in fact, pilots in particular tended to swap around quite a bit, forming close bonds that extended well beyond the flight deck and into the occutubes during off-duty hours. When he’d first come on board, Trevor Gray had still been recovering from losing his . . .
wife
. Wizewski made an unpleasant face as he thought that unfamiliar word. He’d probably kept himself out of the general mix of squadbay camaraderie and social mixing, and so stood out all the more as an
outsider
, someone who didn’t belong.

He wondered if Collins had made a pass at a newbie, and the newbie had rejected her.
That
would have skewed her programming, but good. Might explain the bad blood there, at least.

Wizewski wasn’t a monogie, but he knew very well what it felt like to be an outsider, not quite in synch with the local cultural norms.

Gray was gone, but Collins would be flying with another Prim, Ryan, from the Washington Swamps. And she’d damned well better suck in her bigotry and act
professional
, or Wizewski would break her all the way down to civilian.

Assuming they survived this afternoon.

Twenty-eight against the Sh’daar fleet. . . .

Suicide.

Trevor Gray

Omega Centauri

1015 hours, TFT

“I don’t understand,” Gray said, interrupting the march of unfolding images. “
That’s
why the Sh’daar don’t believe in advanced technology? It would upset the order of their civilization?”

“No,” Thedreh’schul told him. “In fact, the imminent collision of galaxies spurred technological development to an unprecedented degree. If the member worlds of the N’gai Cloud civilization were to maintain some level of coherence or cultural unity, they would
have
to advance technologically, and advance to an enormous degree. Ships that could cross twenty thousand light years within a brief span of time, perhaps. Portals, doorways that would allow a being to step from one world to another as if from one room to another. Life spans so long that a thousand-year voyage meant nothing. Forms of communication involving entangled quantum particles allowing messages to pass instantaneously across a hundred thousand light years. All of these were considered, yes-no? All were tried. Ur-Sh’daar technologies exploded in number and in accelerating advancement.

“The ur-Sh’daar learned to re-engineer stars.”

“The Six Suns,” Gray said.

“Among other engineering feats, yes. What you call the Six Suns created a unique gravitational environment for some of the ur-Sh’daar experiments, as well as a kind of cultural beacon designed to unify and focus the member civilizations. In a more immediately practical development, they also learned to take the mass of a star and collapse it into a state of neutronium hyper-matter, shaping it into a cylinder rotating at close to the speed of light.

“The Texaghu Resch gravitational anomaly,” Gray said quietly.

“Yes. Created in pairs tuned together, they formed artificial wormholes that could span tens of thousands of light years. The ur-Sh’daar began exploring, probing into the looming spiral galaxy, creating a network of far-flung gateways—what you call the TRGA cylinders or tunnels. We Agletsch heard of them only as legends. For us, they were the
Kir’ghalleg v’nroth
. You would say . . . ‘Across the Depths,’ yes-no?”

“I think I like ‘TRGA’ better,” Geray said. “Easier to pronounce.”

“Either way it is only a name,” Thedreh’schul told him. “No matter what these devices were called, they were intended to link together a scattered ur-Sh’daar union, yes-no?

“And more . . .”

T
hough life on Earth had only begun blossoming into multicellular forms over the past couple of hundred million years or so, though terrestrial life had only recently discovered the key biological masterstroke of sex that would end an evolutionary bottleneck and lead ultimately to the evolution of intelligence, Earth’s galaxy nevertheless teemed with sentient species. The galaxy had first coalesced out of vast collapsing clouds of dust and gas and newborn stars perhaps a billion years after the big bang. Though several successive generations of exploding stars were required to enrich individual galaxies to the point where solid worlds could be formed that could give rise to life, to intelligence, and to technology, the first technological civilizations must have begun exploring their galactic neighborhoods as much as 2 billion years before the birth of Earth’s sun.

By the time the ur-Sh’daar began exploring the new galaxy, that spiral was home to perhaps 50 million intelligent species.

The majority of these, for one reason or another, never developed a technic culture. Some evolved within the deep abyssal realms of their world oceans, or in oceans locked away beneath planet-wide ice caps on worlds like Europa or Pluto in Earth’s solar system. Many evolved in the atmospheres of gas giants, with no solid surface and no means of mining metals or creating plastics or developing any of the other accoutrements and necessities of technic civilization. Many evolved in reducing atmospheres or carbon dioxide or methane-ammonia or other exotic but common gas mixes, where fire—hence smelting—was impossible. And so, tragically, many species ended their own existence as their technological development was still aborning, through miscalculation, through cosmic accident, to asteroid impacts and nearby supernovae, and all of the myriad other catastrophes that threaten any planetary species.

But at least one tenth of 1 percent of those intelligent species managed to survive. They’d developed on worlds with oxygen atmospheres, permitting fire, metals smelting, and the development of primitive technologies. Or they developed through advancements in exotic chemistries that bypassed the need for open flame, or learned to extract metals from the throats of hot volcanic vents in the deep ocean or on worlds with unoxygenated, reducing atmospheres. A few were helped by more advanced others, the technically gifted descending to help those trapped in technological bottlenecks—

Gray thought of the gas-giant dwelling H’rulka.

Fifty thousand technic civilizations, a very great many of them star faring, spreading out through the length and breadth of the Milky Way 6.5 billion years before the rise of Humankind.

And then the N’gai Cloud had descended upon the galaxy, bringing with it the ur-Sh’daar. . . .

Chapter Twenty-Three

1 July 2405

CIC

TC/USNA CVS
America

Omega Centauri

1510 hours, TFT

A
t long last,
America
approached her Emergence point.

Koenig sat in his command chair in the carrier’s Combat Information Center, watching, expressionless, as the CIC team sat strapped down and linked in. The tactical tank showed the expected positions of the other ships of the CBG; how good a guess that projection was would be determined in another few moments.

A very great deal depended on the accuracy of that guess.

The process of moving faster than light within an Alcubierre gravitational warp bubble had been compared to squeezing a watermelon pit tightly between thumb and forefinger and shooting it across a room. Technically, the bubble of folded-up space no longer existed inside the universe proper, but was skimming along the surface in a hyper-dimensional sense, within an eldritch realm physicists called metaspace. In another sense, the focused gravitational singularities embracing the ship contracted the fabric of spacetime ahead while expanding it astern.

No matter what metaphors were applied, precise navigation within metaspace was difficult, a matter for the extremely powerful sentient AIs running in the astrogation department of each ship. Those AIs had linked with one another during the initial acceleration so that all of the ships shared a precise directional vector, but even so, there would be a certain amount of scatter within the fleet, even across so short a distance as half a light year.

Within metaspace, human starships could manage between 1.7 and 1.9 light years per day, the lower values applying to freighters, stores ships, and the like. The assault force Koenig had organized here consisted entirely of combat vessels, all capable of the faster rates.

Even so, it had taken more than six hours to travel half a light year. Even across so relatively short a distance, there was certain to be a fair amount of scattering at the other end, both in space and in time. The battlegroup was operating in completely unknown territory here. There’d been no opportunity to send out reconnaissance probes to record the local metric, and while a ship was folded up within metaspace, there was no way to take sightings of nearby stars.

With normal interstellar jumps, it was possible for ships to emerge from Alcubierre Drive scattered across several astronomical units, so far that it took ten or twenty minutes or more for the light of each emerging vessel to reach the others, allowing them to coordinate their movements. For that reason, battlegroups tended to emerge well out on the fringes of a target star system. The metric there would be flatter than in close to the system’s core, where the gravity of the local star twisted space and made emergence dangerous. And tactically, that gave the emerging ships the room they needed to look at the dispositions of enemy ships and to formulate a plan of attack.

Koenig had absolutely no idea what they were about to jump into now, however. The Sh’daar—if in fact that was who they were facing here, and not simply another client species—possessed a level of technology undreamed of by human science, whole planets capable of faster-than-light travel, and the astonishing stellar engineering displayed by the Six Suns.

He was counting, however, on one point. The Six Suns were so bright that they illuminated a vast region of space, one so large that not even the Sh’daar would be able to guard all of it all the time. Koenig’s hope was to emerge at one point within that sphere, threaten whatever appeared to be both vulnerable and important, and use that threat to force the Sh’daar to negotiate.

It was, Koenig had to admit to himself, the longest of long shots. With no hard intelligence, with no understanding of the enemy or his defensive capabilities, the
America
battlegroup could easily find itself cut off, surrounded, and overwhelmed.

But it was all they had. The alternative had been to back off, return to Earth, and go back on the defensive, a strategy that ultimately meant defeat.

Ten more minutes to go. . . .

Thirty-three ships.

Of the forty-one that had come through the tunnel to deploy within the Omega Centauri cluster, five, all of them with serious battle damage, had been left on guard at the TRGA—the
OCGA
, Koenig corrected himself. The astrogation department had dubbed the artifact on
this
side of the shortcut the Omega Centauri gravitational anomaly, or OCGA. Pronounced with a soft C, as in
Centauri
, the term had swiftly devolved into “Oscah,” a parallel with “Triggah.”

After Koenig’s discussion with the assembled CBG captains, three of the ships—two of them Pan-European and one the North-American destroyer
Azteca
—had opted out, decelerated, and returned to Oscah, where they were now waiting with the others.

That
only
three ships in the fleet had balked at making this final assault was nothing less than a miracle, Koenig knew. That the rest had stayed with him was an astonishing declaration of both solidarity and trust.

He prayed that the trust was not misplaced.

“Karyn,” he said, then stopped himself, and said instead, “Personal assistant.”

“I’m here, Admiral.”

The voice was emotionlessly androgynous. But it was better this way.

“Final pre-Emergence checklist, please.”

“All stations report readiness for Emergence,” the PA replied. “CAG Wizewski states that all fighters are ready for rotational drop, as soon as you give the word.
America
’s launch tubes are configured for high-G KK bombardment.”

“Very well.”

“Readiness of the other ships is, of course, conjectural, pending Emergence. However, our last communications with the other carriers in the CBG stated that they were readying their fighters, and that General Mathers and Colonel Murcheson were preparing for a possible Marine assault on either the mobile planet or upon such other targets as you might designate.”

“How long?”

“Seventeen minutes, twenty-one seconds, Admiral.”

“Okay. I want a full sensory sweep as soon as we emerge. Emphasis on tracking those two transponders. If we come out anywhere close to them, I want to know.”

At the planning conference yesterday, Koenig had told the battlegroup’s command staff and ship captains that they were not here primarily to find the fleet’s missing pilots, that to do so simply did not make sound military sense. Nonetheless, those two pilots, Gray and Schiere, were very much on Koenig’s mind.

If they
were
alive, prisoners on that mobile alien planet as those briefly intercepted transponder signals had suggested, he was going to rescue them if there was any way to do so.

He could imagine no colder and more lonely an isolation than to be left behind in enemy hands almost 17,000 light years from home. The distance might be far, far greater than that if the speculation about this being someplace other than Omega Centauri was correct, but the difference between 16,500 light years and
millions
of light years was purely academic, and could have no real meaning for the human psyche. Abandoned was abandoned, and it would mean a bleak and despairing death for those two if the fleet couldn’t, in fact, reach them.

He wouldn’t risk the entire battlegroup
solely
on that rescue.

But if there was a way to pull it off, he would do so.

“Scanners are set. However, Admiral, you should be aware that our chances of emerging within close proximity of that planet are remote.”

“I know.”

So far as was possible,
America
and the rest of CBG-18 were following the track of that fleeing and unplanet-like planet, but they were going to try to emerge around three thousand astronomical units from the center of the Six Suns, within what humans thought of as the habitable zone for six stars of that incredible brightness.

There was no reason to think that what humans found “habitable” would apply to the Sh’daar, however. If the planet had emerged ten thousand AUs from those blue-hot beacons, or if it had continued on to, say, just two thousand AUs out, the battlegroup would emerge many hours, many
days
away from it.

“I know,” Koenig said, repeating himself. “But sometimes miracles happen.”

“I do not understand.”

Koenig smiled at that. Karyn Mendelson
would
have understood.

But she had been human, not an artificial intelligence.

“No,” he said. “You wouldn’t.”

Flight Deck

TC/USNA CVS
America

Omega Centauri

1520 hours, TFT

Lieutenant Shay Ryan stepped out onto the flight deck, a vast and echoing chamber ringing with the harsh bray of a klaxon announcing the imminent drop. She hit the touchpatch on her skin suit, which immediately began transforming itself over her body, growing the link points she would need to connect with her fighter. Her helmet was in her ship.

Guided through the labyrinthine confusion of flight-deck personnel, machinery, and waiting fighters by an in-head beacon, she found her Starhawk resting above its nanosealed drop hatch, in the middle of a line of identical fighters. Here, the fighters were in their load configuration, their light-drinking black hulls shaped like loaves of bread, featureless save for their hull numbers picked out in glowing white nanomatrix, their cockpits melted open to give the pilots access.

Her number was 836.

“Hey, Shay!” a voice called. “Luck!”

It was Rissa Schiff, standing next to her fighter a few hatches down.

“Thanks!” Shay called back, grinning. “Let’s grab some hard Gs!”

Shay still wasn’t sure how she felt about the previous night. She and Schiffie had ended up together inside Shay’s rack. It had started out as a cuddle and gone further.

She’d never married, and her Prim monogamous preferences had never been seriously tested. She knew a majority of people from the Periphery
were
monogamous, and that they tended to collide in a fairly messy way when they mixed with citizens and their more normal social mores. Shay didn’t care about normal, but she
did
care about fitting in with the squadron. The problem was, she wasn’t about to start sleeping with every other pilot on the flight line just to prove she was “normal.” Worse, she was wondering, now, how she would handle it if anything happened to Schiffie.

She pushed the thought away. That was monogie thinking. Sex was fun, superb recreation, a way to bond with friends.

It wasn’t possession.

She climbed into her cockpit, picking up the lightweight bubble of her helmet, setting it over her head, and letting its rim merge with her utilities. As she connected with her fighter, the AI flooded her in-head display with incoming data and graphics, showing ship readiness, squadron status, and tacsit.

Ten minutes to Emergence.

Ten minutes of waiting.

“Hey, Dragons!” That was Ben Donovan’s voice. “We’ve got VIPs with us!”

“Hey, CAG!” Schiff called. “What are you doing, slumming with the peasants?”

“I just figured you could use my years of experience,” Wizewski’s voice came back. “A steadying influence, right?”

“And Commander Allyn!” Calli Loman called. “What are you doing back on the flight deck?”

“Looking out for you newbies,” Allyn replied.

“Do I relinquish command to you, Commander?” Donovan asked. “Or to Captain Wizewski?”

“I’ll take it,” the CAG replied.

“And Lieutenant Collins too,” Lawrence Kuhn said. “Man, this is like old-home week.”

“What would you know about it, newbie?” Collins called back.

Shay listened to the banter, realizing just how serious things must be. The CAG was senior command staff; his presence in a fighter was only a little less astonishing than if Captain Buchanan or Admiral Koenig himself were to come down here and strap on a Starhawk. And Allyn and Collins . . . those two had been so badly wracked up at Alphekka. What the
hell
were they doing here?

The fact of their presence was not exactly reassuring. From the scuttlebutt she’d been hearing over the last couple of days, this assault deployment was going to be rough—rougher than anything
America
had seen yet in this war.

But at the same time, the fact that they were here made her feel . . . accepted. Part of the team.

Almost
as warm and wanted and needed as she’d felt with Schiffie last night.