Singularity: Star Carrier: Book Three (43 page)

The galaxy that one day would be known as Omega Centauri was at this point just skimming above the sweep of the Milky Way’s spiral arms, a few thousand light years above the galactic plane, and a mere hundred thousand years or so from collision. An exact demarcation in time was impossible, of course, since the star clouds that comprised entire galaxies didn’t have sharp boundaries. The outer stars of both galactic systems were already merging, in fact, and Koenig could see where tidal interactions were sharply warping a portion of the Milky Way spiral, and were already seriously disrupting parts of Omega Centauri.

When the final coalescence occurred, most of Omega Centauri’s suns and dust and gas would be stripped away, leaving the naked core to orbit through the Galaxy of Man as an apparent globular cluster.

Koenig was looking at the Humankind’s galaxy as it had appeared almost 900 million years ago. Somewhere in that frozen maelstrom of stars and curling tentacles of interstellar gas and dust, of glowing nebulae and evolving suns overhead, lay hidden Sol and her retinue of planets. On Earth, at this moment, living cells in shallow, warm seas were learning how to congregate into multicellular colonies, the stromatolite reef builders were beginning to go into a long decline, and a few adventurous organisms were just at the point of inventing sex. Those two linchpins of evolutionary creativity would make possible the entire astonishing panoply of life on Earth that would follow. From here, the dinosaurs lay another 626 million years in the future, and humans some 250 million years after that. Such a stunning abyss of time left Koenig awed and a feeling a little lost.

And perhaps that’s why the Sh’daar had elected to extend their reach through time, to an epoch in the remote future, when Omega Centauri had evolved—or
de
volved, rather—into a globular cluster orbiting within the hundreds of billions of stars of the Milky Way’s galactic spiral.

The fact that the AIs had been able to identify Omega Centauri with the infalling dwarf galaxy of a billion years before remained an astonishing technological leap. Even across a billion years, it turned out that many of the cluster’s stars retained the spectral fingerprints necessary to make the identification . . . that, and the cluster’s unusual size. Even so, the leap felt more like intuition than science.

And AIs weren’t supposed to indulge in such human ways of viewing the cosmos.

There’d been endless speculation about the true nature of the Sh’daar, of course, ever since their Ultimatum in 2367. An advanced civilization ruling the galaxy, existing for millions, even for hundreds of millions of years . . . no. Koenig never had liked the term
Sh’daar Empire
. The galaxy was simply too vast to permit such shallow and shortsighted terminology. Evidently, the Sh’daar had agreed with him. They’d hoped to infiltrate the future by bypassing almost a billion years, pruning away those species that threatened their plans, co-opting the rest into nonthreatening acquiescence. Koenig strongly suspected that the enigmatic Six Suns were a part of that, but he couldn’t prove it. One interesting fact, though, had been pointed out by the astrogation department: the Six Suns no longer existed in Omega Centauri, the future version of the Sh’daar galaxy.

Stars that massive would die after a few million years, of course, going supernova. Still, the life spans of those artificially enhanced stars
could
have been extended by feeding in more stars. What had changed?

What were the Sh’daar—or the
ur
-Sh’daar, for that matter—really up to?

“What
I
want to know,” Wizewski said, “is whether the bastards can be trusted.”

“I’m not sure it’s possible to trust another species,” Koenig said.

“My, but aren’t
we
cynical today,” Buchanan said, laughing.

Koenig shrugged. “Hell, we still have trouble trusting members of our
own
species. And as for
the alien
. . . with an entirely different way of looking at the universe, a different concept of the natural order of things . . .”

“Exactly,” Wizewski said. “Things we take for granted, they don’t. Things they take for granted are sheer fantasy, aren’t even
conceivable
, to us.”

“But they seem willing to talk,” Koenig said. “That’s the important thing, at least for right now.”

“I’m still trying to get a handle on the idea of us
joining
the Sh’daar,” Katryn Craig said. “Becoming a part of their civilization.”

“I suppose it makes sense,” Wizewski said. “We’re in on their secret. If we can’t beat ’em, join ’em. And share the galaxy.”

Koenig had his own ideas about that. How does an enemy bent on your absolute annihilation become a friend, an ally, almost literally within the blink of an eye?

After almost four decades of fighting the Sh’daar, could Humankind accept them as allies?

Should
Humankind accept them as allies?

Ultimately, it would be the Confederation government that upheld the hastily cobbled-together treaty he’d presented to the Sh’daar . . . or struck it down. He suspected they would accept; after all, those government factions set on accepting peace at any price, including that of giving up GRIN technologies, had been in the majority back home. When the Fleet returned to Earth, Koenig would be giving them an option, a chance for peace without hobbling human technological advancement.

Koenig knew he would still resign his commission, though . . . and that they might well court-martial him before that happened.

Time would tell.

“It’s not over yet by a long shot,” he said after a long moment. “We don’t know how all of the Sh’daar client races are going to react to upstart humans suddenly hobnobbing with their galactic masters. The Turusch, the Nungiirtok, the H’rulka . . . none of them think like humans. And there’s a lot we still don’t know about the Sh’daar themselves. Or the
ur
-Sh’daar, for that matter.”

“We know they’re afraid of our being
here
,” Buchanan said. “Here and
now
, a billion years in our own past. We’re going to need to learn more about that.”

Three days ago, the battlegroup had been at the point of final defeat when the Sh’daar had linked in through the fleet’s Agletsch liaisons and the fighter pilot, Lieutenant Gray, who’d been a prisoner within the ship designated as Objective Gold. They’d requested a cease-fire—“an immediate and unconditional end of all military operations,” as they’d put it—in order to protect the integrity of spacetime.

The Sh’daar, it seemed, were as terrified of temporal paradox as they were of technological singularities.

The grandfather paradox. It was as well established in the realm of scientific myth as Schrödinger’s cat. Build a time machine. Travel back to the past and kill your grandfather. You are never born, hence you can
not
travel back in time and your grandfather lives, so you
do
build the time machine and you
do
kill him, and on and on and irreconcilably on.

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

T
hey’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?”

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.