Deep Space

Hell, even if the Sh’daar had nothing to do with the Endeavor attack, the Slan capture of 36 Ophiuchi meant that Earth was going to need every fighter available, and now. There wouldn’t be time to grow new Velociraptors or Stardragons, not when every moment counted in intercepting the aliens before they reached Solar space. America and her battlegroup had been on full alert since the news of Arianrhod’s capture and of Endeavor’s destruction had come through from Mars. Supplies for an extended deployment were coming up through the space elevator now, or arriving down-tether from Anchorage, the small asteroid 36,000 kilometers farther out that kept the elevator structure taut and in place. Crews on liberty and leave on Earth and on the moon were being recalled, and two fresh squadrons—VFA-96 and VFA-115—had just arrived.

Similar preparations were under way on board all of the ships in CBG-40, the designation for America’s current battlegroup. The expectation was that they would be getting the affirm-go from Geneva at almost any moment.

The only real question was where the battlegroup would be deployed … Omega Centauri, as originally planned? Or to a much closer objective, to 36 Ophiuchi?

Gray pulled back from the interior view, shifting instead to America’s logistical displays. Supplies of raw material—carbon, nitrogen, and the other elements necessary to nanufacture food and most other consumables used by the nearly five thousand personnel on board—were stored in sponsons along America’s kilometer-long spine. Hydrogen, oxygen, and water itself were tapped from the 27 billion liters of water stored in America’s shield cap. While the carrier could resupply from convenient asteroids in almost any star system, Gray wanted to have every stores module full-up before they departed Solar space. Faced with a hostile unknown, there was no telling how long it would be before they would have the luxury of resupply.

“Connie?” he asked. “What’s the logistics status for the Wing?”

Captain Connie Fletcher was America’s CAG—an anachronistic three-letter acronym for commander air group, even though the squadrons on board the carrier comprised a wing, not a group, and rarely operated within a planetary atmosphere. The Navy was nothing if not wedded to tradition, and some of the terminology had stuck through four centuries from the days of ocean-going navies and pre-spaceflight aircraft carriers.

“We’re at ninety-four percent,” she told him. “We’re still waiting on the plutonium and the depleted U.”

“Expedite that.”

“We are, Skipper.”

Plutonium was necessary for the nuclear-tipped missiles carried by America’s fighters, Kraits, and the newer Boomslangs, Taipans, and Lanceheads. Depleted uranium was used in the cores of kinetic-kill rounds for the fighters’ Gatling weapons and for larger mass-driver weapons.

“And your crews?”

“We currently have four hundred ninety-six personnel still ashore, Captain. But the alert is out and they’re all on the way back … all except for five hospital cases and thirty-nine in one slammer or another.”

“Very well. Let me see.” Five medical no-shows and thirty-one under legal detention out of over 2,500 fighter-wing personnel wasn’t too bad at all. Extended liberty always meant a few people getting into fights or getting so brain-buzzed they ended up AWOL. Some ninety of America’s non-aviation personnel had reported sick or under arrest as well.

The data from Wing Personnel joined to the streams moving through Gray’s consciousness, and he filed it with the rest. He would need it all in order to compose readiness reports for Mars, for Columbus, and for Geneva.

There were times—lots of them—when Gray seriously wished he was still a Starhawk driver, with no more administrative responsibilities than his own evaluations and flight status uploads. Point him at an enemy-held star system and boost him in at 99.7 percent of c, and he knew exactly what was expected of him.

No more. He’d left the old VF-44 in 2406, deployed to Mars HQ for three years, then served on board the light carrier Republic, first as assistant CAG, and later as CAG. In 2414, he’d been given command of a Marine light carrier, the Nassau, but five years later he’d taken a career side-step to serve as executive officer of his old ship, America.

And now, with the rank of captain, he was America’s commanding officer, and flag captain to the battlegroup commander, Rear Admiral Jason R. Steiger.

Not bad at all for a monogie from the Periphery, the Manhattan Ruins.

Best, perhaps, not to think about that …

He focused instead on the matter of America’s Alcubierre Drive, and Engineering’s concerns that the ship would have trouble matching the emergence ZOP—the zone of probability—of the rest of the fleet.

Executive Office, USNA

Columbus, District of Columbia

United States of North America

2050 hours, TFT

The fireworks were spectacular.

Hands clasped behind his back, the newly elected president of the United States of North America stood before the viewall in his office. Its luminous surface was currently set to display in real time the scene in the Freedom Concourse outside. The Concourse, some eighty stories below, was still packed with cheering people as the dark skies overhead pulsed and rippled and flared with celebratory pyrotechnics. It was odd, Koenig thought, that in an age when most entertainment was downloaded directly into people’s brains through nanochelated implants, audiences still seemed to have that primal, almost atavistic need to come together in massed crowds, packed in shoulder to shoulder and shrieking at the tops of their lungs.

“It’s quite a show, Mr. President,” his aide, Marcus Whitney, observed.

“Eh?” Alexander Koenig said. “Oh, yes. Yes, I suppose it is.”

“The crowd’s enthusiasm seems a splendid validation of your policies, sir. Two nights, now, and still going strong!”

“Ha. Makes me wonder what I’m supposed to do for an encore.”

Those crowds, he thought, might not be so enthusiastic if the Sh’daar Treaty unraveled within the next few days, as it showed every sign of doing. He’d downloaded a fresh report from Mars only hours ago: Endeavor and two Confederation destroyers had been lost out at Omega Tee-prime. Intelligence suspected that the Sh’daar were behind the attack. This news, coming so close on the heels of the disaster at Arianrhod, seemed to promise the final collapse of the Sh’daar Treaty.

“They re-elected you because they know how you feel about the Confederation, Mr. President. You promised to give North America more sovereignty within the world government.”

Koenig grunted at that. The Pax Confeoderata had been formed in 2133, a union popularly known interchangeably as either the Earth or Terran Confederation. The creation of a single polity embracing most world governments had been a necessity arising from the chaos of the First and Second Sino-Western Wars, the Blood Death plague, and the widespread devastation caused by the Chinese asteroid strike into the Atlantic Ocean. The Pax had held now for almost three centuries and had followed Humankind to the stars.

But with the apparent defeat of the Sh’daar twenty years before, there’d been a resurgence of spirit, of independent thought and goals—and a new wave of calls for American independence from Geneva. North American sovereignty. It was an intriguing dream and one that Koenig himself very much wanted to see realized.

If the Sh’daar were renewing the old conflict, though, this was exactly the wrong time in which to do it. If ever Earth needed to stand united, this was the time.

Koenig had retired from the USNA Navy in 2408, four years after his startling victory over the Sh’daar. Elements within the American party had pointed out that his popularity would all but guarantee his election as president of the USNA.

His refusal to follow Confederation government orders in the face of Geneva’s blunt stupidity had had a lot to do with that. He’d ordered his battlegroup to leave the Sol System deliberately before orders to the contrary could arrive, won a surprising victory at Alphekka, skirmished with a French squadron at HD157950, and eventually beaten Sh’daar client forces at Texaghu Resch. Ultimately, Koenig had taken CBG-18 through a Sh’daar transit node into the remote past to confront the Sh’daar puppet masters within their home galaxy and epoch … though that hadn’t been clear at the time. The Sh’daar threat had collapsed with astonishing suddenness, resulting in the treaty guaranteeing Earth’s interstellar borders.

When CBG-18 had returned to Earth, Geneva had had little choice but to forgive Koenig’s de facto mutiny and declare him a hero.

He’d resisted getting into politics, but the ongoing battle with Geneva over Periphery Reconstruction had drawn him in, and he’d been elected to the USNA Senate in 2410. As North America began rebuilding the shattered, half-submerged cities along its drowned coastal areas, Geneva insisted that these regions, formally abandoned by the USNA centuries before, now properly belonged to the Pax world community. Once again, the former admiral had aligned himself against the Terran Confederation government, this time in the senate halls in both Columbus and in Geneva. In 2418, Koenig had left the Senate to run for president, and been elected to a six-year term.

And now, just two days ago, he’d won a second term.

The big question was what Geneva would decide to do in light of the news of the twin naval disasters … and whether President Koenig would be able to support their decision, whatever that might be.

And would the American public, caught up in their new enthusiasm for independence, support him if he decided that he must first support a united Earth?

Much depended on the alien Sh’daar, and at the moment they were a complete unknown in the equation.

The Confederation maintained at best only a tenuous connection with the Sh’daar. The so-called Sh’daar Empire, the remnants, apparently, of an ancient extragalactic federation of mutually alien civilizations, maintained a far-flung polity of mutually alien species, both now and in the remote past. That they feared the Terran Confederation, despite their considerable technological advantage, was indisputable. But Humankind understood them so poorly, even down to exactly what it was about humans that the Sh’daar feared.

Attempts to open new negotiations with the aliens through their usual representatives, a species called the Agletsch, had repeatedly failed. The Sh’daar had ignored Geneva’s call for a dialogue over the Osiris question, refused to put human diplomats in touch with the alien Nungiirtok still occupying the 70 Ophiuchi system, and rejected point-blank Confederation requests to revisit Omega Tee-sub, as the Sh’daar home cluster in the remote past was commonly known.

And now, according to the packet that had just arrived at Fleet HQ in Mars orbit, the Navy survey vessel Endeavor and her escorts had been destroyed by unknown attackers at the central core of Omega Tee-prime.

“Tee-sub” was a manageable shorthand for “T-0.876gy,” an unwieldy mouthful pronounced “Tee-sub-minus zero point eight seven six gigayear,” a physics notation referring to an epoch 876 million years in the past. Tee-prime, on the other hand, was Time Now, November of the year 2424 in common usage. Time travel, Koenig reflected, not for the first time, made things almost unendurably complicated. And conducting a war across a span of almost a billion years made everything infinitely worse.

Sixteen thousand light years from Sol lay the largest globular star cluster in the galaxy, Omega Centauri, a swarming beehive of 10 million suns packed into a sphere just 230 light years across. Close inspection, however, had proven that Omega Centauri was not, strictly speaking, a proper member of the cloud of regular, smaller globular star clusters orbiting the center of the Milky Way galaxy, but the stripped-down core of a separate dwarf galaxy devoured by the Milky Way hundreds of millions of years in the past.

Some 876 million years ago, Omega Centauri had been an irregular galaxy much like the Greater Magellanic Cloud of the present day, hanging just above the far larger galactic spiral. That Omega Centauri, existing almost a billion years ago and known to its inhabitants as the N’gai Cloud, was the home of some thousands of mutually alien civilizations called the collective name Sh’daar.

The central core of Omega T-0.876gy and Omega Centauri Tee-prime were in fact one and the same, the same star-swarm in two epochs, separated by just less than a billion years. The ancient version teemed with life, with inhabited worlds and with the incomprehensibly vast structures of a highly advanced and utterly alien technology; the modern version was uninhabited, its worlds silent and empty, the polyspecific civilization it once had held long vanished.

Why? What had happened to them?

The Sh’daar weren’t discussing it, obviously. In fact, they’d long seemed distinctly nervous about the entire topic, and lately all communication with the Sh’daar had ceased.

It was distinctly possible that the Sh’daar were on the point of renewing the war, and that, Koenig thought, could be very, very bad news indeed for all of Humankind.

He turned from the viewall display. “Marcus?”

“Sir?”

“Get me time with Konstantin. The sooner the better.”

“Yes, sir.”

The problem, Koenig thought, demanded more-than-human consideration.

Chapter Three

9 November 2424

Sh’daar Node

Texaghu Resch System,

210 Light Years from Sol

0105 hours, TFT

Red Mike fell through emptiness, accelerating gently toward the blurred haze of distorted light now only 10,000 kilometers ahead. At his current velocity, he would reach the maw in another fifteen minutes.

“Deep Peek, Peleliu,” a voice whispered within his awareness. “You are on course and clear for departure.”

“Copy,” Red Mike replied, using a tightly packaged, low-powered, and coded burst transmission. “Further communications suspended until mission return. Deep Peek out.”

His ship was a black lump of nanomatrix artfully shaped to look like a meteoroid, a small chunk of nickel-iron massing just thirty kilograms. Red Mike was an artificial intelligence, a complex set of interlocking software downloaded from the far larger AI on board the Marine assault ship Peleliu. His name was taken from U.S. Marine history, from Lt. Colonel Merritt A. “Red Mike” Edson, the commander of the 1st Raider Battalion in World War II. A patch of the rock’s outer surface a few centimeters square provided his sole data feed from the universe outside. He was tumbling slowly, so he could see his objective only intermittently for a few seconds at a time.

The maw was growing larger, more defined. Red Mike was not capable of emotion as humans understood the word, but he was as focused, as aware as any human combat pilot entering a dangerous flight zone under enemy observation. Just how good were the Sh’daar servants watching the gate, and could they see him from the other side?

Properly known as the Sh’daar Node or as the TRGA, for the Texaghu Resch gravitational anomaly, the maw was the product of an unimaginably advanced technic civilization, an artificial construct located just 210 light years from Sol at a star called Texaghu Resch. A mass equivalent to that of Earth’s sun had somehow been crushed down into a cylinder twelve kilometers long and one wide, rotating about its long axis at close to the speed of light.

Centuries earlier, the mathematical physicist Frank Tipler had described theoretical devices—black holes stretched into spaghetti-thin strands and set spinning at billions of rotations per second—that became known as Tipler machines. Their rotation, Tipler postulated, would open closed, timelike curves through spacetime, allowing access across vast distances of space … and through time as well.

Ultimately, a flaw was discovered in the concept; a Tipler machine would have to have infinite length to function as a shortcut across space or time. The Sh’daar, however, appeared to have found a slightly different approach. The movement of that much mass dragging on the fabric of spacetime opened paths inside the rotating cylinder. Twenty years ago, Admiral Koenig had taken Carrier Battlegroup 18 through the Sh’daar Node at Texaghu Resch and emerged … somewhere—somewhen—else.

At first, Koenig’s tactical group had assumed they’d jumped some sixteen thousand light years, to the heart of a globular star cluster called Omega Centauri. Only later did they discover the truth: that they’d jumped to that cluster in the remote past, when it was still the core of a small galaxy just outside the spiral arms of the Milky Way.

The TRGA/Sh’daar Node was much more than a kind of super-high-tech galactic transport system.

It was also a time machine.

For Red Mike, the thought of traveling across tens of thousands of light years and hundreds of millions of years of time in a single swift leap was not at all daunting. Both distances were mere sets of spacetime coordinates reflecting the knowledge that the universe was both far larger and far more complex than cosmologists had thought before the Einstein revolution. Tipler machines and the TRGA cylinder both were derived ultimately from the Van Stockum-Lanczos solutions to the equations of General Relativity, and therefore could claim Einstein as their father.

But Red Mike was concerned, in a coldly calculating AI sort of way, about whether or not Sh’daar technology would be able to pick him out from among the molecules of nano-embedded nickel-iron encasing him. The microcircuitry within which his consciousness resided took up less volume than a human brain and resided among the shielding atoms, woven through and among them within the nanomatrix, rather than inside a hollow within the core. Both ends of the TRGA cylinder attracted matter—dust, gas, and small bits of meteoric rubble—and drew them in and through constantly, sending them through the lumen of the cylinder in gravitational currents running both ways, in and out. The planners of Operation Deep Peek were counting on the Sh’daar watchers on the far side of the gate to assume that Red Mike was just another chunk of interstellar rubble.

To pull it off, Red Mike would have to power down to almost nothing, cutting back to the point where he was radiating heat at just a few degrees above absolute zero. He could accomplish this by dropping into power-saving mode, his conscious awareness slowed to a rate so sluggish by human standards that, for him, the minutes flickered past like seconds.

An instant before entering the maw, the encircling sphere of stars warped and puckered, the infalling light wildly distorted by the sharply bending fabric of space. His passage through the rotating cylinder was a blurred instant … and then he emerged far indeed from Texaghu Resch, a place where stars blazed around him as if from a solid wall, where only scattered and isolated patches of black, empty space peeped through the dazzling mass of closely packed suns.

Red Mike’s inbound trajectory had been carefully adjusted to match that of CBG-18 twenty years before … which should mean that he’d emerged deep within the central core of the Omega Centauri galaxy, and at T-0.876gy, almost 900 million years in the past. However, according to the Van Stockum-Lanczos solutions, different paths through the distorted spacetime vortex within the rotating cylinder would translate to different paths through both space and time; it was distinctly possible that Red Mike had emerged off-target, somewhere and somewhen else.

Confirming his exact spacetime coordinates was vital.

It would also be extremely difficult.

Executive Office, USNA

Columbus, District of Columbia

United States of North America

1124 hours, TFT

It was the next morning before President Koenig’s request could be processed and time secured on the Tsiolkovsky Array. Konstantin worked on a twenty-four-hour schedule, but there was always a backlog of high-priority requests. Geneva had been attempting, in fact, to designate Konstantin as a Confederation asset, but so far the USNA had managed to block the move, and individual governments within the Confederation could still consult the technological oracle on a first-come-first-served basis.

At the designated time, Koenig settled into his office chair, placed the neuronet contacts exposed on the palm of his hand against the chair’s contact plate, and thoughtclicked a connection through to Tsiolkovsky.

Located on the far side of the moon from Earth, the crater Tsiolkovsky was a somewhat irregular 180-kilometer depression with an off-center central peak. Named for the Russian physicist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the feature was one of the very few dark-floored maria features visible on the moon’s far side, its central peak looking like an island within a circular, black lake.

Buried deep within the central peak was a man-made cavern housing the Tsiolkovsky Array, originally the control center for a farside lunar radio telescope, but now the site of a long-running experiment in artificial hyperintelligence.

Konstantin was a fifth-generation digitally programmed and enhanced artificial intelligence, a machine mind running within a vast network of Digital Sentience DS-8940 computers. What made Konstantin unique was that humans had not programmed him; he was an AIP.

During the first half of the twenty-first century—possibly as early as 2020, though definitions were fuzzy and the records from four centuries earlier were frustratingly inexact—computers with human levels of intelligence had made their first appearance, machines with the equivalent of around 1014 neural connections. According to the records, those early human-equivalent systems and networks weren’t conscious—at least the software engineers involved were fairly certain that they weren’t—but under the relentless, driving whip of Moore’s Law, computer power had continued to double and redouble, until by the middle of the century such markers as numbers of neural connections or raw processor speed simply were no longer relevant. By 2084, a computer had written a complete operating system for a new generation of information processors—the first AIPs, or artificial-intelligence-programmed machines. One early AIP—an IBM-Lenovo Mk. 1 Brilliant e-Mind—had been instrumental in designing the first Earth-to-Synchorbit space elevator, in the early 2100s.

Within another century, computer programs and operating systems were routinely written by computers, which were designing ever more brilliant and innovative systems. Nowadays, most computers possessed something on the order of 1017 neural connections; a typical ship network might boast 1019, while Konstantin was rumored to possess about 1024.

But … just exactly what did it mean to say that a computer was 10 billion—1010—times more powerful than the human brain? It wasn’t a matter of speed; computers had been faster than humans at basic arithmetic since ENIAC in the late 1940s, and had been more complex, at least in terms of the numbers of interneural connections, since the 2020s.

And even now, experts engaged in acrimonious debate over whether Konstantin or any of his electronic kin were even conscious in the same way as were humans. They acted as if they were … and when asked directly they claimed to be so. But if modern AIs had been programmed to act as if they were self-aware, how would humans even know?