Singularity: Star Carrier: Book Three (12 page)

And it could bend light around itself in a way that gave it near invisibility.

Lieutenant Christopher Schiere was an old hand with the Sneaky Peaks—named for their CO, Commander James Peak.
Sneak and peek
was their squadron motto, and they were an effective means of exploring ahead of the battlegroup to see what might be lurking up ahead.

Schiere’s last mission had been a high-velocity flyby of the manufactory orbiting Alphekka, and it had nearly been his last. Attacked by dozens of Turusch fighters, all he’d been able to do was tuck himself into a tight little invisible ball and hurtle on into emptiness. A day later, he’d risked decelerating and sending out a questing signal, a rescue beacon. One of
America
’s SAR tugs had picked him up forty hours later.

It had been a near thing. Finding an all-but-invisible sliver of a spacecraft many AUs from the battlespace was far worse than looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack.
Needles
you could see. . . .

Despite the near miss, Schiere had put up his hand when the skipper had asked for a volunteer. “What, are you nuts, Chris?” Peak had asked him.

“It’s that damned horse, Skipper,” Schiere had replied. “I need to get back on.”

His post-mission psych check had flagged him as marginal, a downgrudge that normally would have taken him off of active flight status for at least six weeks, followed by re-evaluation. Schiere had fought the listing. Dr. Fifer and his damned psychtechs were
not
going to ground him.

Amazingly, the psych department had relented—no doubt, as Schiere had told his buddies in the squadron, because they
knew
recon flight officers were nuts. Three days locked up inside a Shadowstar cockpit had been rough, yeah, and the thought that he might drift for eternity through the emptiness had preyed on him.

But he’d
made
it. They’d
found
him. He was good to go!

And he wanted to go, to go
now
, before he lost his nerve.

“
America
CIC, this is Shadow Probe One, handing off from PriFly and ready for acceleration. Shifting to sperm mode.”

“Copy that, Shadow Probe One,” a new voice said. “You are clear to accelerate at your discretion.”

“Roger,
America
,” he replied. “Bye-bye!”

He accelerated at fifty thousand gravities, and
America
vanished astern so swiftly it might have been whisked out of the sky.

And Christopher Schiere once again was as utterly alone as it was possible for a person to be.

The objective lay some eighty light minutes from
America
’s emergence point. At fifty thousand gravities, Schiere’s Shadowstar was pushing 99.9 percent of
c
in ten minutes, and the universe around him had grown strange.

CIC

TC/USNA CVS
America

Outer System, Texaghu Resch System

1225 hours, TFT

“Shadow Probe One is away, Admiral,” the tactical officer reported. “Time to objective is ninety-three minutes, our reckoning.”

“Thank you, Commander,” Koenig told him. He noted the time. An hour and a half for the probe to reach the mysterious object, plus eighty minutes for the returning comm signal to reach the
America
—they could expect to receive a transmission in another 173 minutes, at around 1517 hours, or so.

Assuming the pilot didn’t encounter hostiles.

He opened a channel. “Commander Peak? Koenig. Who’s the VQ-7 pilot who just launched?”

“Lieutenant Christopher Schiere, sir.”

He knew the name. “He was our advance scout at Alphekka, wasn’t he?”

“Yes, sir. He’s a brave man.”

“Indeed. Thank you.”

Koenig wanted to know who it was who was putting his life on the line for the battlegroup. He deserved to be remembered.

CBG-18 was still engaged in the tedious process of forming up around
America
. All fifty-seven of the other capital ships had reported in after Emergence, and all were now showing on
America
’s tactical displays.

And so far, not a single enemy target had appeared—no bases, no fighters, no capital ships, no sensor drones, no heat or energy signatures on or around any of the planets, nothing except for that enigmatic and utterly impossible object orbiting the local sun.

It was amusing, Koenig thought. The small army of artificial intelligences operating within
America
’s electronic network had first identified the thing, now called TRGA, for the Texaghu Resch gravitational anomaly, but not one had been able to hazard a guess at what it might be. Dr. Karen Schuman, a civilian physicist in
America
’s astrogation department, had been the one to make the connection with Frank Tipler. AIs tended to have extremely focused and somewhat narrow ways of looking at the universe, and would have had no reason to be aware of Tipler’s long-forgotten theory.

Schuman, however, had a packrat mind and a fascination for the history of physics. Koenig had once spent a pleasant evening in the officers mess discussing Einstein over dinner with the woman.

Of course, traveling through time was still impossible. Stephen Hawking and others had proven that centuries ago. Unless the Tipler cylinder was infinite in length, there would be no time travel.

There might well, however, be
space
travel, without a temporal component. That much mass rotating that quickly, according to the physicists and the AIs in Schuman’s department, might well warp space in unusual ways, opening up a passage—the technical term was a wormhole—allowing instantaneous travel across unimaginably vast distances. That was still strictly theoretical, however. They would need Schiere’s report from an up-close examination of the artifact before they could refine their initial guesses.

Koenig considered ordering the fleet to begin moving in closer to the star, then decided against it.

There were simply too many unknowns to allow him to risk the fleet that way.

They would wait.

Shadow Probe 1

Approaching Texaghu Resch System

1357 hours, TFT

For Chris Schiere, only about twenty-five minutes had passed since he’d boosted clear of the
America
. His seventy-three-minute drift between his flight’s acceleration and deceleration phases had been carried out at 99.7 percent of
c
, and time dilation had squeezed the subjective passage of that time down to just over five and a half minutes. He was now fifty kilometers from his objective and approaching it at a relative velocity of two hundred meters per second.

Close. Very close. And still no sign that the thing was occupied or guarded.

He stared ahead into bright-lit distance, adjusted the incoming levels of radiation, and stared again. He’d never been this close to a star before—fifteen million kilometers, a tenth of an AU, or roughly one quarter of the distance from Sol to Mercury. At this distance, the expanse of the local star covered over five degrees of the sky ahead—ten times wider than Sol appeared from Earth. Its brilliance would have blinded him instantly had the Shadowstar’s AI not been stopping down the optical sensors. With the light reduced so much that he could look into it with his naked eyes, it was difficult to make out detail.

But the AI had bracketed the TRGA object, marking it for him.

And he was beginning to see it more clearly.

From
America
, ten AUs out, the artifact had appeared to be tiny, almost lost against the vastly enlarged backdrop of Texaghu Resch’s photosphere, but that had been an illusion of distance and magnification. Here, the artifact seemed far larger in relationship to the star, and had drifted off to one side. It was still damned tough to make out the details, though. It looked like nothing so much as a long, slender knot made out of golden, glowing fuzz.

“This is Lieutenant Schiere, Shadow Probe One,” he said, opening a laser-com channel back to the fleet. “Beginning reconnaissance report.”

It would take eighty minutes for his words to reach them, but it was important that he begin transmitting immediately, sending them not only the data now being acquired by his ship’s sensors, but his words, thoughts, and impressions from moment to moment . . . just in case.

“The near-
c
passage was completed without incident. I’m currently fifteen million kilometers from the outer regions of the stellar photosphere—what passes for the star’s visible surface. It’s hot. My hull is cycling most of the incident radiation around me, of course, but if it wasn’t for that, I’d be basking at about six hundred degrees right now. My nanomatrix is still operating within acceptable tolerances, and I’m missing most of the rough stuff. If you decide to bring the fleet in this close, you’ll have to do so with shields up full.

“I’m now forty-nine point seven kilometers from the target. Its mass is equivalent to that of a G-class star—call it one point nine-eight-eight times ten to the thirty-third grams. Intense gravitational folding in the object’s immediate vicinity. I’d call the thing a black hole, except that it obviously is not. It’s between twelve and thirteen kilometers long, roughly one kilometer wide or a little less. Still very hard to get precise measurements, because the volume of space immediately surrounding the object is extremely twisted. Light from the star is falling into that twisted space and emerging at odd angles, from constantly changing directions. Magnetic flux, too. It’s like the thing is tying knots in space.

“Judging from the way the thing is twisting the local magnetic field, I’d have to say it is spinning. Can’t even guess at how many rotations per second, though. It would have to be billions. Can something rotate at the speed of light?

“I’m accelerating slightly, moving closer. I’ve got the hull invisibility switched on. Still no sign there’s anyone home. I’m going to arm three of my VR-5s and release them at intervals. That’ll give us a closer look . . . and might get their attention if there’s anyone in there.”

The VR-5 was a remote-scan probe, a mass of sensory, transmission, and drive components imbedded within a nanomatrix that could shape itself as a slender needle a meter long for launch, or collapse into a black sphere twenty centimeters in diameter for reconnaissance. Schiere spent a moment linked with the Shadowstar’s AI, programming the probes.

“Okay,” he said. “We’re good to go. Launching Probe One in three . . . two . . . one . . .
launch
!”

The first ebon needle slid from the CP-240’s belly and vanished into space.

“And Probe Two in three . . . two . . . one . . .
launch
. And Number Three in three . . . two . . . one . . .
launch
.”

Within his in-head display, he watched as the twist of clotted space around the objective grew rapidly larger.

“Okay . . . you should be seeing the imagery from the probes, now. My AI is linking it back on the primary data channel. I’m still not entirely sure what I’m seeing. The area of twisted space appears to extend out from the central object by a kilometer or two. The object itself . . . looks like a dark gray cylinder buried inside a thick fog of hazy light. I can’t get radar or lidar reflections back, nothing coherent, anyway. The warp effect around the object is scattering everything I send.

“First probe is starting to enter the warped area. I . . . wait a sec . . . wait a sec . . .”

The VR-5 was penetrating the clotted light close to the near end of the object, and the shape inside was growing clear.

“My God!” Schiere said. “It’s
hollow
!”

The image transmitted from the first probe suddenly seemed to leap forward, as though something had reached out, snatched the probe, and jerked it into that rapidly spinning maw.

Schiere and his recording instrumentation caught just a glimpse down a long, black tunnel—to a blaze of light at the far end.

And then the probe was gone.

“
America
, Probe One,” Shield said. “It looks like my first drone got caught in an intense field of focused gravity and was pulled into the cylinder. Contact with the drone is lost.

“But if I had to guess, I’d say we’re looking at a star gate.”

Chapter Seven

29 June 2405

CIC

TC/USNA CVS
America

Outer System, Texaghu Resch System

112 light years from Earth

1518 hours, TFT

T
echnically, the objective appeared to be a stable artificial wormhole.

In fiction, such things had been called star gates, jump gates, jump portals, and a dozen other names. In physics, they were termed Lorentzian wormholes, Schwarzchilde wormholes, or Einstein-Rosen bridges, but all of the names meant the same thing: a means of warping local space so tightly that a tunnel or doorway was opened between two points in spacetime quite possibly
very
far removed from each other. Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen had first postulated the idea of the Einstein-Rosen bridge as early as 1935, though the structure they’d proposed mathematically would have collapsed. Other physicists, much later, had proposed theoretical constructs called wormholes. The idea was that a worm crawling over the curved surface of an apple might take a long time to reach the other side; the trip would be shortened if he bored through the middle. The concept depended on three spatial dimensions being curved through a fourth.

For four centuries, wormholes had remain strictly theoretical, a possible outgrowth of certain equations within Einstein’s field equations. Whether they existed in nature was still unknown. Whether some advanced technical civilization could create wormholes, and keep them open, permitting shortcuts not through but
past
enormous stretches of space was likewise unknown . . . or it had been until now. There could be no thought that the TRGA object was natural; someone had built the thing.

But to do so required a degree of control over the laws of physics that was nothing short of godlike.

Koenig had frozen the image transmitted from Schiere’s remote drone at the eye-blink instant when the solid sheet of brilliant light had appeared on the other side. To human perceptions, the glimpse had been so brief that all that could be perceived was white light; at first, the people studying the images on board
America
had assumed that the probe was looking all the way through the hollow tube at the glaring surface of Texaghu Resch beyond.

With the image frozen and cleaned up by the AIs, however, the solid wall of white had been resolved. It wasn’t a picture of the surface of one star, but of many tens of thousands together. Beyond the wormhole, stars were swarming within a dense-packed cluster where individual suns were separated from one another, on average, by only about a tenth of a light year.

According to
America
’s astrogation department, there were only two possibilities. Either the wormhole opened within the heart of a globular star cluster . . . or it opened within the core of a fair-sized galaxy, either the Milky Way or some other, distant, galaxy. Which was it? The answer was important, and the stargazers were hard at work on the problem now.

And Koenig now had to make some important strategic decisions.

“America,”
he said, addressing the primary artificial intelligence that ran the ship.

“Yes, Admiral.”

“Link through to the other ships in the battlegroup. Inform all ship captains and their staffs that we will hold a strategic virtual conference in . . . make it twenty minutes.”

“Very well, Admiral.”

Koenig continued studying the image transmitted by the recon probe. Tipler’s original theory had suggested that doorways between widely separated regions of space as well as of time might be opened around a dense, rotating cylinder. A ship would have accessed those doorways by following pathways just above the cylinder’s surface; he’d said nothing about what happened if the cylinder was
hollow
, however. That wall of stars clearly existed a long way away from this region of space—tens of thousands of light years at the very least, millions or even hundreds of millions of light years at worst. The question was whether it also was reaching through time, either into the past or into the remote future.

“America,”
he said.

“Yes, Admiral.”

“Pass the word to all ships. We’re going to move closer to the TRGA.”

“Very well, Admiral.”

Shadow Probe 1

TRGA

Texaghu Resch System

1540 hours, TFT

By now, Schiere thought, his running commentary and the accompanying images had reached the battlegroup, and were causing all sorts of consternation. Within another hour and a half, he should have heard a response—stay put or come home. It would take that long for the transmission to reach him.

He hoped it would be a recall. For the past one hundred minutes, he’d been cautiously moving about the artifact, using VR-5 probes to get in close while keeping himself well outside the zone where the thing’s deadly gravitational grip might tear his ship to pieces—or send him somewhere else. Two of his probes had been destroyed within that dangerous region close to the cylinder; another had vanished down the cylinder’s maw. He’d launched two more VR-5s and maneuvered them in carefully, until they were stationed off the opening of the tube.

Through these proxies he continued watching, but there wasn’t a lot more he could do from here. He’d measured what there was to measure and transmitted the data back to
America
. Now all he could do was wait.

Movement
 . . .

One of his drones picked it up, a flash of movement emerging from the kilometer-wide opening of the rotating cylinder. He ordered the drone to pivot and track the object, to follow it . . . but too late. The drone was gone, vaporized. Before he could connect with the other drone, it too had been wiped from the sky.

By this time, Schiere realized that he was under attack, and that the situation was
not
good. His remote eyes had been swatted out of space, and he still hadn’t had a good look at the attacker.

Attackers
. There were more than one.

A
lot
more . . .

Virtuality

CBG-18

Outer System, Texaghu Resch System

1548 hours, TFT

Koenig had returned to his office for the staff meeting, and technically, that’s where he—or at least his body—was now. Within his mind, however, he was in an artificial space generated by the fleet net, the interlinked network of communications and information systems spread throughout all fifty-eight capital ships of the battlegroup. “I suggest,” Admiral Liu Zhu of the Chinese Hegemony light assault carrier
Zheng He
, was saying, “that we not enter the local star’s gravity well to such depth. Better that we remain in the outer system, against the possibility of ambush.”

“With respect, Admiral Liu,” Captain Harrison said, “we haven’t seen any sign of enemy ships in this system.
What
ambush?”

“As has been pointed out, the . . . the artifact, TRGA, may well be a means of creating a wormhole passage between two widely separated regions of space. The other end may open at a Sh’daar base. If so, large numbers of enemy ships could come through from unseen bases on the other side. We would have no way of knowing that we were in fact badly outnumbered.”

Koenig listened impassively to the debate as it unfolded. Within the minds of the ship captains and staff officers linked into the simulation, they were seated around a large conference table, within a room digitally re-created from one in the Hexagon basement in Columbus, where the USNA Joint Chiefs held their briefing sessions. In deference to the other Confederation members, the USNA flag and the 3-D portrait of American Senate president Carolyn Saunders had been edited. Now it was the Terran Confederation flag and a portrait of Regis DuPont.

Politics
 . . .

Admiral Liu, of course, wasn’t interested in Confederation politics other than in how they affected the Chinese Hegemony. Koenig didn’t know him personally, but he appeared to be a hardheaded sort with a keen eye for the long-term advantage.

And Koenig had to admit that he had a good point.

As if to underscore the unknowns, one bulkhead of the virtual conference room showed vid transmitted from the CP-240 reconnaissance probe—the enigmatic cylinder suspended in a golden glow of twisted light.

“We don’t have to close with the Triggah,” Colonel Murcheson pointed out, using the newly arisen slang for the TRGA. Murcheson was the commander of the USNA Marine contingent on board the
Nassau
, a Marine expeditionary force numbering some nine hundred infantry and a close-support group of SG-86 Rattlesnake fighters. “Our recon units can camp out close to the thing, while we take up a station that will let us pace it within fighter range. If anything does come through, we’d be able to catch them while they’re bottlenecked.”

“What is this term, ‘bottlenecked’?” one of Liu’s aides asked.

“He means any enemy ships coming through the TRGA would have to do so one at a time,” Koenig replied. “They’d be bunched up when they emerged, and relatively easy to pick off.”

“We could bloody well nail ’em one at a time,” Harrison said.

“This might also be our chance to steal a march on the Sh’daar,” Captain Jossel of the railgun cruiser
Kinkaid
said. “Can we assume that the Triggah is a Sh’daar artifact? That it leads to an important Sh’daar system . . . perhaps even their homeworld? For sixty years, now, we’ve been on the defensive. This is our chance to take the war to them for a change!”

“Right,” Captain Grunmeyer added. He was the CO of the heavy missile carrier
Ma’at Mons
. “Kick them where it hurts!”

“Except that if we traverse that tube,” Kapitän zur Weltraum Roesller of the Pan-European battleship
Frederick der Grosse
said, pointing at the image of the cylinder on the bulkhead, “it will be us who are bottlenecked at the far end.”

“If the other end of that thing does open in the Sh’daar home system,” Captain Blaine of the cruiser
Independence
pointed out, “it’s going to be protected. Heavy monitors, maybe. Or fortresses of some sort.”

“Good points,” Koenig put in. “But Captain Jossel is right. The chance to strike back at the Sh’daar is why we’re out here. If the TRGA offers us a shortcut to get at them, we’re going to take it.”

“Jesus,” Captain Samantha Adams of the cruiser
Bainbridge
said with considerable feeling, “We’re going to jump down a rabbit hole with no idea of what’s at the bottom?”

“The dangers—” Liu began.

“Can be met and matched,” Koenig said, interrupting. “We will, of course, use AI probes to investigate the cylinder, as well as any other technology we can bring to bear on the problem. We will
not
go through blind.”

“Probes will alert the enemy on the other side, Admiral,” Captain Buchanan said.

“We’ll address that when we get there,” Koenig said. “I want each of you to put your tactical teams to work on this . . . how to put our fleet through that wormhole with a good chance of breaking through on the other side. I want to see contingency plans assuming a large Turusch fleet on the other side . . . and for the possibility that they have the far end covered by some sort of fort or heavy orbital base. We
must
assume they’ll have that end well protected.

“Once we reach the artifact—that will be in another nine hours, give or take—we will assemble the fleet a hundred thousand kilometers from the opening and begin sending sneak-probes through.”

“Unless we get there and find the enemy has already emerged,” Captain Charles Whitlow of the star carrier
United States of North America
said. “I suggest we send in fighters ahead of us, just in case.”

“Sounds good,” Koenig said. He’d been about to suggest the same thing. “I suggest one Starhawk squadron apiece from the
United States
, the
Lincoln
, and the
America
.

“We’ll take it one step at a time. Okay . . . questions? Comments? Very well, ladies and gentlemen. Dismissed.”

And the figures gathered around the virtual table began winking out.

VFA-44

On board TC/USNA CVS
America