Star Carrier 6: Deep Time (15 page)

“I will remind you once more of your basic operation parameters. We need to know what’s on the other side of that Triggah, some idea of what’s waiting for us over there. We need to know if the Glothr are leading us into a trap, or are genuine in their offer of high-level negotiations with a new and apparently high-ranking Sh’daar species.

“Your orders state that you are to follow the alien vessel through to wherever it takes you. You will survey the space on the other side and get the data back through the Triggah to the rest of the fleet. Given what we know about other Triggahs, it’s unlikely that the Glothr homeworld will be very close to the Triggah on the other side. As senior officer, Captain Lewis, you will be in overall command, and will decide how best to proceed once you’re over there. I suggest that you leave one watchship close to the Triggah, and have the other two with most of the fighters continue on with the alien ship to its final destination.

“Record everything, avoid conflict if at all possible, and use the fighter squadron to transmit data back through the Triggah to
America
. We will evaluate your report, and, depending on what you find over there, the rest of the task force will then come through.

“If you find yourself under attack, your orders are to E and E, make your way back through the Triggah, and return to us here.

“This remains a volunteers-only operation. If any of you is having second or third thoughts, now, in front of the Triggah, now’s the time to declare yourselves out. We’ve asked you and your watchships to be our vanguard into the unknown precisely because WPS-100s are highly maneuverable and relatively unthreatening—at least to the uninitiated. So try to avoid a fight if you can, but you are officially weapons-free if you are forced to defend yourselves. The single most important objective for this patrol is to gather data . . . and get that data back here at all costs.

“Okay . . . that’s all I have to say. Upon reception of this transmission, you may proceed with your mission. Good luck, all of you.”

And Gray’s face winked off.

The pompous little bastard, delivering speeches and aping his betters.

Dahlquist was strongly considering backing out of the mission, had been considering that move ever since their new orders had come through a week ago. The memory of Gray’s temper tantrum in his dayroom last week still burned—
burned
—and Dahlquist found himself detesting the pervy little Prim more than ever.

Well, he would get his own back, soon enough. Unfortunately, both Dahlquists, Terrance and Fred, were going to be on the wrong side of the TRGA . . . he commanding the
Concord
, and Fred in one of the Black Demon Starblades.

But the more Dahlquist thought about it, the better this looked. While the Prim was pontificating, Fred had reported from the
America
that Reid Symington had agreed, that he had things covered, and that he should be able to get the vid Dahlquist wanted. And it would be perfect if
both
Dahlquists were God-knew-where on the far side of the TRGA someplace else, some
when
else when the peek show went down. If Symington screwed up, he would take the fall . . . and it would just be his word against theirs that they’d put him up to it. He’d rather have Gray take the fall, though.

And when they got back from the other side, Symington should have a nicely packaged file ready for Dahlquist’s review.

And fucking Sandy Gray would get the comeuppance he deserved.

Dahlquist wouldn’t jeopardize this mission. He would sit on the goods until they got back to Earth.

But when they did, he
would
prove that Gray wasn’t fit material for the officer corps, wasn’t fit to wear admiral’s stars, wasn’t fit for command.

The pervy bastard.

VFA-96, The Black Demons

TRGA

M44, the Beehive Cluster

577 Light Years from Earth

1725 hours, TFT

“Launch fighters!”

Accelerated by the spin gravity of the turning hab modules, the twelve Starblades of VFA-96 dropped into emptiness. Seconds later, they emerged from the depths of the shadow cast by the star carrier’s huge shield cap forward. Lieutenant Don Gregory engaged his fighter’s drive and slipped into formation with Demons One, Six, Seven, and Nine, already drifting toward the blunt shape of Charlie One, adrift in hazy, golden light.

“Demon Four,” he announced. “Clear of the ship.”

The alien vessel was a monster, nearly as long as the
America
and much, much bulkier. Where the USNA star carrier was a five-hundred-meter-wide saucer balanced on a slender spine like an old-fashioned parasol, Charlie One was an elongated, gray-green ovoid, blunt-nosed and -tailed, flattened slightly, and with flutings and grooves and sponsons that made it hard to describe or even remember details of its shape. It had a distinctly organic feel to it, as though it had been grown rather than constructed. It must have out-massed
America
by hundreds of thousands of tons, and that plump shape housed powers and potentials that humans could only guess at.

It was hanging in space, inactive, motionless relative to the immense shape ten kilometers ahead.

Gregory had been trying not to think about
that
. Not yet.

The artifact known as a TRGA was all but lost in a thick golden haze of illumination, with individual streamers shaped by gravity, by intense electromagnetic forces, and by the twisting of spacetime itself. More than twelve kilometers long and about a kilometer wide, it was a hollow tube rotating about its long axis at very close to the speed of light.

In the distance, three other shapes were gently closing the range, the three High Guard vessels:
Pax
,
Concord
, and
Open Sky
.

“Welcome to the party,” a voice said—Captain Lewis, of the
Pax
.

“Thank you, sir,” Mackey replied for the squadron. “Where do you want us?”

“Tucked in tight,” Lewis replied. “With us. Just don’t get too close. Remember that thing’s temporal field.”

The three watchships were closing in behind the alien. Each was closer to the fighters in size than they were to the alien’s bulk. A WPS-100 cutter was just ninety meters long—a tenth the length of Charlie One—and massed twelve hundred tons. Instead of the forward shield cap of larger warships like
America
, its water stores were housed in an egg-shaped bow tank pierced by the bore of a single high-energy particle-beam weapon. She carried a crew of eight officers and thirty-five enlisted personnel.

Her principle operational strength lay in her maneuverability. Watchships were designed to close with an asteroid that might be coming in from any direction and at high velocity, on a course that threatened Earth or another inhabited body. Her particle beam weapon, her “pee-beep,” in naval slang, could vaporize a large enough chunk of the asteroid’s mass to create a jet of expanding plasma, in effect creating a rocket burst to nudge the boulder onto a new and nonthreatening vector. With both excellent maneuverability and a sharp sting, the WPS-series ships were affectionately nicknamed “wasps.”

The question was whether they would be able to stand up to whatever was waiting for the squadron on the other side of the TRGA.

The three wasps, then, edged closer to the far larger alien, but they carefully maintained a distance of a half kilometer. The time-warping fields employed by the Glothr ship still weren’t well understood, and it wouldn’t do for the cutter, its crew, and its AI all to experience the next few minutes as a second or two.

At the same time, the USNA vessels would have to track close astern of Charlie One in order to match its vector through the TRGA exactly.

The alien craft began moving forward, accelerating slowly.

“Okay, Demons,” Commander Mackey said over the squadron channel. “You heard the gentleman. Keep tucked in tight.”

The twelve night-black Starblades edged closer to the alien until they vanished into the shadow cast by the far more massive vessel, minnows in the wake of a whale.

As specified by the mission orders, Gregory turned full control of his fighter over to his AI. They were threading the needle here, passing into a tunnel just less than a kilometer wide, and the slightest mistake in vector could send ship and pilot into the deadly gold-gray blur of the tunnel’s whirling mass.

Ahead, a haze of golden light expanded out on all sides of the black silhouette of the alien vessel. Then the edge of the rotating cylinder itself appeared, blurred and indistinct, and Gregory felt an uncomfortable tug in his gut. His fighter shuddered, its drive singularity struggling to adjust to the changing tides of the local gravitometric matrix. He needed just enough power to keep his Starblade moving ahead, but his AI was having trouble adjusting to the shifting fields.

Into the tube’s interior now. The rotating cylinder was just under a kilometer across . . . plenty of room for a fighter, but an uncomfortably snug fit for something as big as the Glothr vessel ahead. Gregory could only imagine what would happen if a capital ship accidentally brushed against that blur of ultra-dense, rotating wall. The mass of a
star
was packed into that surface . . . and the tricky part was that they couldn’t just fly straight down the middle. The exact destination of a TRGA passage was different depending on the precise path you flew down the tube; the path was defined by how far from the centerline you entered the tube—how close to the rotating wall—and how that distance changed as you proceeded down the tube’s length. Evidently, the difference between one path across spacetime and another could be defined by a shift of as little as fifty meters one way or another.

Again, not too bad for a ten-meter fighter, but navigating these things would be tough for something as large as Charlie One or, worse, a star carrier like
America
.

Several TRGAs had been probed in the past two decades, ever since
America
had traversed one to reach the N’gai Cloud in Deep Time, in the remote past. Something like a dozen scout and exploration vessels had passed through three different known TRGAs, including the original one out at Texaghu Resch, 112 light years from Sol. Half of those probes had never returned.

After that, the powers-that-were had begun using AIs and remote probes. The results were no better . . . and perhaps worse.

The Glothr ship was accelerating.

Gregory’s Starblade AI matched the maneuver, shifting attitude slightly to match a slight change in course as well as speed. They were moving back toward the cylinder’s centerline, now, and accelerating to nearly five kilometers per second.

And then they were out, bursting free and into empty space.

Involuntarily, Gregory gasped. . . .

Chapter Thirteen

5 August, 2425

Admiral’s Quarters

USNA Star Carrier
America

M44, the Beehive Cluster

2215 hours, TFT

“Do you think they made it, Trev?”

They lay together in bed, naked, reveling in the afterglow and the warmth of their embrace. With no word yet from the ships sent through the TRGA hours before, Gray had relinquished the flag bridge to Cameron, a junior officer on his staff, with orders to call him the instant anything,
anything
appeared to be happening in or around the alien artifact. The ship’s AI, of course, would keep him in the loop and wake him if necessary, but Gray preferred having a human on the command deck to make immediate and critical decisions. AIs were good,
very
good, but Gray had never been entirely certain that their priorities in any given decision-making tree were his.

He’d had dinner alone, in his quarters; Laurie had arrived not long after, asking if she could stay. He’d considered turning her away. It had been a long watch and a high-stress one, taking the task force in close to the TRGA and sending the little flotilla of fighters and wasps off into the unknown, and he was exhausted.

Besides, the incident with the electronic ping in the officers’ mess that morning had him edgy and on guard. He was well aware of the shipboard gossip about him and Laurie . . . and that filename he’d glimpsed—“Admiral’s Girlfriend”—was highly suggestive.

But as he’d looked down into Laurie’s expectant eyes, he’d taken her into his arms and invited her in.

“Well,” he said after a long moment’s thought, “we didn’t detect any energy release from the TRGA’s interior. And the battlespace drone following them showed empty space on the other side. So . . . yeah. I think they got through. We won’t know what was waiting for them, though, until they send back a courier.”

The drone had only gone as far as the end of the rotating cylinder, close enough to look along the line of sight toward where the flotilla was traveling. The view it had transmitted back had been curiously empty—black space with a
very
few stars scattered here and there.
America
’s astrogation department was of the opinion that the TRGA path led to a region out on the thin, ragged edge of the galaxy, out toward the Rim.

It emphatically did not look like the N’gai Cloud Gray remembered from twenty years ago: jam-packed with nearby suns and laced through and through with dense nebulae.

As always, the waiting to hear something definitive was the hardest part of this job.

She cuddled closer.

“Laurie?”

“Mm?”

“We need to talk. . . .”

She drew back, looking into his face. “Uh-oh.
That
sounds ominous.”

“Not really. It’s not meant to be.”

“What, then?”

“I’m concerned about the rumors.”

“About what? Us?”

He nodded. “It looks bad, an admiral sleeping with a commander. That’s a five-level jump.”

“That’s your Prim past talking, you know. Monogie prudery.” His face must have shown the brief stab of pain, because she hugged him again. “I’m sorry, Trev. I didn’t mean that to hurt.”

“I know.” He thought for a moment. “You know, it took me a long time to get over Angela. I was nearly hospitalized at one point—PTED.”

“Post Traumatic Embitterment Syndrome? Nasty.”

He’d told her about Angela, about her stroke and brain damage. How she had left, and he’d spent his entire naval career trying to forget her . . . or at least to lose the pain.

“I’m better now,” he told her. “And most of that is due to you.”

“No, it’s due to
you
. You’re the one who faced the demons and bulled your way past them. A lot of people never do. They’re afraid to . . . or else they don’t want to let go of the pain.”

“Well, I still owe you a lot. And besides . . . I think I love you.”

There. He’d said it. He’d long felt deep affection for Laurie, and lust as well, of course. She was superb recreation, fun to be with, and did the most toe-curlingly exquisite things with him in bed. But he’d avoided the word
love
for as long as he’d been with her. It sounded maudlin and trite, even to him, but after Angela he’d felt like he would never be able to pair-bond with anyone, to
love
anyone, ever again.

Laurie was a huge part of why he was still functioning today.

“Love?” she said. “Don’t say that, Trev.”

“Why not? It’s true.”

“That’s your monogie conscience again.”

“Stop throwing that in my face.”

“I’m sorry, Trev, but it’s
true
. You know it is. And, for the record, no one on this ship gives a fuck who you’re banging. If anything, they’re cheering you on. I know for a fact that a half dozen girls in Admin and in the Weapons Department would take you to bed, singly or in groups, any time you want.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“I’m not. It’s true. Even the skipper has the hots for you.”

“Bullshit.” The thought of Sara Gutierrez as a romantic possibility was . . . unsettling.

“Truth. And you know what? I think you ought to give some of them a shot.
That
would prove you’ve broken the old monogie stereotype once and for fucking all!”

“
Not
if it’s prejudicial to good order and discipline.”

The phrase was word for word out of Navy regs, and defined the often vague no-man’s land between what was allowed in the way of private life, and what crossed the line.

Laurie was right, though, he knew. No one
really
cared about personal relationships, not even the Navy.

And since he’d begun enjoying Laurie’s company, Gray had been careful to avoid even the appearance of favoritism toward her. In public, in front of other ship’s personnel, he was precise, formal, and even a bit gruff with her—and he knew she understood. But as rumors about “the Admiral’s girlfriend” had spread, he knew the relationship was edging into that gray area.

“Well,” she said at last, “
I
think that sleeping with a bunch of us will prove to all that you’re not a monogie any longer.” She sat up, eyes narrowed. “Or are you thinking of breaking off our relationship?”

“I . . . the idea had occurred to me,” he admitted. “Look, I adore you, Laurie. I love our time together. I love
you
.” Before she could protest his use of the word again, he pushed on. “And there’s another way.”

“What?”

“We could get married.”

“Damn it, Trev! What makes you think I’d want
that
?”

Her response startled him. “Well . . . I mean . . .”

“In case you hadn’t noticed, I am
not
a monogie. You do know I have other relationships, right?”

Gray nodded. He knew she was seeing a fighter pilot in one of the squadrons. And there was someone on the AI deck she was fond of. What was his name? Gray couldn’t remember now.

He’d tried not to think about that, though. Laurie was right. He did still have some pretty strong monogie thinking habits. It was damned tough to shake off stuff that had been shaping his attitudes and his emotions since he was a kid.

Gray knew that most people thought of sex as something casual and friendly—not a big deal at all. But he hadn’t been able to embrace that knowledge on a gut level. After twenty-five years, he was still monogamous. And he saw—he
felt
—no reason to change.

No one cared who he might be sleeping with.

No one except
him . . .

“Anyway,” Laurie continued, “there’s another issue. Religion.”

“I don’t think that’s an issue.”

“Of course it is. I’m AAC, remember? That’s a sure-fire career killer. You know that. I’ve been stuck at the rank of commander for nine years, now, passed over by the promotion board again and again. You don’t want that stigma, believe me.”

“The White Covenant—”

“ . . . is a lot of noise, mostly static. You can’t stop people from thinking.
Especially
about religion.”

Again, Gray had to admit that she was right. The Ancient Alien Creationists were a minor sect numbering perhaps 20 million people who believed that nonhuman intelligence had tinkered with the genetics of the
Homo erectus
populating parts of Africa a half million years ago and given rise to modern humans. There were other beliefs mixed in as well—aliens had built the Giza pyramids and Baalbek, had raised the now drowned megalithic walls and towers of Yonaguni and Okinoshima and Dwaraka, had created mysterious sites and structures from Pumapunku to lost Atlantis, and been responsible in large part for most of Humankind’s myths and religions. These beings—wise, ancient, and technologically powerful—were the
stargods
.

Almost three hundred years ago the Earth Confederation had adopted the White Covenant, a reaction to the savage religious wars of the twenty-first century. Essentially, it said you could believe whatever you pleased, but it was against international law to try to convert others to that belief by argument, by war, or by an appeal to fear—such as hell. The Covenant had not been intended as an attack against religion, and yet—ultimately—it had had that effect. Even discussing religion was considered . . . rude, a bit barbaric, something that polite and cultured people simply did not do.

“Your religion isn’t supposed to matter, you know,” he told her. “They’re not even supposed to ask!”

“If your church affiliation is mentioned in your public profile,” she said, “it’s known. If you walk in through the front door of a church, electronics check your profile, log you, and . . . it’s known. If you formally join a church, the information goes into the Global Net . . . and it’s known. Damn it, they know just about everything nowadays, don’t they?”

“Well, I’m not sure who you mean by ‘they,’ but, yeah. Privacy’s pretty much a thing of the past, unless you’re a grubby old Prim puttering out in the tidal swamps. I guess I can see how individual bureaucrats with a grudge against religion might make things hard for believers . . . but nearly everything nowadays is monitored by AIs, and they don’t give a shit.”

“So they say.”

“Look, hon, if you feel you’re being discriminated against because of your religion, there are channels—ways you can protest—so you can set the record straight.”

She shrugged. “It’s not worth the time and money. It’s not worth jumping through the bureaucrats’ hoops. Anyway, I’m concerned about
you
at the moment, not me.”

He smiled. “Hell, I’ve already been promoted to admiral. My career’s gone light years farther than I would ever have thought possible when I signed up. I don’t think there’s a lot that
they
could do to me now.”

“But if you were crazy enough to marry me, Trev—and I was nuts enough to agree—everyone would assume you were AAC just because you’d be publically linked with me. How would that look? Trevor ‘Sandy’ Gray, hero of Earth’s long fight against the evil Sh’daar, worships aliens.”

“I thought you guys didn’t worship them?”

She laughed. “We don’t. Or . . . maybe some do. I don’t know.” She looked away. “I don’t know much of anything anymore.”

“Crisis of faith?”

“Don’t make fun of me.”

“I’m sorry. I wasn’t, not really.”

“I just . . . lately, I’m not sure what I believe. From what we’ve seen out here, what we’ve learned—and looking at the incredible technology of the Rosetters—it’s like, okay, there are stargods, but they don’t care a thing for humans, probably don’t even know we’re here. It’s kind of hard to relate to a deity like that, y’know?”

“Yeah. Someone once said, ‘if there are any gods whose chief concern is man, they cannot be very important gods.’ ”

“Who said that?”

He pulled up the quote in his in-head. “Arthur Clarke. A twentieth-century writer and futurist.”

“Huh. Do you believe that? About the gods, I mean.”

Gray considered the possibilities. “I think I have enough worries with godlike aliens who
are
interested in Earth, one way or another.”

She laughed. “The Sh’daar aren’t ‘godlike.’ ”

“Well, they’ll sure do until someone else comes along. And . . . hey. The Glothr aren’t all that far short of godhood, are they? At least when you look at their technology.”

“ ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ Wasn’t that Clarke, too?”

“Yeah.”

She lay back down, and they cuddled together in silence for a time. Eventually, she said, “So . . . do you want me out of your life?”

“Hell no!”

“Mmm. I’m glad.”

He slid his hand down her back and along the curve of her buttocks, drawing her closer. “The hell with all of them,” he said.

AI Suite

USNA Star Carrier
America

577 Light Years from Earth

2215 hours, TFT

Reid Symington palmed a control pad and opened a series of relays. This was the delicate part . . . insinuating himself into the electronic array without tipping off the AI behind it.

Symington was an expert in advanced artificial intelligence. One of the handful of civilian specialists on board the star carrier, he was what was known in computer circles as an e-keeper . . . meaning a kind of zookeeper for the bizarre collection of electronic minds that populated the networks of modern Navy vessels. Although there were Navy rates dealing with computers, electronic networks, and AI systems, civilian experts like Symington were brought in for their extensive training and the depth of their experience. Symington had taught AI systems at Carnegie-Mellon, and worked for ten years at the Tsiolkovsky Array on the lunar far side, among other things.

He knew artificial intelligence—and that meant he knew how to get around AI-moderated security safeguards.

Almost there. This was devilishly fussy work.

One of the pilots, Lieutenant Dahlquist, had come to him a few days before with an unusual request: record in-head vids of Admiral Gray interacting with his girlfriend, the ship’s Weapons Officer, Commander Laurie Taggart, and pass them on to Dahlquist.