Stargods Read online

  The sight was . . . overwhelming. Gray’s breath caught in his throat, and the awe of that moment very nearly jerked him back to the mundane reality of the starship’s bridge.

  But his awareness within this alien vista was expanding as his brain processed more and more of the incoming tsunami of data. He realized with a small shock that he wasn’t seeing his surroundings, not exactly, but he was sensing them, and his brain, confronted with sensations and impressions unlike anything he’d ever experienced before, was struggling to make sense of it all. Flooded by the unknown, his brain was interpreting the data as best it could. Because Gray’s principle sense was sight, that interpretation was as visible images rather than as sounds or touch or something else.

  Gray was aware of stars beyond the bulk of the America, tens of millions of them thronging about him in an opaque wall. America was still deep within the central core of the N’gai Dwarf Galaxy, and the thickly clustered stars formed a glowing shell around them thousands of light years across.

  Astern, the heart of the cluster erupted in a glorious blue and violet glare of radiance, where the black holes of the Sh’daar Rosette, the remnants of exploded supergiant stars, filled space with a throbbing, visible gravitational light. The detail he was seeing was startling. From the heart of the hypernova’s glare came ripples of gravity generated by the ponderous orbiting of six black holes around a common center, a steady churning that filled space like the surge and boom of waves on a stormy sea.

  Gray momentarily was puzzled. Gravity waves, he knew, traveled at the speed of light. How could he be seeing . . .

  But of course. Idiot! He was seeing gravity waves that had set out over two years ago. In fact, as his sensitivity increased, guided by Konstantin’s careful direction, Gray was aware now of more and more of the living fabric enmeshing him, America, the other ships of the squadron, and every star he could see in the heavens around him.

  With that realization, his awareness . . . expanded, moved outward.

  No wonder detecting Sh’daar world-ships was so difficult! At distances of more than a few billions of kilometers, an insignificant fraction of a single light year, the thunderous noise generated by the Rosette, and the echoing reverberations of the hypernova tended to drown out the drive signatures of even the largest vessels.

  But those signals were there, if you could extend yourself far enough, reach deeply enough into the gravitational matrix around you, feel the subtle ripples all but drowned in that pounding, storm-hammered surf.

  Gray reached out . . . and became aware of other minds riding the Godstream with his, several thousand men and women and intelligent machines drawn from the crews of the squadron’s ships, spread out across an expanse of space at once vast and vanishingly insignificant against the grandeur of space around them.

  Godstream. A fitting name, he thought, for a God’s-eye view.

  He’d ridden these waves before, when he and myriad others had spread their hive-mind consciousness across space in order to communicate with the enigmatic and monstrous Mind of the Consciousness. His brain, he realized now, was drawing on those memories to help make sense of what he was experiencing. He realized, too, how very, very much of that experience three years ago he’d forgotten. When he’d uncoupled from that powerful group mind, he’d dwindled, shrinking back to a mere human, losing the vast majority of his remembered impressions and thoughts, a mind far too small to retain the power, the intricate detail, and the Transcendence of Mind.

  Now those memories were flooding back, enhancing his awareness of the depths of the N’gai galaxy. Riding the pulsing ripples of gravity, he found his awareness extending far, far beyond the perimeter defined by human ships and Bright Light modules. Spacetime, he found, possessed a literal fabric, a warp and woof of virtual energy within which gravity waves rippled and within which he could extend his wings and soar. It was as though his physical self was growing, expanding, becoming a titanic node of awareness spreading out through the encircling walls of clustered stars and into space beyond.

  What he sensed out there stunned him, and his physical body somewhere back within the N’gai galactic core gasped. The central core dropped away, a thick haze of light thickly set with suns, a thinner, luminous mist of stars surrounding it. And beyond . . .

  The N’gai Dwarf Galaxy was already in the process of being devoured by a much larger galaxy, a vast and luminous spiral of stars and nebulae—the Milky Way as it had been over 800 million years before Gray’s own time. N’gai was skimming in over the galactic plane at a sharp angle, the outer layers of its dust and gas already in the process of being stripped away by a kind of galactic “atmosphere,” the gas clouds within which the Milky Way lay imbedded. He could see the distinct curve of his home galaxy’s spiral arm, the twists and knots and filaments of dark and dusty nebulae, the faintly red-hued radiance of the central core, the delicate blue haze and the clotted knots of the brighter stars throughout the spiral, the background glow of thronging suns too thickly strewn to see individually.

  The vista, far more detailed and structured than mere light could possibly have revealed, struck him with a dizzying awareness of light and time and gravity and space, a Whole frozen within an instant spanning eons.

  Return, Konstantin’s voice said within that tiny fraction of Mind that was Trevor Gray. Don’t lose yourself.

  Reluctantly, Gray allowed himself to fall back—to be pulled back—into the narrow confines of space immediately surrounding the human fleet, minute sparks of twisted space within the Void.

  We have them.

  As the hive mind of the fleet had stretched out, encompassing more and more space, Konstantin—or perhaps it was the whole of the Mind itself—had been able to separate the faint flicker of gravitational drives from the thundering background noise of mutually orbiting black holes and thronging suns singing their gravitational arias. Gray saw them now, a dozen violet sparks all but lost in the glare of a spacetime filled by, defined by, gravity.

  The group Mind focused in on the nearest of those sparks, their viewpoint zooming in on a massive cylinder all but lost in the darkness. The cylinder, Gray knew without knowing how he knew it, was just over ten thousand kilometers long and a fifth that distance wide, the ends open to space. The cylinder’s rotation created spin gravity across the structure’s inner surface and also held a thin film of atmosphere pressed against the tube’s curved walls, held captive by hundred-kilometer walls around both open ends. On the inner surface, glimpsed through one end, was a landscape, an inside-out habitable world of oceans and mountains and plains, of rivers and desert and forest, of rich greens and russet browns and the white spiraling sweep and splatter of clouds.

  The surface area of the inside of that rotating cylinder, Gray recalled, was well over 60 million square kilometers, as big as all of Eurasia on Earth, from Gibraltar to Kamchatka, from Novaya Zemlya to Sri Lanka. The technology implicit in that structure left Gray awestruck and humbled.

  Beyond one end of the cylinder flickered the brilliant blue-violet spark of a powerful gravity drive, steadily drawing that monster, artificial world forward. A McKendree cylinder this large possessed the staggering mass of a small planet—something on the order of 6 x 1023 kilograms, roughly the same as the mass of Mars—but its velocity, now just over half the speed of light, gave it a relativistic mass that was considerably greater. Viewed up close, the cylinder created a shimmering, three-dimensional gravity wake extending in the shape of a hazy, thinning cone far astern. The structure had the look of a pale blue comet, a bright flickering point of light as the head and a trailing tail 100 million kilometers long, with the cylinder itself all but lost within the coma.

  How, Gray wondered, could that projected point of gravitational energy pull equally on the entire length of a ten-thousand-kilometer-long cylinder? Grav drives worked by putting the projecting craft into free fall, allowing tremendous acceleration without the high-G effects of acceleration. Still, the gravitational field had to be artificiall
y tweaked to encompass the entire vessel or it might be torn apart by the tidal effects.

  How were the Sh’daar inhabitants of that thing enveloping a ten-thousand-kilometer tube in an even gravitational field without ripping the tube apart? It was impossible . . . like purest magic.

  We have their coordinates, Konstantin whispered in his Mind. We can approach them now for a rendezvous.

  Venting Tube 18

  Quito Space Elevator

  Cayambe, Ecuador

  1648 hours, EST

  The solitary aircar threaded its way through canyons and deep, jungle-tangled valleys, maintaining just enough speed to keep aloft on its repulsors without triggering any of the sentry mechanisms along the way. The aircar had been specially outfitted with the latest stealth technologies and was essentially invisible on radar, infrared, and electromagnetic scans. Its external nanoflage repeated the colors and shadowing of its surroundings, making it very nearly invisible at optical wavelengths as well.

  The pilot was Enrique Valdez, though at the moment he couldn’t remember his name. Days before, his in-head circuitry had been infected by nanobots programmed to suppress many of his memories and general cerebral functions, keeping him focused to an inhuman degree on his task. The effect was to reduce him to a kind of biological robot, a robot with only very limited intelligence and a vague self-awareness akin to that of a dream state. All he knew was that his goal was that snowcapped mountain directly to the northwest—specifically the mouth of a vent—and that when he maneuvered his aircar into the entrance of the venting tube, he would remember what he was to do next.

  The mountain was called Cayambe, and its southern slope was dominated by an immense platform extending out from snow-clad rock. Towers, domes, and skyscrapers rose from this platform, and from the center, a needle-slender thread emerged from the buildings and vanished into a deep purple sky. You could get dizzy trying to follow that thread into the zenith, but Valdez didn’t try. The white-and-silver city on the mountainside and the lower reaches of the Quito Space Elevator were, to him, simply a part of the background.

  He certainly was not thinking at the moment about that city’s destruction.

  The valley he was following twisted back and forth but steadily approached the base of the mountain beneath the city of Port Ecuador, Earthside anchor of the Quito Space Elevator. He could see his destination now, a low, stone entryway to a black tunnel entrance.

  A warning signal peeped at Valdez, indicating that he was being painted by radar, but the nanomatrix of his vehicle’s outer skin would absorb most of the incoming signal, giving a reading consistent with a large bird—an Andean condor, perhaps. The entrance to the venting tube was now just ahead. Darkness descended over Valdez like a shroud as he guided his aircar through the stone-lined portal.

  Cayambe was a volcano. Rising almost 5,800 meters above sea level, it was the third-highest peak in Ecuador. The city on its south flank stood at an altitude of 4,690 meters, the highest point in the world crossed by the equator, and the only point on the equator permanently covered in snow.

  There’d been a great deal of argument during the building of the space elevator over whether it was safe to use a volcanic mountain as the Earthside anchor for the structure. The issue was resolved by the Ecuadoran Consortium, a group of business and governmental interests that stood to make hundreds of trillions of dollars if Port Ecuador and the adjoining metropolis of Quito became a major trade center linking Earth with synchorbit. Cayambe had last erupted in March of 1786, some 643 years ago. It was probably dead.

  To protect their investment, however, the governments of the USNA, Pan-Europe, and several other major players had insisted on safeguards. Eighty tunnels had been bored into the lower flanks of the mountain, leading down at shallow angles to a region deep beneath the roots of Cayambe, to La Caldera de Erebus, a basalt chamber twenty kilometers above the top magma plume that had created the peak. Those twenty kilometers of solid rock comprised the plug in the quiescent volcano’s throat; a robotic observatory rested on the floor of the chamber itself, monitoring conditions in the rock deep below. If an incipient eruption was detected, the lowest section of the elevator itself could be severed, allowing the elevator to be moved, while the city would be evacuated.

  Should an eruption occur, that plug would dissolve or be blown clear; the venting stubs existed to redirect the upper surge of magma and hot gas outward and away from the mountain’s base. No one knew for sure if it would work, but the best calculations by the best volcanology SAIs on the planet suggested that it would save Port Ecuador . . . or at least buy time enough to shift the space elevator’s base to Hacienda Tanda, thirty-eight kilometers along the equator to the west, where reserve ground facilities were in place.

  Acting according to the dictates of the nano within his brain, Valdez guided his aircar down the arrow-straight tunnel, dropping off drone relays along his path. When he reached the inner mouth of the tunnel, overlooking the vast basaltic chamber below, he grounded his vehicle.

  The relay drones would keep him linked to his handlers.

  Now all he had to do was wait.

  Chapter Thirteen

  21 April, 2429

  USNA CVS America

  CIC

  N’gai Cluster

  0915 hours, FST

  It had taken some time for Konstantin to find the appropriate channel to contact the enormous McKendree cylinder now hanging in space just ahead of America and her consorts. The aliens apparently did not use radio for regular communication, or laser transmissions, though there was plenty of broadband leakage from various control systems and networks. Konstantin had finally managed to make contact with a robot through its radar ranging circuitry, and after several hours he’d reported to Gray that they were now communicating with the Adjugredudhra.

  Gray remembered them, one of the more advanced species that had made up the Sh’daar Collective. They looked like upright but unsteady pillars perhaps a meter high, radially symmetrical, like eight terrestrial starfish stacked one atop the other. Highly flexible arms emerged from masses of dark tendrils between the pale-yellow starfish shapes; some of those tendrils looked like sucker-tipped manipulatory appendages, while others ended in blood-red marbles—presumably eyes. He found himself looking at one now within an in-head window, as Konstantin opened the channel.

  It regarded him without any emotion that Gray could detect through a number of stalked eyes. He noticed several small, metallic devices were imbedded in the organism’s flesh. Some Adjugredudhra, Gray knew, used advanced nanoprostheses to remake their physical bodies, while others were cybernetic organisms, part machine, part organic. This one, apparently, was pretty much the original model.

  “Ah, Admiral Gray,” the being’s translated voice said in Gray’s head. “It is good to again see you.”

  For Gray, it was very much a matter of one Adjugredudhra looking pretty much like another. “We’ve met before?”

  “Yes. I am called Ghresthrepni,” the being told him. Gray could hear the being’s actual voice in the background, a melodious blend of chirps, trills, and the tinkling of bells. “When last we met, I commanded a vessel called the Ancient Hope,” it continued. “I was selected to receive your communication once more, since I have had dealings with your species before.”

  “It’s good to see you again,” Gray said. He wondered if the odd little being might have been offended by the fact that he hadn’t recognized it, but if it had, it gave no sign.

  Perhaps it found it as difficult to distinguish between individuals of another species as Gray did. It might have learned his name just now from Konstantin.

  Or, possibly not.

  “Why,” Ghresthrepni asked, “have you sought us out?

  And Gray told him.

  Quito Space Elevator

  Port Ecuador

  1034 hours, EST

  Alexander Koenig stepped off the mag-tube pod and onto the terminal platform. Port Ecuador was one of the busiest mag-tube
nodes on the planet, and riding the evacuated tube on magnetic cushions all the way from Columbus to Cayambe had taken just forty minutes. The platform seethed with people, from full-humans to people with organic prostheses or cyberenhancements all the way to outlandish gene mods, some of whom looked very inhuman indeed. There were lots of robots as well, some designed solely for function rather than for a human appearance, and others who would have passed for human except for the ID tags that flashed up within Koenig’s awareness.

  Koenig himself was not exactly as he outwardly appeared. Like Marta yesterday, he was wearing a face, a living mask that made him look physically quite different—forty years younger, with higher cheekbones, thicker eyebrows, and the hint of a beard. His security detail had insisted; too many people knew Koenig’s face . . . including people who had reason to want him dead.

  His Marine bodyguard, Staff Sergeant Hinkley, wearing a civilian jumpsuit and trying very hard—and failing—not to look military, stepped onto the platform behind him. He pointed. “Up-E over that way, sir.”

  “I can read, George.”

  Together, they crossed the open deck, following the guide arrows displayed within their in-heads. The E, the Quito Space Elevator, hung directly overhead, a silvery thread vanishing straight up into the zenith. Koenig felt like a rubbernecking tourist, but it had been years since he’d been up-E to Quito Synchorbital, and he was enjoying the memories.

  The next up-E pod rested in its cradle at the base of the elevator cable as a line of people filed on board. The pods were designed to carry up to 112 people in seats that swiveled to match the current direction of “down,” a concept that would change depending on whether they were accelerating or decelerating. Each pod, a gleaming silver cigar-shape forty meters long and massing twenty-nine tons, rode a superconducting magfield that kept it tucked in close to the elevator cable itself in a frictionless suspension. They moved up or down the cable under magnetic induction.