Stargods Page 3

  But now Humankind faced the possibility that they would be going through their own Schjaa Hok very soon.

  “Did you hear Walker’s latest?” Koenig asked.

  “I doubt it. I try to avoid politics.”

  “Don’t blame you. But you’d better pay attention to this.”

  Koenig used his cerebral implant to switch on a viewall; a living room wall transparency looking out over woods and the serene meander of the river shimmered and was replaced by a towering, four-meter-high projection—the face of President James R. Walker addressing Congress just two days ago on the subject of . . .

  Yeah. The Singularity.

  “These United States of North America,” he was saying, “have the sacred duty, the obligation to renew our commitment to the future . . . and to the future of our children! A majority, a large majority of scientists believe that talk of this so-called Technological Singularity is premature, that it either won’t happen for thousands of years more, or that it will never happen.

  “Well, that’s very comforting, but I can go them one better. Anyone with half a brain can see that the Singularity has already happened . . . and it’s called . . . the Internet!”

  Astonishingly, this pronouncement was met with a roar of applause from the Congressional floor.

  Walker basked in the glow of approval. “I mean . . .” he continued after a moment, “the Internet checks off all the boxes, right? The Internet changed human life in ways we could never have imagined. The Internet changed the way we look at ourselves, not as lonely individuals, but as parts of an enormous, enormous network. The Internet allowed us for the first time to connect with vast sources of information, changing forever the way we work and play.

  “But this expectation that the Singularity has yet to occur—worse, that it could happen any day now—is destructive to this great nation’s productivity! After all, if the Singularity is coming, why work to drain and recover our sunken cities? Why work to rebuild after the recent war? If we all are about to be caught up in some great, transcendent experience, why do anything at all? No! I tell you that this nonsense must stop now!”

  Koenig froze the recording, catching Walker in a florid-faced, floor-to-ceiling sneer.

  “The guy really believes all that, huh?” Gray asked.

  “Apparently so. He’s been pushing Congress to accept his Recovery Act, so there’s a political reason behind it. But yeah. He really does seem to believe that.”

  “But why?”

  “Why does he believe it?”

  “Why are so many people so committed to a set of beliefs that they refuse even to consider the possibility that they’re wrong?”

  “Programming,” Marta said.

  Koenig chuckled. “Partly. But I think more than that, they’re afraid of the economy collapsing, people rioting in the streets, the breakdown of society—”

  “Just like what happened to the Sh’daar?”

  “No, I think this administration is worried about what will happen before the Singularity. The effects on business and the financial markets, especially.”

  “Seems a mite shortsighted,” Gray said, frowning.

  “It’s happened before,” Koenig replied. “A few hundred years ago, scientists from a dozen different disciplines were warning us of the effects of large-scale climate change. Humans had been belching greenhouse gases into the atmosphere since the start of the Industrial Revolution, average planetary temperatures were rising, the ice caps were melting—”

  “Sure, we’ve heard all of that before.”

  “Point is, they missed their opportunity to do something about it, mostly because doing something would stifle the economy. We lost New Orleans in . . . when was it?”

  “New Orleans was officially abandoned in 2075,” Marta said. “But much of it had been continually underwater for at least a decade before that.”

  “Thank you, Marta. The people pulling the financial strings—the Big Twelve—they all would lose money if a major effort to curb the effects of climate change was put in place.”

  Big Twelve was slang for the major megacorporate drivers of the USNA economy—petroleum companies, the major banks, agroconglomerates, and the largest pharmaceutical companies, mostly.

  “Well, they all felt they were looking out for Number One.”

  “Yeah. And because of that, we began losing cities. Miami. Washington, D.C., Boston—”

  “Manhattan,” Gray put in.

  “Exactly. Most of our coastal cities gone . . . or praying that the floodgates hold when the next storm surge hits.”

  “So you think Walker is tied to the Big Twelve?”

  “Has to be. You do not become President without some powerful money behind you.”

  “Were you?”

  “In part,” Koenig admitted, and Gray admired the candor. “The Nationalist Party wanted to be free of Pan-Euro politics. They brought me in as a war hero who would rally the people. The Big Twelve, those that weren’t completely controlled by Geneva, they backed me.” He shook his head. “I’m not proud of that.”

  “You should be. We did need our independence. We’re better off now not tied to Geneva’s apron strings.”

  “Maybe. But because we were busy fighting each other, we damned near lost the Sh’daar War.”

  “Ah . . . yes. Hindsight. Wonderful thing, isn’t it, sir?”

  Koenig shrugged. “I’m not sure there was anything we could have done differently.” He paused, then let the enormous head on the wall do a brief fast-forward before letting it continue its monologue.

  “In order to maintain our focus on the here-and-now,” Walker said, “and on the recovery of this great nation, I have today signed a presidential order directing all USNA naval forces to return to near-Earth space, to avoid any and all contact with alien forces, and most particularly, to avoid any contact with the Sh’daar, both those operating in this epoch and those in the remote past. Discussing the so-called Technological Singularity with them can only distract us from the clear task at hand.”

  “What the hell?” Gray said, suddenly leaning forward.

  “It gets worse.” Koenig paused the image again, catching Walker’s face in a weirdly funny pursed-lips grimace. “But the baseline is . . . he’s cancelling the Sh’daar Archive Expedition.”

  “But why? That’s pure research! It’s not political at all!”

  “He thinks it is, and whatever he thinks is political had better serve his best interests, so far as he’s concerned.” Koenig sounded disgusted, but he obviously was making an effort not to say what he really thought. Open criticism of a sitting President by a former President simply wasn’t done.

  Admiral Gray had no such restraints, though. He’d been in on the planning for the Sh’daar Archive project. There’d been talk of putting him in command of the America battlegroup again and sending them off to track down the Sh’daar migration, 800 million years in the past and tens of thousands of light years distant.

  The goal of the expedition, as Gray understood it, was to catch up with the Sh’daar evacuation fleet and talk with its personnel about just what had transpired at their Schjaa Hok. Images of that event had been passed mentally to some humans, including Gray, but few hard facts remained. How long had the transformation taken? How had the ur-Sh’daar culture acted in protecting itself? What had worked and what had not? Somewhere within that migration there must be records of the Sh’daar Transcendence, an archive of some sort that would be of incredible value to a Humankind facing the same disruptive event.

  The project had been suggested by none other than Konstantin. According to Koenig, the super-AI had come to him with the idea rather than approaching President Walker, whose beliefs about the Technological Singularity were well-known.

  And that raised some extremely serious concerns about both the chain of command and government oversight . . . not to mention the impropriety of a former President second-guessing the man now sitting in the Oval Office.

  “So,�
�� Gray said, not sure where this was leading. “The Sh’daar expedition is cancelled?”

  “Officially, yes,” Koenig told him. “But Konstantin feels this is far too important to be tossed aside by a political whim.”

  “Konstantin . . .” Gray said, closing his eyes.

  “Hello, Admiral Gray,” a familiar voice said inside his head. “It appears that you and I will be working together again.”

  “Huh. Does that mean I get court-martialed and busted again?”

  Obeying Konstantin’s directions several years before had resulted in him taking his carrier to Tabby’s Star against orders.

  “That worked out okay, did it not?” Konstantin said. “You did regain both your lost rank and your credibility.”

  “Maybe. But not my dignity. . . .”

  Gray, thanks to his low-tech Prim origins, had never fully trusted this embodiment of ultra high-tech. Konstantin seemed to have no qualms about reaching in and meddling, carrying out programs and even conspiracies if he thought the end justified the means. Theoretically, humans were still in the loop, guiding him. A kind of high-tech priesthood of computer scientists served Konstantin in the deep regolith of Tsiolkovsky Crater on the moon, and if the powerful SAI ever got out of hand, they would pull the plug.

  Again, though: in theory. Gray wondered if that was even possible now.

  He had to admit, however, that Konstantin’s meddling had for the most part worked out quite well. He’d ended the civil war with the Confederation by infecting the Pan-Euro networks with a memegineering virus designed to make the European population question the morality of that war. He’d guided the creation of peaceful relations with two highly advanced civilizations, the Satorai at Tabby’s Star, and the Denebans, as well as with the Sh’daar.

  And he’d been instrumental in defeating the strange group Consciousness known as the Rosette Aliens. All in all, a remarkable track record.

  But Gray didn’t like the idea that Konstantin almost routinely acted on his own, without any input at all from humans.

  Especially when Gray ended up taking almost all the risk.

  “What Konstantin has proposed,” Koenig said carefully, “is that we dispatch the America to the outskirts of Omega Centauri to observe the hypernova effects there. We know the effects were partially blocked, but we need to know how much . . . and we want to be sure the Consciousness has departed.”

  “Understood.”

  “You will then use the TRGA at the Omega Cluster to transit back to the N’gai Cloud, catch up with the Sh’daar migration, and learn what you can about their Singularity.”

  “In direct violation of a presidential directive,” Gray pointed out.

  “Well . . . yes. If it helps, you’ll have the full backing of the USNA Navy and the Joint Chiefs.” He held up a hand level across his eyebrows. “They’re fed up to here with Walker’s grandstanding. I don’t think it will come down to another court-martial.” So . . . it was back to Omega Centauri.

  The Rosette Consciousness had been an existential threat for Humankind, a hyperintelligent Mind that had come through from somewhere else by way of the six black holes whirling about a common center of gravity deep within the central regions of the globular star cluster known as Omega Centauri. Astronomers had recognized since the late twentieth century that Omega Centauri was not a normal globular cluster like its lesser siblings, but the remnant core of a dwarf galaxy devoured by the far vaster Milky Way spiral some 800 million years in the past.

  A few individual stars—Kapteyn’s Star, just 12.7 light years from Earth, was one—had been identified by their spectral fingerprints and their off-orbits through the galaxy as refugees from the cannibalized dwarf. Astrophysicists had connected the dots and determined that the ancient N’gai Cloud, home to the enigmatic civilization dubbed the ur-Sh’daar, had once been what eventually became Omega Centauri. A sextet of hypergiant blue suns in an artificially created rosette at the center of the N’gai galaxy had ultimately become the six black holes of the later globular cluster’s Rosette. The Consciousness, emerging at the core of Omega Centauri, had established itself within the cluster and seemed to be searching for other minds. For a time, the alien intelligence was believed to be the Transcended ur-Sh’daar. Xenosophontologists now thought that the Consciousness had been something very other, an invader from another universe emerging through a hole within the weakened fabric of spacetime at the Rosette’s gravitational center.

  However, exactly what had actually happened to the Consciousness was still unknown. The Sh’daar had propelled a giant blue sun in the N’gai Cloud 800 million years ago through the circle of hypergiants on that side of the Rosette, so that it emerged on this side as a shotgun blast of raw energy, a hypernova of terrifying proportions. The full force of that stellar explosion had been absorbed, somehow, by a Harvester ship—highly advanced aliens from Deneb with technologies literally magical by human standards.

  That seemed to have gotten the Consciousness’s attention, at least, and it appeared to have withdrawn from human space, vanishing with the Harvester.

  The operative word there was seemed.

  “And if the Consciousness doesn’t let me go through the triggah?”

  “Omega Station reports no sign of the Rosette entity since the hypernova appeared,” Konstantin replied. “You should be okay.”

  “What,” Marta asked, “is a ‘triggah?’”

  “Navy slang,” Gray told her, “so it’s probably not on the Net. Look up ‘TRGA.’”

  “‘Texaghu Resch Gravitational Anomaly?’” she said after a brief moment. “Ah . . . an interstellar transport mechanism. Named for a star with the Agletsch designation of Texaghu Resch close to the location of the first one discovered. . . .”

  “For a long time we called them Sh’daar Nodes,” Koenig told her. “For a while, we were pretty sure that somebody else built the things a long, long time ago, and the Sh’daar were just taking advantage of them . . . just as we do. Now things have come full circle. We’re pretty sure the Sh’daar did build the TRGA network, at least partly to let them infiltrate the Milky Way after they fled from N’gai. But . . . yeah. The short story is, they’re gateways across space and into other times.”

  “They’re big, inside-out Tipler machines,” Gray told her. “You can look up the reference. But that’s how we can cross tens of thousands of light years in one jump.” He frowned. Thinking about the TRGA cylinders had made him think of something else . . . something that could be a huge problem. “Konstantin,” he said, “there’s an issue here. I know that most of the hypernova’s energy, the stuff coming through to the present, was absorbed or blocked somehow by the Denebans . . . right?”

  “Correct.”

  “But a lot of stuff still got through.”

  “In sixteen thousand years,” Konstantin said, “when the wavefront of that event reaches Earth, Omega Centauri may become the brightest object in the planet’s night sky.”

  “Okay . . . so what did get through will have engulfed the Omega TRGA. And 876 million years ago it’ll have taken out Thorne.”

  Thorne was the name of the N’gai TRGA, designated that after Kip Thorne, a brilliant twentieth-century theoretical physicist who’d advanced human understanding of black holes, quantum physics, and the possibility of time travel.

  “Indeed,” Konstantin replied. “You will need to proceed cautiously. We believe the TRGAs will have remained operational. They’re very hard to damage. But you’ll need to check your pathways carefully with drones.”

  “I have to emphasize,” Koenig added, “that we are not ordering you to command this expedition. We’re asking you to volunteer.”

  “And the reason would be . . .”

  “You’ve probably had more experience dealing with the Sh’daar than any other command officer we have,” Koenig said. “And you’ve had extensive experience with the Consciousness. So we’re asking you just in case.”

  “Just in case the Consciousness is still
out there making trouble,” Gray said, nodding. “I understand.”

  Gray was actually flattered that Koenig and Konstantin wanted him leading this expedition, though he refused to reveal that emotion. And to tell the truth, he’d been seriously considering retiring in any case. Flying a desk in Washington, D.C., was simply not the same as skippering a star carrier or running a carrier battlegroup. He was sick of politics, especially since Koenig’s term had run out and the former President had been replaced by Walker. A very real possibility would be forced retirement when he got back . . . retirement and disgrace. It might mean his pension, but he was pretty sure Koenig and Konstantin would have that covered.

  Gray had been in the Navy for twenty-eight years, since 2401. He had little to look forward to at this point, since he increasingly would be considered too old for an active command. There was nothing left but working in the newly reborn Pentagon, possibly shooting for a seat on the Joint Chiefs. . . .

  The idea filled him with unease.

  The thing was, he was only fifty-two years old. With modern nanomedicine and life extension techniques, he could expect another century and a half of active life at least, and by the time he reached the ripe old age of two hundred, Gray was willing to bet that they’d have achieved something that amounted to practical immortality.

  He was not going to spend the rest of eternity—or even a couple of centuries—flying that desk. Lots of people switched careers once they hit fifty or sixty, and could expect to do so several times over their long lives. Why not him?

  He just wished that he knew what other career might hold any interest for him whatsoever.

  He’d figure that out when he got there. But that mentality was all he needed to accept this assignment. If Walker did force him into retirement, it wouldn’t be the end of the world. He’d find something else . . . and he was confident enough to know that whatever the new career was, he would be damned good at it.

  It occurred to him that these orders constituted a kind of coup, undercutting Walker’s clear constitutional authority in a blatant attempt to change the administration’s policy. In fact, taking a star carrier out to Omega Centauri and beyond against the express orders of a presidential directive just might be construed as treason.