Star Carrier 6: Deep Time (13 page)

“I think we need to figure out what he meant by the ‘galaxy transforming into biological existential reality,’ ” Taylor said.

“And I think we need to get a fleet out to the Beehive cluster and through the TRGA to Joe’s home space and time,” Koenig said. “Let’s talk about that.”

Brookings nodded. “Who do you have in mind, Mr. President?”

“As it happens, Admiral Armitage has already begun assembling a fleet: Task Force One, with the carrier
America
as flag . . .”

Chapter Eleven

22 July, 2425

USNA Star Carrier
America

Naval Base

Quito Synchorbital

1345 hours, TFT

“I’d be happier, Mr. President,” Admiral Gray said, “if we knew just who built the TRGA cylinders . . . and why.”

“Nervous that they might be Sh’daar? Or at least controlled by them?”

“Frankly, yes. And following a Sh’daar ship through a Sh’daar node without knowing what’s waiting for us on the other side strikes me as just a smidge beyond total insanity.”

Gray was seated in his office on board the
America
, linked in-head with the president of the USNA. Three weeks had passed since the capture of Charlie One. He’d received his orders five days ago, and he was still feeling more than a little daunted by them.

No one knew for sure who had built the TRGA cylinders originally. For a time, the assumption had been that they were Sh’daar constructs—and certainly the Sh’daar used them throughout their far-flung territories across both time and space. There were numerous TRGA cylinders within the N’gai Cloud of 876 million years ago, and a pathway provided by the original Texaghu Resch Gravitational Anomaly had given the
America
battlegroup access to the Sh’daar capital—for lack of a better term—two decades before.

But assumptions are not facts, and some researchers felt that the technology necessary to create TRGA cylinders—enormous inside-out Tipler machines, in fact—was well beyond the technological capabilities demonstrated by any of the known Sh’daar client species.

Of course, perhaps that was why the Sh’daar were trying to forbid certain technological advances and research. They had the necessary technologies themselves, but didn’t want anyone else ever to challenge them.

The Glothr appeared to be the most technically advanced of any Sh’daar client race yet encountered. They’d taken robotics to an extremely advanced degree, and their trick with slowing down time for the
Concord
while it was inside their vessel was impressive.

If the Glothr could warp time, even if just on a small scale, it could give them a staggering advantage in combat. Of course, they hadn’t used it in the battle that had captured the Glothr ship, except as a means of immobilizing the
Concord
. But was that because they couldn’t, or because they’d chosen not to?

No one knew except the Glothr themselves, and they weren’t exactly being forthcoming about it. They seemed to be pretending that they didn’t understand the question.

That was just one of the many issues going through Gray’s mind as he glanced at the AI-generated representation of TF-1 glowing above his workstation console. Task Force One was the flotilla newly completed around the star carrier
America
, consisting so far of thirty-two capital warships. The Marine carrier transport
Marne
and the battleships
New York, Northern California
, and
Illinois
had just cast off from the SupraQuito dockyards and were marked in space now by the pulsing wink of their navigation strobes. Four battlecruisers, four heavy cruisers, five light cruisers; and a number of smaller vessels—destroyers and frigates—were adrift in synchorbit as well, along with the heavy mass-driver bombardment vessel
Farragut
. The
Concord
and two other High Guard ships,
Pax
and
Open Sky
, had been recalled back to USNA naval service to fill out the roster. The fleet numbered as many warships as the North American government had been able to assemble . . . a risk, obviously, given the fears in some quarters that the Confederation was not yet truly beaten.

So far as Gray was concerned, the Confederation was pretty much out of the game, at least as an organized participant. Korosi’s holdouts in France, Turkey, and North India had been rounded up, Ilse Roettgen was again in control of the Earth Confederation Senate in Geneva, and a week ago she’d signed the Pax Deux, formally ending all hostilities between the Confederation and the United States of North America. The document also reaffirmed the basic unity of Humankind, and pledged assistance in the ongoing struggle against “all interstellar threats to terrestrial independence.”

In response to a direct request by President Koenig, several Confederation vessels had joined the fleet as well—the cruisers
Churchill
,
Valiant
, and
Hessen
, the French heavy battlecruiser
Victoire
, and the North Indian
Ranvir.

Gray wasn’t sure if they were being included in TF-1 as additional firepower or to guarantee Geneva’s continued cooperation at home. Outside of the Confederation ship muster, there also were two powerful new Japanese warships,
Yamato
and
Honshu
, both technically battlecruisers, plus a Theocracy frigate, the
Najim al Zafir
.

The more, Gray thought, the merrier . . . though how well this mismatched congeries of vessels would respond to his command remained to be seen. There’d been no time to practice or to do much at all in the way of fleet coordination, save exchanging AI addresses and frequencies.

There were promises of even more ships—in particular a Chinese flotilla, as well as more Indian and German vessels—but those ships all were still out-system and would have to catch up with Task Force One later, if at all.

The incorporation of both Pan-European and North Indian ships in the expeditionary force presented at least the illusion that Humankind was now at last operating on a united front against the Sh’daar. It also, better than anything else, proved that the civil war against the Confederation was over.

What it
didn’t
prove, in Gray’s estimation, was that low-level hostilities with the Confederation were over for good. Korosi’s last stand had been, in effect, a holdout by forces unwilling to lay down their arms. Bad feelings and grudges ran deep on both sides of the divide, and it would be a long time yet before the Earth’s governments would be able to hammer out a single government—or even just a single way of seeing things—that might be acceptable to all.

But all of that was Koenig’s concern. Gray was faced with quite a different set of problems.

“You know, Mr. President,” he said, “if we don’t come back, it’s going to leave a terrible hole in the naval inventory.”

“I know,” Koenig told him. “That’s why you’d damned well better bring them back. Starships are expensive.”

“I’ll do my best. But I think you’re a little more confident of my abilities than I am.”

“I’m aware of that . . .
Admiral
.”

Koenig had stressed Gray’s rank, and Gray bit off an angry response. It remained a sore point between them, Gray’s promotion to full admiral over any number of other flag-rank officers by presidential executive order. Koenig had claimed the promotion was provisional, and if a later Senate confirmation hearing didn’t confirm it, he would go back to being a two-star rear admiral or less.

And that would be just fine with Gray.

Koenig claimed to have signed the order because Gray needed the extra mass of those four stars to boss the commanding officers of half a dozen other naval services—Chinese, Islamic Theocracy, and now their erstwhile enemies from the Confederation. From Gray’s perspective, it just meant he had to work harder than ever to justify the rank to his own personnel . . . and created a lot of jealousy among all the other naval officers in the service. He didn’t
deserve
four stars, and he was still angry at Koenig for saddling him with them.

How much of Dahlquist’s defiance, he wondered, was due to his own too-quick rise through the ranks?

But, then, Koenig
was
the president, and the commander-in-chief of all USNA military forces. Gray was too much of a soldier to ignore orders.

Still, why couldn’t the man confine his commanding-in-chiefing to someone else?

Gray swallowed the anger. Now wasn’t the time or the place. Better to change the subject.

“I’m surprised, Mr. President, that the Glothr agreed to having this horde drop into their backyard. How did you manage that?”

“They weren’t pleased about it, but you’re going to have one thing going for you. Everyone in TF-1 isn’t going in at once.”

“I saw that in the orders,” Gray replied. “Just a squadron of fighters off of the
America
. . . and the three Guard cutters.”

“Right. Twelve fighters and three small WPS-100s won’t be particularly alarming to an entire world. And once they’ve ascertained that everything is clear, they send a message drone back and have the rest of you come through—
if
that seems prudent to you.”

“Meaning if they don’t see a fleet of ten thousand time-bending battlecruisers over there waiting to ambush us, we’re good to go. Got it.”

What was not said was what would happen to those ships and crews if Gray decided not to follow them.

“Based on the fighter squadron’s report,” Koenig continued, “you’ll decide what goes in next—the rest of the fleet, or just a few ships. You could even stagger your arrival over a period of time so you can count on reinforcements.”

“Which is fine, unless the Glothr get nervous when more and more of our warships keep popping in on them,” Gray said. “At some point, they might decide enough is enough and open fire. I’m also not sure dividing my force in the face of a superior possible enemy force will be a real good idea.”

“That will be your tactical decision, of course.”

“Mm. Thank you so much, Mr. President. Don’t you want to come along, sir? Revisit your glory days in the N’gai Cloud?”

“I have
every
confidence in your ability to carry this off, Admiral.”

“I’m flattered. Terrified, but flattered.” He considered possibilities for a moment. “You know, Mr. President, we can’t be certain that the other end of the TRGA link will be the Glothr home system. It might be the N’gai Cloud, where we visited the Sh’daar twenty years ago. It might be some other place in the galaxy at time now, rather than in the past. We just don’t know.”

“True.”

“Worst case—the Glothr could lead us someplace well away from their home system. Maybe a place with a Sh’daar fleet waiting for us, because they know something about faster-than-light communication and we don’t.”

“My, you
do
have a nasty, suspicious mind, don’t you?”

“It’s what I would try to do if the situation was reversed. They’re not going to want us coming anywhere near their homeworld. You do know that, right?”

“It depends on the payoff, Sandy,” Koenig said, using Gray’s old squadron handle. “If they can get us to surrender without a shot, to knuckle under to the Sh’daar demands, they’ll do it. Maybe they just want peace. That’ll be up to you and Dr. Rand.”

Dr. Lawrence Rand had been appointed ambassador-at-large by the USNA State Department. He and his staff, which included a team of xenosophontologists from Crisium, would be traveling on board the Glothr vessel inside a courier packet specially modified as a human-life-support hab module. They hoped to establish permanent peaceful relations with the Glothr at the very least, and possibly the larger Sh’daar Collective as well.

“And if they can squash us like a bug, they’ll do that instead. The mission briefing said the Glothr were . . . what? A billion years ahead of us?”

“Our Glothr friend was trying indirectly to make us think so,” Koenig said. “I don’t believe it for a minute, though.”

“Oh? Why not?”

“I might believe a million years.
Maybe
. But a species that’s been around for a billion years . . . hell, I’d expect them to have evolved into beings of pure light or something, ages ago. Wouldn’t you?”

“Transcendence,” Gray said. “Yeah. But that’s the point of the Sh’daar, isn’t it? They’re doing everything they can
not
to transcend to a higher order.”

“They want to block
technological
transcendence. But how do you stop evolution itself?”

“By taking control of your own genetics, of course. We’re doing that ourselves now.”
Transhumans
 . . .

“And that’s one of the forbidden technologies.”

“Ah. I see what you mean.” A new thought occurred to Gray. “Huh. There’s an idea. If the Glothr are from the N’gai Cloud, they might have started out 876 million years ago, but be counting their presence at time now in this galaxy. That would mean their existence spans
almost
a billion years.”

“Maybe. I’d wondered about that, actually . . . but mostly I think our jellyfish friend was bluffing. They’ve lied about several things.”

“Such as?”

“I’m not convinced that they’re Sh’daar.”

“
What?
”

Gray felt Koenig’s shrug. “They don’t appear to have Seeds.”

That
was a surprise.

The various time-now species encountered as members of the Sh’daar Collective included species startlingly different from one another, but they did seem to have one thing in common. Certain members of each species possessed tiny, BB-sized pellets somewhere within their bodies. Known as Sh’daar Seeds, they weren’t well understood as yet, but they seemed to be spy devices of a sort, storing up sights and sounds from the being’s immediate vicinity and, when a Sh’daar ship was close enough, transmitting that data in a tightly compressed burst. Not all Sh’daar individuals had them by any means, but most who had dealings with humans did, and the assumption was that the Seeds were one way of gathering intelligence about humans and their technology.

A new alien species only recently contacted, the monstrous Gr’doch, had
not
carried the telltale Seeds . . . and it had turned out that they were, in fact, enemies of the Sh’daar.

But the Glothr claimed to be part of the Collective—spokescreatures for the Sh’daar, in fact.

“It seems inconceivable that beings sent to actually negotiate with the Confederation wouldn’t be carrying Seeds,” Gray said. “Did they ask our guests about the Seeds out at Crisium?”