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Singularity
Ian Douglas
The third book in the epic saga of humankind's war of transcendenceThere is an unseen power in the universe—a terrible force that was dominating the galaxy tens of thousands of years before the warlike Sh'daar were even aware of the existence of Sol and its planets.As humankind approaches the Singularity, when transcendence will be achieved through technology, contact will be made.In the wake of the near destruction of the solar system, the political powers on Earth seek a separate peace with an inscrutable alien life form that no one has ever seen. But Admiral Alexander Koenig, the hero of Alphekka, has gone rogue, launching his fabled battlegroup beyond the boundaries of Human Space against all orders. With Confederation warships in hot pursuit, Koenig is taking the war for humankind’s survival directly to a mysterious omnipotent enemy.
Copyright
HarperVoyager
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager 2012
Copyright © William H. Keith, Jr 2012
William H. Keith, Jr asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
Cover art by Gregory Bridges
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks
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Source ISBN: 9780007485956
Ebook Edition © November 2012 ISBN: 9780007485963
Version: 2017-09-12
For Deb,whose science is about as hard as it comes
INTO THE JAWS OF A SAVAGE GOD
Gray was sliding down a gravity well, as though he were being funneled straight toward the wildly rotating cylinder ahead.
Somehow, he realized, the Sh’daar had compressed a medium-sized star into a hollow cylinder a kilometer across and twenty long. Something didn’t add up. Beings that could create this thing weren’t merely good magicians. They were gods, or the closest thing to gods mere humans could imagine.
Gray’s fighter, falling free, was accelerating, moving faster and faster as the maw of the cylinder yawned ahead, the opening empty and utterly lightless.
Fifty more seconds, at this rate, and he would be drawn inside.
If the Sh’daar possessed such power, they didn’t need to rely on the Turusch or their other subject species.
Why fight this protracted war for almost forty years, when such technology could wipe Humankind out of existence with scarcely a thought?
Table of Contents
Title Page (#u3bf9ffd7-78e3-5a5a-b35c-8dba3b825c13)
Copyright (#uf321b51e-955c-58f5-b1b8-f29df6475ec0)
Dedication (#ue0c7175b-0835-52b9-a113-c497824dfa8e)
Into the Jaws of a Savage God (#ub3697b74-b167-5b62-8075-edddcbf58771)
Prologue (#u9aa7db8b-a0ce-5baa-9b82-f664980c597a)
Chapter One (#u817f192f-2e4e-5b89-975f-de1123feb263)
Chapter Two (#u5267931a-f660-5c4c-91c1-baae9bd18b44)
Chapter Three (#u4e42fc57-c8d2-5775-90c4-617e1775e4c2)
Chapter Four (#uea7f29f3-a855-5f73-b226-536e2685376c)
Chapter Five (#u21448a22-25a1-5052-b774-32265063320b)
Chapter Six (#u2767f0b8-f2b1-521a-b672-f475876d6f50)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
By Ian Douglas (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue
5 April 2405
Ad Astra Confederation Government Complex
Geneva, European Union
1450 hours, local time
It’s not possible to torture a piece of software. Not even an intelligent one.
Not that artificial intelligences possess anything like the civil rights of humans. With no rights to violate, the Internal Affairs interrogators could take the AI apart almost literally line by coded line, searching for hidden files or withheld memories.
The software avatar’s prototype, as its human object was known in the electronic intelligence business, had recorded a sizable amount of his own character, thoughts, and motivation within his AI counterparts. It was always possible that thoughts, memories—even entire histories—had slipped through from the fuzzy logic and holographic analog perceptions of the organic brain to a far simpler silicon-based digital format. This particular prototype was Admiral Alexander Koenig, and he worked closely with his AI personal assistant.
He had, in fact, developed what amounted to an emotional relationship with it, deliberately programming it with the personal characteristics—voice, thought patterns, judgment, the simulacra appearance, and so on—of his lover, Karyn Mendelson, killed during the battle to save Earth’s solar system just over six months earlier.
The primary software resided inside Koenig’s head, within the nanochelated implants in the twisting folds and furrows of the sulci of his brain. It served as his PA, or personal assistant, a kind of electronic secretary that could handle routine calls and virtual meetings, could so perfectly mimic Koenig’s appearance, voice, and mannerisms that callers could not tell whether they were speaking to the human or to the human-mimicking software. However, more than a month before, shortly after the Battle of Alphekka, Rear Admiral Koenig had copied his PA software, uploading it into one of the HAMP-20 Sleipnir-class mail packets carried as auxiliaries on board most of the ships of the fleet. Almost three times faster than the best possible speed for a capital ship under Alcubierre FTL Drive, they were used to carry high-velocity express communications across interstellar distances.
It had been this copied software that had piloted the most recent mail packet from Alphekka back to Earth.
And multiple copies of this copy were running inside the computers of the Naval Department of Internal Affairs, completely isolated from the outside world, electronic iterations that could be taken apart, tested to destruction, electronically shredded and pulled through a metaphorical sieve, in search of possible traces of Koenig’s thoughts.
Karyn Mendelson possessed within her coded matrix a very great deal of both the original Mendelson and of Koenig himself. And it was the Koenig analog in which the Internal Affairs officers were most interested.
“Anything?” one shadowy figure asked the other. They were deep in the nuke-shielded lower levels beneath the ConGov pyramid, perhaps three kilometers down and well out under the placid-mirrored waters of Lake Geneva itself.
“No,” the other said. He gestured vaguely at a wallscreen, which showed a graphic representing progress so far. There’d been very little. “This is going to take a while.”
“What are you trying?”
“Incoming call iterations. It’s cycling through at almost a million per second now.”
The first IA programmer gave a low whistle. “He’s got the top-of-the-line model, huh?”
“He’s a freakin’ rear admiral, fer Chrissakes. What did you expect?”
Within the computer in the console in front of them, a subroutine was emulating real life for the admiral—but at a vastly accelerated rate. A copy of his PA software was fielding incoming vid calls as Koenig, very quickly indeed. Eventually, the orderly presentation of the program would begin to break down, and other watchdog routines would snatch at what amounted to electronic shrapnel, saving it for later analyses.
They’d already destroyed a dozen copies of the PA software … but there were plenty more, and more could be created easily enough if these ran out.
And abruptly, the emulation stopped.
“What the hell happened?”
“Dunno. And what’s that?”
On the large screen, a woman in a black Confederation naval uniform looked down at them. “Who are you?” she demanded. “What are you doing to me?”
One of the interrogators gave her a cool appraisal. “You’re Mendelson?” he asked.
The screen image morphed into Koenig, also in naval uniform, and looking angry. “This is the personal assistant of Rear Admiral Alexander Koenig,” it said. “And attempting to hack private PA software is illegal.”
“Department of Internal Affairs,” the interrogator replied. “We have authorization.”
“To do what? And by whose authority?”
The interrogator showed the AI behind the screen image his security code level. Possibly they could get what they needed by asking directly, if they could enlist the AI’s cooperation.
“We are trying to get a lead on where Admiral Koenig is taking CBG-18,” he said. “It is vital that we get in touch with him, and we’d hoped you might be able to help.”
“I was … he was at Alphekka when I was downloaded into a Sleipnir-class packet,” Koenig’s face said. “I have no idea what has happened with the fleet since I left it for Earth.”
A copy of a copy, its memories had been copied as well. It would think that it was the original electronic duplicate placed in the mail packet.
“You brought with you a list of over two hundred possible targets,” the interrogator said. “We think he must be headed for one of those. Can you tell us which one that might be?”
“No,” the electronic image on the screen said. “If Admiral Koenig had wanted you to know, I feel sure he would have told you in his final report.”
And as suddenly as Koenig’s image had appeared, it was gone, dissolving into a shrill hiss of white noise.
