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“Yeah. Except the scuttlebutt I heard was that the bugs know, and they’re leading us into a trap.”
“So, you’re believing scuttlebutt, now? Who told you that shit?”
“Uh … a gal I know in S-2.”
S-2 was the designation for America’s intelligence department. “Ah, well if Naval Intelligence said it, it must be true, right?”
He heard several chuckles over the squadron channel. Good. Loosen them up a bit. You don’t want them thinking too hard before a drop.
“We’ll be emerging far enough out-system that we’ll have plenty of time for a look around, okay? The entire Sh’daar galactic fleet could be in there, and they’d never even see us if we dropped in, took a look, and then jumped back into Alcubierre Space.” He hesitated, then grinned as he added, “Yes-no?”
That raised laughter from the waiting Dragonfires. The odd patterns of Agletsch speech and their constant use of the phrase “yes-no” was well known to everyone on board America by now.
“Sounds like we have an Agletsch loose in the squadron,” Rostenkowski said, laughing. “Since when did they start driving Dragonfires?”
“Dragonfires, PriFly,” Wizewski’s voice broke in. “Is there a problem?”
“Negative, CAG,” Gray replied. “No problem.”
“Can the chatter in there and focus on your finals. Emergence in three minutes. Drop in sixty seconds after that.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
No sense of humor, that one.
He was glad the newbies in the squadron could laugh, though. They’d been training hard in sim, but the real deal was never like electronic simulations, no matter how bad-assed realistic the downloads.
If they could enjoy a joke now, they ought to be okay.
He hoped. …
CIC
TC/USNA CVS America
Outer System, Texaghu Resch System
112 light years from Earth
1103 hours, TFT
Emergence.
The star carrier America dropped into normal space as her Alcubierre bubble collapsed. Since she’d been motionless relative to the volume of space wrapped up inside the Alcubierre field, she emerged traveling at a velocity of only a few kilometers per second—the difference in relative velocities between this patch of space, and the space within the Kuiper Belt of HD 157950. The transition released a great deal of potential energy as light and hard radiation, a flaring burst spreading into and through the new star system at the speed of light.
Koenig studied the new system, both represented by icons within the tactical tank, and as revealed by optical sensors across the bulkhead viewalls of the Combat Information Center. They’d emerged ten astronomical units from the local star—a little farther than Saturn was from Sol. There were planets—five visible immediately, and there likely would be others as the ship’s navigational AIs scanned local space.
“Admiral?” a familiar voice asked. “This is CAG. So you still want to launch fighters?”
“Wait one,” Koenig told him. “We need to see what we’re launching to.”
Data continued to cascade in from the AIs scanning the system. Two inner rocky planets, small enough and close enough to their primary that they likely were too hot for Earth-type life. Planet III, 1.5 AUs from the star, was a small gas giant, about the size of Neptune. Beyond that, at 3 and 5 AUs, were two more rocky planets, both dazzlingly bright and probably encased pole to pole in planet-wide sheets of ice.
“Astrogation,” Koenig called. “Give that gas giant a close look. Maybe it has Earthlike moons.”
He was thinking of Alchameth, circling the star Arcturus, and its moon Jasper.
“We’ve been looking, Admiral. We’ve spotted several small moons—rocks, really—but nothing like a real planet.”
“Carry on, then.”
He felt a small bite of disappointment. Because of this system’s listing in the Turusch Directory, he’d assumed there would be an inhabited planet here—if not one with an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere and temperate climes comfortable for humans, then one with the reducing atmosphere and hot, sulfur-laden conditions enjoyed by the Turusch.
The truth of the matter, though, was that habitable worlds of either type were painfully few and far between within that sliver of the galaxy explored so far by Humankind. The chances that a world of near-Earth mass would just happen to lie within the band of liquid-water temperatures around a star were slim; the fact that the Confederation had discovered as many as twenty where humans could walk unprotected—Chiron and Circe and Osiris and the others—spoke more to how many stars were out here, not to how common other Earths might be.
Texaghu Resch was a G2-type star almost identical to Sol … but it simply hadn’t won the planetological crapshoot that would have led to its possessing a planet humans could call home.
Something was flashing red in the tactical tank. Koenig looked … then blinked. There was something there. America’s instrumentation was picking up a gravitational anomaly. In essence, the ship was feeling about twice the force of gravity it should be feeling at this distance from a G-class star. It was exactly as though there were two stars in there—a close binary—each of about one solar mass … but one of the stars was invisible.
Either that, or the single visible star was twice as massive as it should be, and that simply wasn’t possible, not within the rules governing stellar classification as humans now understood them.
“Admiral?” another voice said. “This is Lieutenant Del Rey, in Astrogation.”
“Go ahead.”
“Have you seen the GA alert, sir?”
“Yes, I have. What do you make of it?”
“We didn’t know what the hell it was at first. We still don’t. But … take a look at this, sir.”
A visual feed came through, opening as a new window within Koenig’s in-head display. It appeared to be a highly magnified image of a portion of the star itself, with the light drastically stepped down by the AI controlling it. Koenig could see the curving limb of the star, the mottling of the surface granulation, the sweep and arch of stellar prominences. At first, he saw nothing out of the ordinary.
And then …
“Good God!” he said, expanding the image for a closer look. “What the hell is that?”
“We have no idea, sir,” Del Rey replied. “But we thought it might be important.”
And that, Koenig thought, was a hell of an understatement.
Chapter Six
29 June 2405
VFA-44
Outer System, Texaghu Resch System
112 light years from Earth
1106 hours, TFT
“PriFly, this is Dragon One,” Gray called. “What’s the hang-up?” They were supposed to have dropped two minutes before, but Primary Flight Control had called for a hold.
“Wait one, Dragon One,” a voice replied—one of the traffic control personnel in PriFly. “There’s been a hitch. The Space Boss is talking to the admiral now.”
The “Space Boss” was Commander Avery, America’s primary flight controller.
Gray scowled. His cockpit was projecting a view of surrounding space, overlaid with icons representing the ships of CBG-18 as they continued to emerge from metaspace. A dozen Confederation vessels were out there, now, with more popping in every moment as the light from their Emergence reached the America’s sensors.
There were no icons representing enemy or unknown vessels. It appeared that this system might be clean.
Possibly the drop was going to be scrubbed.
Well, that was the battle cry of the Navy: hurry up and wait.
“Dragonfire Squadron, this is PriFly,” Commander Avery said. “The drop is scrubbed. Repeat, the drop is scrubbed. VFA-51 will remain on Ready Five. All others will stand down.”
VFA-51, the Black Lightnings, was one of the Dragonfires’ sister Starhawk squadrons on board the America. Commander Alton Crane was their new skipper, and like the Dragonfires, they’d taken heavy losses at Alphekka, and a good half of the pilots were newbies.
Gray felt a jolt as his Starhawk began rising within its magnetic cradle. A moment later, it passed through the drop-tube vacuum seal, allotropic composites within a nanomatrix that made solid metal flow like a thick, viscous liquid, allowing the fighter to be drawn into the carrier’s flight deck while maintaining the compartment’s atmospheric pressure. His cockpit melted open and swung away as a rating outside triggered steps that grew out of the deck.
“Short flight, huh?” the guy said, grinning.
“The best kind,” Gray replied with considerable feeling. “Uneventful.”
An hour later, Gray entered the crew’s lounge, located at the third-G level of America’s number-two hab-module stack. The compartment was large and furnished more like a civilian social center Earthside, with numerous entertainment pits, food bars, and low couches grown from the deck and turned soft. The overhead was an enormous dome, and at the moment, it was displaying the view outside. The local star, yellow, bright, and showing a tiny disk, gleamed halfway up the gently curving bulkhead.
Shay Ryan spotted him and walked over. “Hey, Skipper,” she called. “Looks like they don’t want us here, either.”
Like Gray, Ryan was a Prim, formerly of the Periphery areas that once had been Washington, D.C., until rising sea levels had reclaimed the lowland areas as a ruin-littered salt marsh. Like Gray, she’d joined the service because she’d had few decent options. Like him, she mistrusted both government authority and technology, but she’d tested well on her inborn spatial and coordination skills, and they’d made her a fighter pilot.
“Hello, Shay,” he said. He walked over to a food bar and placed his palm on the contact. He ordered a cola, which rose from within the black surface a moment later in a sealed cup with a built-in straw. “Looks like we lucked out, huh?”
“Shit. I don’t like going through all of that, getting ready to drop into hard-V, and then suddenly get pulled back. They’re just jerking us around, y’know?”
“Any day they pull us back,” Gray replied, “is a day we don’t get into a knife fight with toads.” Toads was pilot slang for the blunt, heavy, hard-to-kill fighters used by the Turusch. “And that suits me just fine.”
“I guess. Hey … did you see? A couple of our old friends are on deck.”
Gray turned and glanced in the direction she was pointing, his eyes widening a bit. “So! They’re allowing the spiders out to play?”
“Maybe the brass trusts them now.”
Gray glanced at the Marine staff sergeant standing behind the two Agletsch. “More likely they figure they can’t do any harm here. Let’s go say hi.”
Gray and Ryan both had met the two Agletsch three months earlier, just before the battlegroup had departed from Earth’s SupraQuito synchorbital complex. They’d been at a restaurant called the Overlook, and an officious headwaiter had been trying to expel the two many-legged aliens for no other reason than, as far as Gray could tell, that they didn’t happen to be human. Gray, Ryan, and several other service personnel had lodged a protest by leaving en masse, taking the Agletsch with them to another restaurant, one without so narrow a definition of acceptable patrons.
And they’d gotten to know the two pretty well, Gray thought, as well as it was possible to know beings with both physiologies and psychologies utterly different from anything from Earth.
A small crowd had gathered around the two Agletsch, who were standing with a lieutenant commander in a full dress uniform. Gray thought he recognized the guy—someone on Admiral Koenig’s staff. When he pinged the man’s id, he got back a name and rank: LCDR N. Cleary.
He wasn’t sure which alien was which, but he had their names stored in his implant memory. “Hey, Dra’ethde,” he said. “What brings you down here?”
The Agletsch on the right twisted two of its eye stalks around for a look, identifying itself for Gray as the one he’d named. “Ah! You are the fighter pilot Trevor Gray, yes-no?”
“Yes. We met at SupraQuito, remember?”
“We do. We are delighted to see you again. And Shay Ryan as well! We remember you, too.”
“Stay clear of this, Lieutenant,” Cleary said. “We’re on duty.”
“Doing what?” Ryan asked. “Watching vids?”
A three-meter-high portion of the viewall dome directly in front of the small group had been turned into a display window, showing, it appeared, a portion of the local star.
“We’re looking at what scrubbed your drop, Lieutenant,” Cleary said. “And we would appreciate it if you would stand back and not crowd.”
Gray and Ryan did move back, but only one step. Gray was intensely curious. So far as he could see, they were studying one quarter of the system’s G2 star. Nothing remarkable there at all.
“We have heard of this sort of thing, Commander,” Gru’mulkisch said, apparently continuing an interrupted discussion with Cleary. “But only in whispers. The Sh’daar masters do not speak of them.”
“Is it Sh’daar?” Cleary asked. “Did they build it?”
“Perhaps,” Dra’ethde said. “But it would have been in the Schjaa Krah. You would say the ‘Old Time,’ or possibly the ‘First Time,’ yes-no? A time a very, very long time ago, perhaps before they were the Sh’daar.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Gray asked, then added, “Sir.”
For a moment, he thought Cleary was going to tell him to get lost, but the staff officer just shrugged and shook his head. “Have a look.”
A small square outlined in black appeared just below the limb of the star, then expanded, magnifying the image sharply. The image now showed the uneven granulations of the star’s surface: twisting, linear patterns of lesser light against the greater. And there was something else. …
To Gray, it looked like a fuzzy shadow, but one made out of light—bright light, but still dimmer than the glare from the star behind it. The thing, whatever it was, had a definite shape—elongated, considerably longer than it was wide—but it was masked in a hazy, twisted blur that made it look fuzzy and indistinct.
It was moving across the face of the star, and as it moved, the granulations appeared to pucker and twist behind it.
“It’s bending light,” Gray said.
“It looks like a dustball,” Ryan added.
Dustballs were tiny clots of matter scooped up by the flickering, artificial singularity projected ahead of a fighter or larger vessel using its gravitic drive to move through normal space. Though the drive singularity switched on and off thousands of times per second, it dragged hydrogen atoms, dust and debris swept up from the space ahead just as it did the fighter falling along behind it. In space where the local density of hydrogen and flecks of dust was relatively high—within the inner reaches of a star system, for instance—the dust could collect faster than the microscopic singularity could swallow it, creating tiny, light-bending patches of fuzz the fighter pilots called dustballs.
“What we’re looking at,” Cleary explained, “has a mass of about one point nine times ten to the thirty-third grams … or about the same as Earth’s sun.”
“A black hole?” Gray said.
Take a star as large as Sol and crush it down until it’s just six kilometers wide. What you get is a gravitational singularity with the same mass and the same gravitational field as the original star … but in close, very close, the gravitational field becomes so strong that not even light can escape it—hence the name: black hole.
