Deep Space. Ian Douglas

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ run for president, and been elected to a six-year term.

      And now, just two days ago, he’d won a second term.

      The big question was what Geneva would decide to do in light of the news of the twin naval disasters … and whether President Koenig would be able to support their decision, whatever that might be.

      And would the American public, caught up in their new enthusiasm for independence, support him if he decided that he must first support a united Earth?

      Much depended on the alien Sh’daar, and at the moment they were a complete unknown in the equation.

      The Confederation maintained at best only a tenuous connection with the Sh’daar. The so-called Sh’daar Empire, the remnants, apparently, of an ancient extragalactic federation of mutually alien civilizations, maintained a far-flung polity of mutually alien species, both now and in the remote past. That they feared the Terran Confederation, despite their considerable technological advantage, was indisputable. But Humankind understood them so poorly, even down to exactly what it was about humans that the Sh’daar feared.

      Attempts to open new negotiations with the aliens through their usual representatives, a species called the Agletsch, had repeatedly failed. The Sh’daar had ignored Geneva’s call for a dialogue over the Osiris question, refused to put human diplomats in touch with the alien Nungiirtok still occupying the 70 Ophiuchi system, and rejected point-blank Confederation requests to revisit Omega Tee-sub, as the Sh’daar home cluster in the remote past was commonly known.

      And now, according to the packet that had just arrived at Fleet HQ in Mars orbit, the Navy survey vessel Endeavor and her escorts had been destroyed by unknown attackers at the central core of Omega Tee-prime.

      “Tee-sub” was a manageable shorthand for “T_-0.876gy,” an unwieldy mouthful pronounced “Tee-sub-minus zero point eight seven six gigayear,” a physics notation referring to an epoch 876 million years in the past. Tee-prime, on the other hand, was Time Now, November of the year 2424 in common usage. Time travel, Koenig reflected, not for the first time, made things almost unendurably complicated. And conducting a war across a span of almost a billion years made everything infinitely worse.

      Sixteen thousand light years from Sol lay the largest globular star cluster in the galaxy, Omega Centauri, a swarming beehive of 10 million suns packed into a sphere just 230 light years across. Close inspection, however, had proven that Omega Centauri was not, strictly speaking, a proper member of the cloud of regular, smaller globular star clusters orbiting the center of the Milky Way galaxy, but the stripped-down core of a separate dwarf galaxy devoured by the Milky Way hundreds of millions of years in the past.

      Some 876 million years ago, Omega Centauri had been an irregular galaxy much like the Greater Magellanic Cloud of the present day, hanging just above the far larger galactic spiral. That Omega Centauri, existing almost a billion years ago and known to its inhabitants as the N’gai Cloud, was the home of some thousands of mutually alien civilizations called the collective name Sh’daar.

      The central core of Omega T_-0.876gy and Omega Centauri Tee-prime were in fact one and the same, the same star-swarm in two epochs, separated by just less than a billion years. The ancient version teemed with life, with inhabited worlds and with the incomprehensibly vast structures of a highly advanced and utterly alien technology; the modern version was uninhabited, its worlds silent and empty, the polyspecific civilization it once had held long vanished.

      Why? What had happened to them?

      The Sh’daar weren’t discussing it, obviously. In fact, they’d long seemed distinctly nervous about the entire topic, and lately all communication with the Sh’daar had ceased.

      It was distinctly possible that the Sh’daar were on the point of renewing the war, and that, Koenig thought, could be very, very bad news indeed for all of Humankind.

      He turned from the viewall display. “Marcus?”

      “Sir?”

      “Get me time with Konstantin. The sooner the better.”

      “Yes, sir.”

      The problem, Koenig thought, demanded more-than-human consideration.

      Chapter Three

       9 November 2424

       Sh’daar Node

       Texaghu Resch System,

       210 Light Years from Sol

       0105 hours, TFT

      Red Mike fell through emptiness, accelerating gently toward the blurred haze of distorted light now only 10,000 kilometers ahead. At his current velocity, he would reach the maw in another fifteen minutes.

      “Deep Peek, Peleliu,” a voice whispered within his awareness. “You are on course and clear for departure.”

      “Copy,” Red Mike replied, using a tightly packaged, low-powered, and coded burst transmission. “Further communications suspended until mission return. Deep Peek out.”

      His ship was a black lump of nanomatrix artfully shaped to look like a meteoroid, a small chunk of nickel-iron massing just thirty kilograms. Red Mike was an artificial intelligence, a complex set of interlocking software downloaded from the far larger AI on board the Marine assault ship Peleliu. His name was taken from U.S. Marine history, from Lt. Colonel Merritt A. “Red Mike” Edson, the commander of the 1st Raider Battalion in World War II. A patch of the rock’s outer surface a few centimeters square provided his sole data feed from the universe outside. He was tumbling slowly, so he could see his objective only intermittently for a few seconds at a time.

      The maw was growing larger, more defined. Red Mike was not capable of emotion as humans understood the word, but he was as focused, as aware as any human combat pilot entering a dangerous flight zone under enemy observation. Just how good were the Sh’daar servants watching the gate, and could they see him from the other side?

      Properly known as the Sh’daar Node or as the TRGA, for the Texaghu Resch gravitational anomaly, the maw was the product of an unimaginably advanced technic civilization, an artificial construct located just 210 light years from Sol at a star called Texaghu Resch. A mass equivalent to that of Earth’s sun had somehow been crushed down into a cylinder twelve kilometers long and one wide, rotating about its long axis at close to the speed of light.

      Centuries earlier, the mathematical physicist Frank Tipler had described theoretical devices—black holes stretched into spaghetti-thin strands and set spinning at billions of rotations per second—that became known as Tipler machines. Their rotation, Tipler postulated, would open closed, timelike curves through spacetime, allowing access across vast distances of space … and through time as well.

      Ultimately, a flaw was discovered in the concept; a Tipler machine would have to have infinite length to function as a shortcut across space or time. The Sh’daar, however, appeared to have found a slightly different approach. The movement of that much mass dragging on the fabric of spacetime opened paths inside the rotating cylinder. Twenty years ago, Admiral Koenig had taken Carrier Battlegroup 18 through the Sh’daar Node at Texaghu Resch and emerged … somewhere—somewhen—else.

      At СКАЧАТЬ