Singularity. Ian Douglas

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      Chapter Five

       29 June 2405

       Admiral’s Office

      TC/USNA CVS America

       Approaching Texaghu Resch System

       112 light years from Earth

       1002 hours, TFT

      Seventy-four days after departing the refueling rendezvous within the Kuiper Belt of HD 157950, a total of fifty-eight ships tunneled through the Void within their Alcubierre bubbles, their AIs holding them on course for a star invisible from Earth. Admiral Koenig sat in his office, reviewing again the electronic files of the ships and crews that had joined CBG-18.

      In fact, only seventeen of the Pan-European Federation ships had joined the battlegroup, not the nineteen Harrison had promised. As it turned out, Captain Michel and the Jeanne d’Arc had voted to join the squadron, a surprise last-moment mutiny that had thrown the European contingent into considerable disarray. The crews of three European ships—the destroyers Karlsruhe and Audace, and the heavy cruiser De Grasse—had voted not to join CBG-18, and returned to Sol. Admiral Giraurd had left on board the De Grasse, along with the political officers and a number of other men and women who’d chosen to adhere to Confederation Navy orders. Those three ships were crowded. A number of the officers and crew of the remaining Federation ships had elected to return to Earth as well, while some on board the three had transferred to vessels remaining with the battlegroup.

      Four of the nine Chinese ships had returned to Earth as well. Five, however, under the command of Admiral Liu Zhu, had elected to join America and CBG-18. Koenig wasn’t sure, yet, if that represented Hegemon approval of his strategy … or if Beijing, independent of the Confederation, was simply determined to keep an eye on him.

      Fifty-eight ships, then—more than twice the number surviving after Alphekka—were about to emerge at Texaghu Resch, and Koenig needed to have a long-anticipated conversation with the two nonhuman beings on board the star carrier America.

      “Admiral,” Koenig’s personal electronic secretary said, “the two Agletsch are here to see you, as you requested.”

      “Thank you. Send them in.”

      The office door opened, and the aliens walked in, followed by a Marine guard.

      Humans called them “bugs” or “spiders,” though they were, of course, unrelated to anything that had ever lived on Earth. Flattened and slightly elongated disk-shapes on sixteen slender, jointed legs, each stood as tall as a short human but took up considerably more space. Instead of chitin, their integuments were red-brown, soft, almost velvety, with blue and yellow markings like the reticulated patterns of some snakes. Legs and what passed for faces were black; four eyes on stalks emerged from each face, and Koenig was only now beginning to realize that the movements of the eye stalks added emphasis to their speech. Silver markings on their bodies were decoration of some sort, while each had a metallic device below its face that served as a translator.

      Both Agletsch—their names were Gru’mulkisch and Dra’ethde—were, technically, female; their nonsentient males hung like grotesque, gelatinous leeches from their faces.

      Koenig stood as they entered. “Thank you for coming,” he told them.

      “We appreciate you seeing us, Admiral,” Dra’ethde told him. “We have been … concerned. We have not been allowed into your CIC or bridge since leaving Arcturus.”

      Even now, Koenig had trouble telling the two apart, though there were subtle differences in the decorative silver inlays on their skins. A subroutine programmed into his cerebral implant had learned to recognize those patterns, however, and threw the name of the individual up against his visual field when one spoke. Dra’ethde appeared to be the senior of the two, though the niceties of Agletsch social structures were not yet well understood.

      Koenig nodded to the Marine. “You can leave us, Staff Sergeant,” he said. “Wait in the office outside.”

      “Aye, aye, sir.” The Marine turned and left, the door sliding shut behind her.

      “I do understand you concern,” Koenig told the aliens when they were alone. “You were excluded from the bridge and CIC on my orders.” He thoughtclicked an icon in his in-head display, and a three-dimensional image winked on in the air above his desk. It looked, Koenig thought, like a tangled mat of hair a meter tall, slowly rotating in space. “When we found these. Can you blame me?”

      “No, Admiral Koenig. But we regret that you still do not … understand. Yes-no?”

      The fact was that the two aliens were bugged—a humorous-enough statement given what Agletsch looked like to humans. Each being contained, hidden away within her brain, something called a Sh’daar Seed. The image of one, magnified several million times, hung in the air between them now.

      The implants had only been discovered at Arcturus, when information concerning СКАЧАТЬ