Singularity. Ian Douglas

were nuts. Three days locked up inside a Shadowstar cockpit had been rough, yeah, and the thought that he might drift for eternity through the emptiness had preyed on him.

      But he’d made it. They’d found him. He was good to go!

      And he wanted to go, to go now, before he lost his nerve.

      “America CIC, this is Shadow Probe One, handing off from PriFly and ready for acceleration. Shifting to sperm mode.”

      “Copy that, Shadow Probe One,” a new voice said. “You are clear to accelerate at your discretion.”

      “Roger, America,” he replied. “Bye-bye!”

      He accelerated at fifty thousand gravities, and America vanished astern so swiftly it might have been whisked out of the sky.

      And Christopher Schiere once again was as utterly alone as it was possible for a person to be.

      The objective lay some eighty light minutes from America’s emergence point. At fifty thousand gravities, Schiere’s Shadowstar was pushing 99.9 percent of c in ten minutes, and the universe around him had grown strange.

       CIC

      TC/USNA CVS America

       Outer System, Texaghu Resch System

       1225 hours, TFT

      “Shadow Probe One is away, Admiral,” the tactical officer reported. “Time to objective is ninety-three minutes, our reckoning.”

      “Thank you, Commander,” Koenig told him. He noted the time. An hour and a half for the probe to reach the mysterious object, plus eighty minutes for the returning comm signal to reach the America—they could expect to receive a transmission in another 173 minutes, at around 1517 hours, or so.

      Assuming the pilot didn’t encounter hostiles.

      He opened a channel. “Commander Peak? Koenig. Who’s the VQ-7 pilot who just launched?”

      “Lieutenant Christopher Schiere, sir.”

      He knew the name. “He was our advance scout at Alphekka, wasn’t he?”

      “Yes, sir. He’s a brave man.”

      “Indeed. Thank you.”

      Koenig wanted to know who it was who was putting his life on the line for the battlegroup. He deserved to be remembered.

      CBG-18 was still engaged in the tedious process of forming up around America. All fifty-seven of the other capital ships had reported in after Emergence, and all were now showing on America’s tactical displays.

      And so far, not a single enemy target had appeared—no bases, no fighters, no capital ships, no sensor drones, no heat or energy signatures on or around any of the planets, nothing except for that enigmatic and utterly impossible object orbiting the local sun.

      It was amusing, Koenig thought. The small army of artificial intelligences operating within America’s electronic network had first identified the thing, now called TRGA, for the Texaghu Resch gravitational anomaly, but not one had been able to hazard a guess at what it might be. Dr. Karen Schuman, a civilian physicist in America’s astrogation department, had been the one to make the connection with Frank Tipler. AIs tended to have extremely focused and somewhat narrow ways of looking at the universe, and would have had no reason to be aware of Tipler’s long-forgotten theory.

      Schuman, however, had a packrat mind and a fascination for the history of physics. Koenig had once spent a pleasant evening in the officers mess discussing Einstein over dinner with the woman.

      Of course, traveling through time was still impossible. Stephen Hawking and others had proven that centuries ago. Unless the Tipler cylinder was infinite in length, there would be no time travel.

      There might well, however, be space travel, without a temporal component. That much mass rotating that quickly, according to the physicists and the AIs in Schuman’s department, might well warp space in unusual ways, opening up a passage—the technical term was a wormhole—allowing instantaneous travel across unimaginably vast distances. That was still strictly theoretical, however. They would need Schiere’s report from an up-close examination of the artifact before they could refine their initial guesses.

      Koenig considered ordering the fleet to begin moving in closer to the star, then decided against it.

      There were simply too many unknowns to allow him to risk the fleet that way.

      They would wait.

       Shadow Probe 1

       Approaching Texaghu Resch System

       1357 hours, TFT

      For Chris Schiere, only about twenty-five minutes had passed since he’d boosted clear of the America. His seventy-three-minute drift between his flight’s acceleration and deceleration phases had been carried out at 99.7 percent of c, and time dilation had squeezed the subjective passage of that time down to just over five and a half minutes. He was now fifty kilometers from his objective and approaching it at a relative velocity of two hundred meters per second.

      Close. Very close. And still no sign that the thing was occupied or guarded.

      He stared ahead into bright-lit distance, adjusted the incoming levels of radiation, and stared again. He’d never been this close to a star before—fifteen million kilometers, a tenth of an AU, or roughly one quarter of the distance from Sol to Mercury. At this distance, the expanse of the local star covered over five degrees of the sky ahead—ten times wider than Sol appeared from Earth. Its brilliance would have blinded him instantly had the Shadowstar’s AI not been stopping down the optical sensors. With the light reduced so much that he could look into it with his naked eyes, it was difficult to make out detail.