Ian Douglas - Singularity

“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.

“Wait a minute,” Ryan said. “I thought stars like Sol were too small to become black holes.”

“Exactly,” Cleary said. “If a star of about three solar masses collapses, it becomes a black hole. A smaller sun becomes a neutron star … and if it’s smaller still, like our sun, it becomes a white dwarf.”

“The object we are observing,” Dra’ethde pointed out, “is clearly artificial. A natural stellar collapse would result in a sphere … or, rather, a spherical ergosphere, with the singularity within.”

“The thing,” Cleary said, “is roughly twelve kilometers long and about one wide, and it appears to be rotating around its long axis at close to the speed of light. Whoever built it can do tricks with mass and gravity that we can’t even imagine yet.”

“Okay,” Gray said. “It’s super-tech. But what does it do?”

“That’s what we’re trying to decide,” Cleary said. “Our best guess so far is that it’s a kind of Tipler machine … but we know that that is absolutely impossible.”

“Perhaps,” Gru’mulkisch said quietly, “the builders do not agree with you as to what is or is not possible.”

Gray had to access the ship’s library and download information on Tipler and the machine named after him. Frank Tipler had been a mathematical physicist and cosmologist in the twentieth century who’d written a paper based on the van Stockum-Lanczos solutions to the equations of general relativity. That paper, “Rotating cylinders and the possibility of global causality violation,” had presented the possibility of what were called closed timelike curves appearing in the vicinity of a very long, very massive, rapidly rotating cylinder. According to Tipler, if you could stretch a black hole into a rigid length of spaghetti and spin it up to something like 60 percent of the speed of light, some billions of rotations per second, the thing warped surrounding space in such a way that it would open portals not through space, but through spacetime , the two being inextricably linked within Einstein’s equations.