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 first, Koenig’s tactical group had assumed they’d jumped some sixteen thousand light years, to the heart of a globular star cluster called Omega Centauri. Only later did they discover the truth: that they’d jumped to that cluster in the remote past, when it was still the core of a small galaxy just outside the spiral arms of the Milky Way.
The TRGA/Sh’daar Node was much more than a kind of super-high-tech galactic transport system.
It was also a time machine.
For Red Mike, the thought of traveling across tens of thousands of light years and hundreds of millions of years of time in a single swift leap was not at all daunting. Both distances were mere sets of spacetime coordinates reflecting the knowledge that the universe was both far larger and far more complex than cosmologists had thought before the Einstein revolution. Tipler machines and the TRGA cylinder both were derived ultimately from the Van Stockum-Lanczos solutions to the equations of General Relativity, and therefore could claim Einstein as their father.
But Red Mike was concerned, in a coldly calculating AI sort of way, about whether or not Sh’daar technology would be able to pick him out from among the molecules of nano-embedded nickel-iron encasing him. The microcircuitry within which his consciousness resided took up less volume than a human brain and resided among the shielding atoms, woven through and among them within the nanomatrix, rather than inside a hollow within the core. Both ends of the TRGA cylinder attracted matter—dust, gas, and small bits of meteoric rubble—and drew them in and through constantly, sending them through the lumen of the cylinder in gravitational currents running both ways, in and out. The planners of Operation Deep Peek were counting on the Sh’daar watchers on the far side of the gate to assume that Red Mike was just another chunk of interstellar rubble.
To pull it off, Red Mike would have to power down to almost nothing, cutting back to the point where he was radiating heat at just a few degrees above absolute zero. He could accomplish this by dropping into power-saving mode, his conscious awareness slowed to a rate so sluggish by human standards that, for him, the minutes flickered past like seconds.
An instant before entering the maw, the encircling sphere of stars warped and puckered, the infalling light wildly distorted by the sharply bending fabric of space. His passage through the rotating cylinder was a blurred instant … and then he emerged far indeed from Texaghu Resch, a place where stars blazed around him as if from a solid wall, where only scattered and isolated patches of black, empty space peeped through the dazzling mass of closely packed suns.
Red Mike’s inbound trajectory had been carefully adjusted to match that of CBG-18 twenty years before … which should mean that he’d emerged deep within the central core of the Omega Centauri galaxy, and at T-0.876gy, almost 900 million years in the past. However, according to the Van Stockum-Lanczos solutions, different paths through the distorted spacetime vortex within the rotating cylinder would translate to different paths through both space and time; it was distinctly possible that Red Mike had emerged off-target, somewhere and somewhen else.
Confirming his exact spacetime coordinates was vital.
It would also be extremely difficult.
Executive Office, USNA
Columbus, District of Columbia
United States of North America
1124 hours, TFT
It was the next morning before President Koenig’s request could be processed and time secured on the Tsiolkovsky Array. Konstantin worked on a twenty-four-hour schedule, but there was always a backlog of high-priority requests. Geneva had been attempting, in fact, to designate Konstantin as a Confederation asset, but so far the USNA had managed to block the move, and individual governments within the Confederation could still consult the technological oracle on a first-come-first-served basis.
At the designated time, Koenig settled into his office chair, placed the neuronet contacts exposed on the palm of his hand against the chair’s contact plate, and thoughtclicked a connection through to Tsiolkovsky.
Located on the far side of the moon from Earth, the crater Tsiolkovsky was a somewhat irregular 180-kilometer depression with an off-center central peak. Named for the Russian physicist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the feature was one of the very few dark-floored maria features visible on the moon’s far side, its central peak looking like an island within a circular, black lake.
Buried deep within the central peak was a man-made cavern housing the Tsiolkovsky Array, originally the control center for a farside lunar radio telescope, but now the site of a long-running experiment in artificial hyperintelligence.
Konstantin was a fifth-generation digitally programmed and enhanced artificial intelligence, a machine mind running within a vast network of Digital Sentience DS-8940 computers. What made Konstantin unique was that humans had not programmed him; he was an AIP.
During the first half of the twenty-first century—possibly as early as 2020, though definitions were fuzzy and the records from four centuries earlier were frustratingly inexact—computers with human levels of intelligence had made their first appearance, machines with the equivalent of around 1014 neural connections. According to the records, those early human-equivalent systems and networks weren’t conscious—at least the software engineers involved were fairly certain that they weren’t—but under the relentless, driving whip of Moore’s Law, computer power had continued to double and redouble, until by the middle of the century such markers as numbers of neural connections or raw processor speed simply were no longer relevant. By 2084, a computer had written a complete operating system for a new generation of information processors—the first AIPs, or artificial-intelligence-programmed machines. One early AIP—an IBM-Lenovo Mk. 1 Brilliant e-Mind—had been instrumental in designing the first Earth-to-Synchorbit space elevator, in the early 2100s.
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