For years, Laurie Taggart had been a member of the Ancient Alien Creationists, a church founded on the idea that an aliensuper-civilization had created Humankind millions of years ago and become the gods and goddesses of human history and myth.While serving as the senior weapons officer on board the star carrier America, she’d become . . . disillusioned. Earth’s explorations of the galaxy had come across technologies, artifacts, and civilizationsso far beyond the human ken as to utterly defy comprehension. There were beings and technologies out there that so dwarfedthe deities of any merely human mythology or religion to paltry insignificance. Human gods were so . . . so human—fallible and short-sighted and petty and childishly vindictive compared to the reality.
But the stirrings of wonder she still felt when she witnessed that kind of scope and power took her back to the roots of herold faith and seemed, sometimes, to rekindle it.
But Gray knew she didn’t like admitting that.
“We are the Stargods,” he told her gently. “Or we will be. Just give us a few thousand years.”
“Come the Singularity,” she said.
The Singularity, of course, had been very much on his mind since the conversation with Koenig and Konstantin. “Even withoutthe Singularity, we humans are on our way to being more powerful, more intelligent, more knowing than any mythological godever was.”
“And in the meantime, we are very, very small fish in an ocean filled with whales. You be careful out there, okay?”
He kissed her deeply. “Believe me, I will be. I want to come home to this.”
“Mmm. Are they expecting you this morning then? On the America?”
“Actually, no. My orders read the seventh, tomorrow morning. I figured a surprise arrival would put me ahead of the curve.”
“Then you have a little more time. C’mere. There are priorities, you know.”
Two hours later, Admiral Gray sat within the cramped confines of the personal transporter’s narrow cabin. Too small to bea spaceship in its own right, too large to be a spacesuit, the PT drifted along a precisely calculated path between the mainsynchorbital base and one of the open receiving bays recessed into the curve of America’s massive flank. The two-kilometer trip would last just fifteen seconds.
He used the time to watch the mammoth star carrier’s approach, feeling the gathering excitement.
She was no longer the largest vessel in human space as she’d been when she was launched, but she still was as impressive as she’d ever been—1,150 meters long, a slender needle extending aft from her shield cap, the water tank shaped like a flat dome or the cap of a mushroom half a kilometer across and 150 meters deep. That tank held some billions of liters of water serving both as radiation shielding and as a store of reaction mass for maneuvering. A conning tower tucked up within the shadow of that shield cap housed the bridge; aft of that, four long, flat, massive hab modules rotated around the central spine swiftly enough to generate a half G of out-is-down spin gravity. The carrier’s landing bays and flight decks were housed there, along with living accommodations for nearly five thousand crew members. The kilometer-long spine of the ship housed bank upon bank of quantum power converters, plus the twin magnetic railguns that emerged at the front center of the shield cap.
The ship ahead swelled from a delicate toy to a dark gray metal cliff; magfields in the tiny opening of the receiving baycaptured him, guided him in, then decelerated him with a gentle but firm shove forward.
He was home.
He’d docked with the carrier in a non-rotating hull section, so he was now in microgravity. Once the receiving compartmentwas pressurized around him, a hatch opened, its nanomatrix dissolving away, and he drifted out into the receiving bay. A largerhatch opened in front of him, and he used a grab rail to pull himself hand over hand into the quarterdeck.
He saluted the flag painted on the aft bulkhead, then rotated to face the officer of the deck. “Permission to come aboard,”he said.
The two saluted one another as the OOD said, “Granted, Admiral!” He sounded surprised. “Sir, we weren’t expecting you aboardfor another twenty-four hours! No one told us—”
“Just between you and me, Lieutenant,” Gray replied, “I hate those full-dress welcoming ceremonies.” And he winked.
His quip wasn’t completely a lie. He did dislike the spit-and-polish rituals surrounding a flag officer coming aboard. But it would also give him a chance to checkup on crew and vessel before they were ready for him. Stealing a march on Walker had other benefits besides a swift departure.
Hand over handing to the elevator at the far side of the quarterdeck, he entered it, gave his destination, and held on asweight momentarily returned. How something could be called an elevator when there was no up or down was an amusing puzzle . . .but a moment later the door opened and he floated onto America’s flag bridge.
“Admiral on the bridge!” a rating barked.
“As you were.”
Gray still wasn’t entirely sure why he’d finally agreed to this. A lot of it, he thought, probably had to do with wantingto ease the transition of the Singularity when it happened. If the chaos of the Schaa Hok was any indication, things were going to be rough when the transition began.
But part of it, too, was a kind of personal defiance against abject stupidity. The government was making assumptions and carryingout programs based on ignorance and deliberately twisted facts. When that sort of idiocy had consequences affecting everyhuman on the planet, the people who knew better had to do something.
And while Gray was not certain that anything he could do would make one damned bit of difference, he was willing to be guided by those smarter than him once more.
“Welcome aboard, Admiral,” the ship’s captain said. His name was Jason Frederick Rand, and he’d taken command of the America just four months earlier, when her former skipper, Sara Gutierrez, had finally received her well-deserved and long-overduepromotion to rear admiral.
“Thank you, Captain,” Gray replied. He maneuvered himself to his command seat and let
