“I understand that,” Gray said, nodding. “The hypernova, we know, didn’t quite make it through the Rosette. But enough mighthave leaked through to, I don’t know, vaporize the whole TRGA structure? Or part of it? I’m just wondering if it could bedamaged enough that it was no longer working.”
She shook her head. “A TRGA’s walls are not as dense as the degenerate matter in a neutron star, but damned close. I don’tthink even a hypernova could more than singe the outer surface of the thing.”
“Okay. So when we emerge from the Omega TRGA, we’ll find hot plasma, high radiation. Anything else, you think?”
“I’ll talk with Engineering about ship specs.”
He nodded. “Good. The ship’s magnetic shielding, along with her space-bending, ought to protect us from the rough stuff.”
“So . . . from Omega Centauri to the N’gai Cloud. What are we going to be doing in N’gai?”
“Chasing down the fleeing Sh’daar migratory fleet.”
“Any particular reason?”
“Yeah. Staving off planetwide chaos here on Earth.”
She nodded, pursing her lips. “Okay. Sounds reasonable.”
Oval Office
New White House
Washington, D.C., USNA
1235 hours, EST
President James Walker scowled at his Chief of Intelligence. “I don’t want excuses, Ron. I want results!”
“Of course, Mr. President. And we’ve given you results. America won’t be going anywhere with that fault in her nanoreplicators.”
“I still think you ought to just round up the whole big slimy bunch of ’em. Bring ’em up on charges of insubordination, maybe,or disturbing the peace, or . . . I don’t know, celebrating Christmas out of season!”
Ron Lehner closed his eyes. “Sir . . . we do have to observe due process.”
“And they have to obey the chain of command!” He shook his head. “I know, I know. But don’t we have enough to indict themfrom what we overheard at Koenig’s place yesterday?”
“That recording was made without a legal warrant, Mr. President. And Koenig is a former President and a retired admiral, whileGray is an admiral and a naval hero. We’re going to have to be very careful to make any charge stick, much less actually try them for it.”
“Koenig is just pissed off that I closed down his precious SIRCOM. Useless waste of time.”
“Maybe. But it wasn’t illegal. Spying on our citizens is.”
“Damn it, Ron, don’t talk to me about legal. We really need to sideline this crazy expedition to the dwarf galaxy or whateverit is.”
“May I ask, sir . . . why?”
“Why what? Why sideline their expedition?”
“Why this antipathy toward anything having to do with the Technological Singularity?”
Walker shrugged. “It’s all nonsense, you know.”
“There’s plenty of hard scientific data that it’s a real possibility.”
“Scientists! What do they know?”
“Quite a lot, actually, Mr. President. You can’t simply dismiss inconvenient facts.”
“I can when they’re false facts, Ron. Facts pulled out of someone’s ass!”
“Sir—”
“C’mon, you know as well as I do that the science wonks have been talking about this Singularity thing happening any day now ever since the twentieth century! You know my feelings about it. If the Singularity is real, it already happened three hundredyears ago when they invented the Internet!” He tapped his desk with a forefinger. “In fact, you know what I think? This talkabout a Singularity is more religion than science. Stands to reason. Radical Christians have been saying for centuries thatany day now, all good Christians are gonna get caught up into the sky to be with God, right? They call it the Rapture! Howis that one bit different from the Singularity thing?”
“Okay, Mr. President. Assume you’re right. It’s still harmless. There’s no reason to harass people who believe in it, right?Or sabotage our own star carriers!”
“No reason? No reason? Ron, your people have been filling my in-box with reports every day for the last two years: Revolts all over the world. Minor wars. Breakdowns in food and rawmat deliveries. Riots. Whole populations suddenly refusing to work. And apparently all because a few idiots are convinced that the sky is falling, that we’re all going to be . . . I don’t know . . . raptured by the sky gods! People need to pay attention to work, to fixing what needs fixing now, not to this pie-in-the-sky religious crap.”
“I don’t think things are quite that simple, Mr. President. A lot of the global unrest is centered on the aftereffects ofthe wars we’ve been through . . . both our civil war with the Confederation and six decades of war with the Sh’daar . . .and the attack by the Consciousness. That really shook people!”
“Bullshit,” Walker said. “The problem is that if people believe the Stargods are gonna come down and transform the world—orthat all humans are gonna get caught up into some kind of alien paradise—then they don’t want to work! Look at this.”
He used his implants to bring up a vid on the Oval Office wall screen. An angry mob filled the Place d’Lumiere, the enormousplaza in front of the ConGov pyramid in Geneva. Riot police in heavy armor lined the approach to the government complex. Onewaved a sign toward the vid pickups: La Singularité est proche!
The Singularity is near.
“And there’s this.”
The scene shifted to another mob, this one in Hudson Park in downtown New New York, just outside the city’s financial district.Signs read Lose Your Chains and Ascend! and Slaves Can’t Fly!
“We are suffering a major economic downturn, Ron,” Walker said. “We need people working, not worrying about something that’s never gonna happen! These mindless protests are bullshit. They don’t know what they’retalking about.”
“If you say so, Mr. President.”
“I do say so. Now, if I understand this right, Koenig wants to send one of our carriers back in time a billion years to find
