Star Carrier 03: Singularity by Ian Douglas

Author:Ian Douglas [Douglas, Ian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780061840272
Amazon: 0061840270
Publisher: Harper Voyager
Published: 2012-02-28T05:00:00+00:00

There was a lot more, but Gray broke off reading, closing the window. Old news. He remembered going over much of this with the Frank Dolinar avatar, in the Heimdall docuinteractive. Looking up, he stared at and through the dome of stars behind the sky, wondering if this was a recorded image from an era, eons ago, when the dwarf galaxy was still outside Sol’s far larger galaxy, before it had been captured and devoured.

It would have been incredible to be able to see the Milky Way’s spiral from outside . . . but he could see nothing but the cluster’s stars. Either the Milky Way was hidden by the bulk of the planet itself, or the local star background was just too thick.

But there was something else. . . .

Gray walked a few meters forward, looking for something—and found it behind a nearby mass of feathery purple vegetation. As he pushed the plants aside, he revealed one of Heimdall’s cliff faces, just a meter and a half tall, polished and smoothed into a gleaming wall of silver, with what appeared to be circuitry diagrams imprinted in the metallic face. In his era, this cliff was much higher, heavily eroded, and looked like nothing more dramatic than a shelf of exposed rock with odd patterns of metallic stains, only just recognizable as the product of technology. But this . . .

He reached out and touched the surface, his fingers dragging lightly across the imprints. The face felt very slightly warm. Though he’d said as much to Schiere moments before, he was only just beginning to realize, to really feel that what he was seeing here was alien data somehow superimposed on the docuinteractive in his memory.

And that meant . . . the aliens were communicating with him. Telling him something. Showing the two humans something about themselves or their civilization as it looked a billion years ago.

“Gray?” Schiere said. “I think you should turn around and see this.”

Gray turned.

The sim of Frank Dolinar had vanished. In its place was an alien.

Gray felt a shiver of anticipation . . . mingled with fear, and a bit of wonder as well. Was this one of the Sh’daar, revealed at last?

The entity was small, if the simulation was scaled appropriately for Gray’s electronic avatar—about a meter high, or so, and perhaps thirty centimeters wide. It was radially symmetrical, looking, he thought, like a stack of six or eight terrestrial starfishes the size of dinner plates, but with flexible arms that looked like shredded yellow leaves, twisting branches, and weaving tendrils. Its overall color was a pale cream-yellow, with black splotches throughout and with the outermost tips shading to a dark rust. Within the tangle of arms, he saw, were some tendrils that might be tipped by bright red eyes, some ending in suckers, some with highly mobile appendages that might be hands or might be flattened tentacles. The being oozed along on its lowest set of arms; Gray had the impression that it

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