Singularity
The third book in the epic saga of humankind's war of transcendenceThere is an unseen power in the universe—a terrible force that was dominating the galaxy tens of thousands of years before the warlike Sh'daar were even aware of the existence of Sol and its planets.As humankind approaches the Singularity, when transcendence will be achieved through technology, contact will be made.In the wake of the near destruction of the solar system, the political powers on Earth seek a separate peace with an inscrutable alien life form that no one has ever seen. But Admiral Alexander Koenig, the hero of Alphekka, has gone rogue, launching his fabled battlegroup beyond the boundaries of Human Space against all orders. With Confederation warships in hot pursuit, Koenig is taking the war for humankind’s survival directly to a mysterious omnipotent enemy.
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Copyright
HarperVoyager
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager 2012
Copyright © William H. Keith, Jr 2012
William H. Keith, Jr asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
Cover art by Gregory Bridges
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the authorâs imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780007485956
Ebook Edition © November 2012 ISBN: 9780007485963
Version: 2017-09-12
For Deb,whose science is about as hard as it comes
INTO THE JAWS OF A SAVAGE GOD
Gray was sliding down a gravity well, as though he were being funneled straight toward the wildly rotating cylinder ahead.
Somehow, he realized, the Shâdaar had compressed a medium-sized star into a hollow cylinder a kilometer across and twenty long. Something didnât add up. Beings that could create this thing werenât merely good magicians. They were gods, or the closest thing to gods mere humans could imagine.
Grayâs fighter, falling free, was accelerating, moving faster and faster as the maw of the cylinder yawned ahead, the opening empty and utterly lightless.
Fifty more seconds, at this rate, and he would be drawn inside.
If the Shâdaar possessed such power, they didnât need to rely on the Turusch or their other subject species.
Why fight this protracted war for almost forty years, when such technology could wipe Humankind out of existence with scarcely a thought?
Table of Contents
Prologue
5 April 2405
Ad Astra Confederation Government Complex
Geneva, European Union
1450 hours, local time
Itâs not possible to torture a piece of software. Not even an intelligent one.
Not that artificial intelligences possess anything like the civil rights of humans. With no rights to violate, the Internal Affairs interrogators could take the AI apart almost literally line by coded line, searching for hidden files or withheld memories.
The software avatarâs prototype, as its human object was known in the electronic intelligence business, had recorded a sizable amount of his own character, thoughts, and motivation within his AI counterparts. It was always possible that thoughts, memoriesâeven entire historiesâhad slipped through from the fuzzy logic and holographic analog perceptions of the organic brain to a far simpler silicon-based digital format. This particular prototype was Admiral Alexander Koenig, and he worked closely with his AI personal assistant.
He had, in fact, developed what amounted to an emotional relationship with it, deliberately programming it with the personal characteristicsâvoice, thought patterns, judgment, the simulacra appearance, and so onâof his lover, Karyn Mendelson, killed during the battle to save Earthâs solar system just over six months earlier.
The primary software resided inside Koenigâs head, within the nanochelated implants in the twisting folds and furrows of the sulci of his brain. It served as his PA, or personal assistant, a kind of electronic secretary that could handle routine calls and virtual meetings, could so perfectly mimic Koenigâs appearance, voice, and mannerisms that callers could not tell whether they were speaking to the human or to the human-mimicking software. However, more than a month before, shortly after the Battle of Alphekka, Rear Admiral Koenig had copied his PA software, uploading it into one of the HAMP-20 Sleipnir-class mail packets carried as auxiliaries on board most of the ships of the fleet. Almost three times faster than the best possible speed for a capital ship under Alcubierre FTL Drive, they were used to carry high-velocity express communications across interstellar distances.
