Stargods by Ian Douglas (best summer books TXT) 📕

reality never could. He could feel a rippling awareness spreading out around him, could see America herself below him, apparently several kilometers away—her slender keel extending aft from the immense hemisphere of her shieldcap like the handle of an umbrella, the stately rotation of her hab modules about the spine, the wink-wink-wink of her runninglights and the tiny specks of a squadron of encircling fighters on combat space patrol, keeping pace with the behemoth.

She was making her way through normal space at dead slow, but he could see what was normally invisible on a ship under way,the steady, purring flicker of her projected grav field just ahead of the curve of her shield cap, an intensely warped areaof space drawing the massive ship slowly forward. Each fighter had that flicker as well, deep blue luminosities just off theirprows.

That puzzled him for a moment. You couldn’t actually see warped space; you couldn’t see gravity, but that appeared to be exactly what he was sensing somehow.

Then he realized that he was seeing gravity, or at least its more intense manifestations. As he studied his surroundings, he found himself becoming moreand more aware of the fabric, the texture of space itself, not seen so much as sensed, rippling with uncountable waves andeddies and currents that filled all of circumambient space. It was as though space itself was a living, breathing, sensateorganism, trembling, exquisitely alive, responding delicately and precisely to each movement of mass through its invisiblematrix.

The sight was . . . overwhelming. Gray’s breath caught in his throat, and the awe of that moment very nearly jerked him back to the mundane reality of the starship’s bridge.

But his awareness within this alien vista was expanding as his brain processed more and more of the incoming tsunami of data.He realized with a small shock that he wasn’t seeing his surroundings, not exactly, but he was sensing them, and his brain, confronted with sensations and impressions unlikeanything he’d ever experienced before, was struggling to make sense of it all. Flooded by the unknown, his brain was interpretingthe data as best it could. Because Gray’s principle sense was sight, that interpretation was as visible images rather thanas sounds or touch or something else.

Gray was aware of stars beyond the bulk of the America, tens of millions of them thronging about him in an opaque wall. America was still deep within the central core of the N’gai Dwarf Galaxy, and the thickly clustered stars formed a glowing shellaround them thousands of light years across.

Astern, the heart of the cluster erupted in a glorious blue and violet glare of radiance, where the black holes of the Sh’daarRosette, the remnants of exploded supergiant stars, filled space with a throbbing, visible gravitational light. The detailhe was seeing was startling. From the heart of the hypernova’s glare came ripples of gravity generated by the ponderous orbitingof six black holes around a common center, a steady churning that filled space like the surge and boom of waves on a stormysea.

Gray momentarily was puzzled. Gravity waves, he knew, traveled at the speed of light. How could he be seeing . . .

But of course. Idiot! He was seeing gravity waves that had set out over two years ago. In fact, as his sensitivity increased,guided by Konstantin’s careful direction, Gray was aware now of more and more of the living fabric enmeshing him, America, the other ships of the squadron, and every star he could see in the heavens around him.

With that realization, his awareness . . . expanded, moved outward.

No wonder detecting Sh’daar world-ships was so difficult! At distances of more than a few billions of kilometers, an insignificant fraction of a single light year, the thunderous noise generated by the Rosette, and the echoing reverberations of the hypernova tended to drown out the drive signatures of even the largest vessels.

But those signals were there, if you could extend yourself far enough, reach deeply enough into the gravitational matrix around you, feel the subtleripples all but drowned in that pounding, storm-hammered surf.

Gray reached out . . . and became aware of other minds riding the Godstream with his, several thousand men and women and intelligentmachines drawn from the crews of the squadron’s ships, spread out across an expanse of space at once vast and vanishinglyinsignificant against the grandeur of space around them.

Godstream. A fitting name, he thought, for a God’s-eye view.

He’d ridden these waves before, when he and myriad others had spread their hive-mind consciousness across space in order tocommunicate with the enigmatic and monstrous Mind of the Consciousness. His brain, he realized now, was drawing on those memoriesto help make sense of what he was experiencing. He realized, too, how very, very much of that experience three years ago he’dforgotten. When he’d uncoupled from that powerful group mind, he’d dwindled, shrinking back to a mere human, losing the vast majority of his remembered impressions and thoughts, a mind far too smallto retain the power, the intricate detail, and the Transcendence of Mind.

Now those memories were flooding back, enhancing his awareness of the depths of the N’gai galaxy. Riding the pulsing ripplesof gravity, he found his awareness extending far, far beyond the perimeter defined by human ships and Bright Light modules. Spacetime, he found, possessed a literal fabric, a warp and woof of virtual energy within which gravity waves rippled and within which he could extend his wings and soar. It was as though his physical self was growing, expanding, becoming a titanic node of awareness spreading out through the encircling walls of clustered stars and into space beyond.

What he sensed out there stunned him, and his physical body somewhere back within the N’gai galactic core gasped. The centralcore dropped away, a thick haze of light thickly set with suns, a thinner, luminous mist of stars surrounding it. And beyond . . .

The N’gai Dwarf Galaxy was already in the process of being devoured by a much larger galaxy, a vast and luminous spiral ofstars and nebulae—the Milky Way as it had been over 800 million years before Gray’s own time. N’gai was skimming in