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  “In the remote past, before the N’gai Cloud was absorbed by our galaxy,” Truitt said, nodding. “Yes. But as you’ll recall, the N’gai Cloud is . . . was considerably more open than this, even at its core. What is left of the N’gai Dwarf Galaxy has compacted over the eons, quite possibly as a direct result of the gravitational presence of the Rosette.”

  “If there were other civilizations in this cluster,” Kline said, “they might have been exterminated by the Consciousness. It never seemed to be aware of organic life. Or of technologies more primitive than what they were using.”

  “The Texaghu Resch,” Gray said, nodding.

  Texaghu Resch was the Agletsch name for a world not far from the first TRGA. Little was known about the civilization occupying that world; the Sh’daar had wiped it out long ago, probably because they felt threatened by any advanced technology.

  Perhaps the Consciousness had the same drivers, which triggered a survival-instinct reaction.

  “I wonder,” Gray said, looking out into the surrounding starfield, “if any of the original Sh’daar races remained in what later became Omega Centauri? Or if the species that migrated to the Milky Way found new worlds and survived?”

  “We know, at least, that some members of the Baondyeddi created the planetary computer and virtual worlds within the Etched Cliffs of Heimdall and survived there into the present time,” Konstantin said. “At least until they were destroyed by the Consciousness. We know, however, that within their virtual world, they had drastically slowed the passage of time for themselves. Hundreds of millions of years in the outside universe were only a few years for them.”

  “And why did they do that?” Truitt said. “They were helpless when the Consciousness found them.”

  “We think,” Konstantin replied, “that they did it because with their time flow altered, they hoped to be less conspicuous to those . . . outside. But it is important to remember that even highly technic species have a limited lifetime—a very few million years at most—before they evolve into something else, destroy themselves, ascend in a technological singularity, or simply peter out in genetic senescence and internal rot.”

  “Or they’re wiped out by something else,” Gray added. “Gamma ray bursters, nearby supernovae, unfriendly neighbors . . . It’s not a particularly friendly cosmos.”

  “Lovely thought,” Kline said, her face sour.

  “Reminds me of some kids back home,” Truitt said, scowling. “The viraddicts, especially. Dive into recrealities and pull the ladder in after themselves.”

  Gray had to agree. A lot of people—the younger set, for the most part—were so caught up in fantasy and adventure universes of their own creation that they rarely came down. The medical community was still divided as to whether the behavior should be classified as true addiction or not, but it was a serious social problem in some quarters.

  But was it worse, he wondered, than kids gouging out chunks of their skulls to make room for “drune” extra eyes? That image still shook him . . .

  “Captain Rand?” Gray called in his head.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Take us in closer to the Rosette.”

  If there was any evidence of the Consciousness having remained in this universe, it would be there at the heart of this thing.

  Lieutenant Adams

  Moskva, Penrose TRGA

  79 light years from Earth

  1407 hours, FST

  Lieutenant Adams hung in the air, stretched taut, shoulders screaming, sweat dripping from her body. The nanobot infusion in her circulatory system had flooded through her brain, locating all of her cerebral implants, tracing their connections, and infiltrating them like a high-tech virus.

  Naked . . . helpless . . . vulnerable . . . you are ours . . .

  The computer-generated words had been drumming through her head without stop for . . . how long? She suspected that the emphasis on her vulnerability was a psychological weapon designed to wear down her inner defenses. Nudity was not an issue with her. The culture behind her was quite free and easy with casual social nudity, as it was too with casual sex. She was not embarrassed by it.

  But the helpless and vulnerable part . . . yeah, that one was getting to her. Adams admired strength, and she admired self-sufficiency. Someone who was vulnerable was weak . . . and open to attack. She’d learned that much from an abusive boyfriend a few years ago. She’d joined the Navy in part to escape him, but mostly to demonstrate to herself that she was her own person, that she didn’t need anybody.

  Not even Don.

  Her interrogator still hadn’t asked her any questions. Instead, the nanobots in her brain had connected with her in-head RAM and were downloading her memory. People didn’t store all of their memory in their implants, but they did store what was important. Classified stuff could be locked behind a code word, and so long as the code word wasn’t accessible, it was fairly secure.

  What the Russians appeared to be doing was following patterns of past usage, gathering clues that might help them force their way deeper into her hardware, compromising the software. She continued to feel this as a solid, steady pressure inside her head; she wasn’t sure what the physical cause of that discomfort was, but her attempts to fight it over the past hours had left her sweat-drenched and weak, unsure of what they’d lifted already, unsure of what was in there that they might be able to read.

  Worse, far worse, she knew that if they studied her neural patterns closely enough, for long enough, even her organic memories could be laid bare to the bastards.

  Naked . . . helpless . . . vulnerable . . . you are ours. . . .

  Damn it! That verbal refrain kept gnawing at her, making it impossible to concentrate! She was afraid her memories, both organic and machine, were dribbling away, easily accessed by her captors.

  Suddenly, without any warning, the pressure ceased, and Adams was left gasping, dizzy, completely disoriented.

  “Excellent, my dear!” Her interrogator stepped close, grinning, and gave her a ringing slap across one buttock. “I think we have everything we need here. Thank you so much for your cooperation!” He turned to face a couple of guards standing by the door. When had they come in here? “Take her.”

  She was lowered to the deck and the magnetic grip on her ankles and wrists was released.

  “They’ll take you to a cell, Julia,” her interrogator told her. “You can get cleaned up and put on some fresh clothing. I don’t think we’ll be needing you any longer.”

  And what, she wondered, did he mean by that?

  Flag Bridge

  CIS CV Moskva

  Penrose TRGA

  1433 hours, GMT

  “I believe we got what you need, sir.”

  Oreshkin looked up from the data on the Penrose TRGA and nodded. “Indeed, Dr. Fedorov. What did you learn?”

  “That the America battlegroup is, as you suspected, commanded by an Admiral Trevor Gray. And that the intent was to proceed to the Dunlop TRGA in Omega Centauri. After verifying that the alien entity there had been destroyed, they were to re-enter the TRGA and make the jump through to the Thorne TRGA. That’s at the core of the N’gai Dwarf Galaxy some 876 million years in the past.”

  “This is confirmed?”

  Fedorov shrugged. “With only one prisoner, I could not compare stories from different sources. However, no matter how deeply I dug, the data remained consistent, and I could find no trace of prevarication. What I read was what she truly believes.”

  “I suppose it’s possible that she was told a cover story, that she believes that. But I think that would be needlessly complicating matters.”

  “Yes, sir. Since we captured her after her ship had already vanished through the TRGA, she would have no way of knowing where America had gone.”

  “Indeed. Thank you, Doctor. You’ve done very well.”

  “What do you want to do with the prisoner, sir?”

  Oreshkin considered this. “She might be useful later on, so simply keep her locked u
p in the brig. Once we destroy the America battlegroup, she will be eliminated. Our orders, after all, are to leave no survivors.”

  “Of course, sir.”

  “Dismissed.”

  After Fedorov had left the bridge, Oreshkin spent some time considering the hazy circle of the Penrose TRGA, dead ahead and twenty kilometers distant. If he sent drones through ahead of the fleet, he would warn the Americans on the other side that Moskva was coming after them. But now that he was certain that the Americans had gone through to the Dunlop TRGA, he didn’t need a recon.

  What he could send through ahead of the fleet, however, was a volley of smart nukes, AI missiles programmed to traverse the Penrose-to-Dunlop path, emerge at the other end, and immediately detonate. If the Americans had ships close by the TRGA’s mouth—and he knew that they would—he might be able to destroy or at least disable one or more of them before the Moskva emerged.

  Better, the missiles could be programmed to seek out any American ships on the other side and take them out. An initial volley to clear the area beyond the TRGA, followed by hunter-killers that would track down the Yankee ships and obliterate them.

  “Dmitri,” he called, connecting with his weapons officer. “Prepare a flight of ten Umnaya Ptitsa, please. Program one of them to emerge from the Dunlop end of this thing and explode, and the rest to pass through the fireball, find any surviving American vessels, and destroy them.”

  “Da, Captain. At once. Ah . . .”

  “What is it?”

  “Sir, do you wish to target only the capital ships? Or the fighters as well?”

  Oreshkin nodded; it was a good question. The Americans almost certainly had fighters close by the TRGA. And the missiles might be distracted by the relatively low-value, highly maneuverable targets.

  “Target the capital ships, Dmitri. We can mop up the fighters at our leisure.”

  “Da, Captain!”

  Umnaya Ptitsa was Russian for the PKR-130 “Smart Bird” missile, a variable-yield shipkiller comparable to the American Kraits. They were quite smart, but constrained by their programming to concentrate on just one thing—destroying the enemy.

  With luck, when Moskva emerged from the TRGA, Oreshkin would find the American squadron wrecked and helpless.

  VFA-96, Black Demons

  Omega Centauri TRGA

  1446 hours, FST

  Lieutenant Commander Gregory watched the slow and stately tumble of the TRGA, which from here had the appearance of a titanic soda straw rotating around its short axis. C’mon, you damned Russkies! he thought with red-rage ferocity. Show yourselves!

  Rage, he found, helped him push aside the pain, the grief, the guilt he felt at Julia’s death.

  The guilt had surprised him. What did he have to feel guilty about? It took him a while, in his tortured mind, to figure that one out. But he figured it out: she had died.

  And he had not.

  That was a state of affairs that might change, that could be changed, though.

  After he’d lost both Meg and Cyn, he’d felt something like this . . . he thought. One of the effects of his treatment had been to cut the memory of their loss from the associated emotion. He still remembered both of them, but the pain was gone.

  Yet he could remember there had been pain, and that was what he was dwelling on now. He supposed Mason could fix this feeling of bottomless grief as well, but right now it felt as though the only way to feel better was to fling himself into combat with the bastards who’d killed Julia, even if he would almost certainly die himself.

  Emerging target detected.

  His Starblade’s AI dropped that alert into his mind, and an in-head window showing the mouth of the TRGA zoomed in on a mote—a tiny speck—highlighted by a red CGI box emerging from the huge structure’s maw.

  “What the hell is—” Gregory began.

  And then it exploded.

  The silent flash seared into Gregory’s brain, though the fighter’s optics automatically stopped the glare down to tolerable levels.

  Nuclear detonation, his AI told him inside his head. Approximately two hundred megatons, range ten kilometers.

  Fortunately, a fusion explosion that would have vaporized much of a city was far less effective in hard vacuum. With no air to superheat or in which to create a shock wave, with no matter to convert into plasma other than that of the missile itself, the fireball was brief and died away almost at once. There was an equally brief pulse of electromagnetic energy, including hard X-ray and gamma radiation, but the Starblade’s hull handled that without much problem.

  Had there been a ship—the America, say—parked outside the opening of the TRGA, things would have been very different.

  “America, America, VFA-96,” he called. “Warhead detonation at the TRGA mouth. . . .”

  America, at that moment, was 18 million kilometers away—one light-minute. They wouldn’t see the flash or hear his warning for another . . . make it fifty-four seconds now. Gregory reoriented his Starblade and started moving toward the TRGA, but slowly. That blast had almost certainly been intended to clear any USNA ships away from the opening. It might be followed by another . . . or by a fleet of Russian warships.

  The second detonation came a moment later, farther out from the rotating TRGA’s end. Gregory was reporting that blast to the carrier when another flight of smart missiles emerged, spread by the TRGA’s rotation across an arc of sky, and began to accelerate.

  “Missiles!” he yelled through his in-head link with the carrier. “Missiles inbound from the TRGA!”

  A whole minute until America would hear the warning. Those missiles were already beginning to accelerate.

  “Demons with me!” he called to the rest of his squadron. “Chase down those missiles!”

  He flipped his fighter end-for-end and accelerated. Starblades and most antiship missiles had about the same acceleration—50,000 gravities. He’d counted eight missiles coming from the TRGA. They had four and a half minutes to kill all of them before they reached the capital ships.

  “Headhunters, Gregory!” he called, his voice tight. “We’re going after those warheads. Stay put and watch for the Russians. They’re bound to be coming through any moment!”

  “Copy that,” replied Commander Jason Meier, the new CO of the Headhunters. “Knock ’em down!”

  “Ay-ffirmative.”

  Even at 50,000 gravities, after one minute’s acceleration, one of those missiles was “only” traveling at 500 kilometers per hour and would have covered less than a million kilometers of distance. The problem, of course, was that the pursuing fighters were playing with the same numbers. As Gregory brought his acceleration up to 50,000 gravities, he turned the targeting problem over to his fighter’s AI. Target lock. . . .

  It would have been an impossible chase save for one important bit of physics: though his fighter could never quite match the speed of the missiles because he’d begun accelerating several seconds after them, he could get to within a few tens of kilometers per second of their current speed, then launch his own Krait shipkiller. The Krait’s acceleration would build from his velocity and rapidly overtake the enemy warhead, exactly as if it were a two-stage missile.

  He thoughtclicked one of his VG-92 Kraits into space. “Fox One!” he called, the general squadron warning of a smart missile launch. The missile rapidly burned up the distance to the target.

  The detonation, starkly silent in the vacuum of space, dazzled Gregory despite his optics’ stopping down to protect his vision. Kraits, like the Russian Smart Birds, were variable-yield weapons capable of a couple hundred megatons . . . something of an overkill option when firing at Russian antiship warheads, except for the fact that a more powerful yield increased the chances for a kill.

  “Target eliminated,” his AI informed him.

  “Next target,” he ordered. “Lock on!”

  “Target lock. . . .”

  “Fox One!”

  Other Starblades in the squadron, spread out in an arc two h
undred kilometers across, began releasing their own Kraits, and nuclear detonations began flashing and pulsing ahead. Gregory was concerned at first that they were traveling directly toward—and firing their missiles at—the America battlegroup, but the AIs were in perfect control of the weapons.

  The Starblades continued their pursuit across the empty kilometers.

  One by one, the Black Demons hunted down the nuclear missiles and destroyed them.

  After four and a half minutes, the fighters had traveled just over 18 million kilometers—a full light-minute—and were moving at just under half the speed of light as they entered the volume of space surrounding America, not fast enough to experience significant relativistic effects, but far too fast for merely human reflexes and perception.

  And then the last Russian warhead was gone, just as it arrowed in toward the carrier, and an instant before it hit.

  “Good job, Demons.” The voice came from CIC.

  “Decelerate and reverse vector, Demons,” Gregory ordered. “Back to the triggah!”

  He wanted to be there if the Russians came through.

  When the Russians came through.

  USNA CVS America

  Flag Bridge

  Omega Cluster

  1450 hours, FST

  Gray watched the strobing of nuclear detonations against the star-clotted backdrop of space, one following another in fast-paced rhythm, the blasts growing closer and closer with each passing moment. That final detonation was close—less than 30,000 kilometers—but it was far enough away to not affect America.

  Incoming targets destroyed, the ship’s fire control computer whispered in Gray’s mind. The final kill actually had been scored by one of America’s point defense weapons, a HEL controlled by a dedicated AI and triggered when a threat got too close. Gray’s heart rate went up a bit as he watched the firefight play itself out. He’d been a fighter driver long enough to know the sense of pounding adrenaline when a close-quarters knife fight took you inside a capital ship’s defensive perimeter. A capital ship’s AI should be able to readily distinguish between a threat and a friendly fighter, but things were happening so fast, the ships and missiles moving so quickly, and frankly, mistakes did happen, even with sophisticated automation.