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  He allowed himself a sigh of relief as the Black Demons formed up and began boosting back toward the TRGA.

  If the Russians were going to come through, however, it would be any time now. Quite possibly they’d already begun emerging from the Dunlop TRGA, but the news had not yet crawled across that light-minute of separation.

  “Lieutenant West,” he snapped.

  “Yes, sir!”

  “Make to all vessels. Execute Plan Tango.”

  “Execute Tango, aye, aye, sir.”

  They wouldn’t be able to take on a carrier and six destroyers. They had to get the hell out of here.

  The problem was going to be how.

  VFA-96, Black Demons

  Omega Centauri TRGA

  1508 hours, FST

  Gregory was decelerating his fighter back toward the TRGA. It had taken four and a half minutes to decelerate back down from his top velocity of 0.45 c, then begin accelerating again back through the America battlegroup and then on toward the TRGA. At the halfway point he began decelerating once more. He’d had an instructor at Oceana who’d told his class that the biggest hazard in space fighter combat was that with all of the accelerating and decelerating back and forth across an ungodly huge battlespace, the battle would be over before you could get back into position.

  The minutes had dragged by, but now the Black Demons were again approaching the TRGA.

  Gregory didn’t need to worry about missing out this time.

  “My God!” Lieutenant Johanson called. “Look at that!”

  The Russians had arrived.

  They were still arriving. Four of those Cossack-class destroyers had already emerged from the TRGA, the gate’s rotation having spread them all over the sky. As Gregory watched, another emerged, followed closely by another. The TRGA rotation had actually worked in the Russians’ favor. Had they all come out as a group in one area, the waiting fighters could have pounced on them easily enough, perhaps even taken them down one at a time as they followed through the needle’s eye of the gate.

  But with destroyers spread all over the sky, the defenders were going to more than have their work cut out for them.

  And while Gregory relished the idea of fighting the Russians, he was aware that the defending forces might have lost the battle before it had even properly begun.

  Chapter Eight

  12 April, 2429

  VFA-96, Black Demons

  Omega Centauri TRGA

  1510 hours, FST

  Gregory watched the Russian destroyers drifting in a broad and steadily expanding arc near the TRGA as they slowly oriented themselves, turning to face the distant America. Nuclear flashes scattered across the battlespace ahead showed where the Headhunters were already hammering at the Russian escorts. Gregory tagged one of the destroyers and flashed the data to the other members of his squadron. “Designating target Alfa-One!” he called. “Everybody gang on him. Approach velocity one kps. Kraits armed.”

  By having all ten fighters in the Black Demons attack the same target, they increased the chances that something would slip past the enemy’s close-in defensive perimeter. With an approach speed of one kilometer per second, the human pilots could make broad judgment calls—and change targets at the last moment if necessary—but would still have to rely on their AIs for the final instant of approach and launch.

  The Russian destroyers were closer now, each bullet-capped, long and slender, a two-hundred-meter needle with a blunt tip. Moment by moment, the targeted ship loomed larger across the sky ahead. The range was still well over 100 kilometers, but the optics in Gregory’s fighter made the target look huge, and very close.

  Which, of course, it was, given the velocity of his fighter.

  “Fox One!” Gregory yelled over the squadron link.

  “Fox One!”

  “Fox One!”

  The other Black Demons added their voices to the chorus as their missiles dropped from their Starblades, then accelerated toward the looming target. Volleys of laser and plasma beam fire from three of the destroyers stabbed and snapped at the oncoming fighters. Lieutenant Hall’s Starblade took a direct hit and flared into a fireball of hot plasma. Lieutenant Randle’s Starblade flared and crumpled an instant later.

  Gregory held his course, daring the Russian weapons crews to claw him down. The other fighters peeled off, giving themselves sufficient lateral vectors to clear the enemy target, but Gregory continued arrowing through the wall of defensive fire. “Fox One!”

  His second Krait missile slipped smoothly through the Russian point defense and detonated just aft of the destroyer’s shield cap, a dazzling flare of incandescence that swiftly cooled, revealing drifting debris and the slow spinning axis of the ship trailing a tangle of wreckage where the shield cap had been mounted. The shield cap had been blasted free and was now spinning in the midst of a glittering, expanding spiral galaxy of frozen droplets of water.

  Gregory’s Starblade hurtled through the debris field.

  Ice and small metal fragments pinged and cracked across his hull, but the fighter’s nanomatrix absorbed the myriad impacts. Beyond the debris cloud, Gregory saw the oncoming maw of the slowly tumbling TRGA. And rising from the cylinder’s enormous opening . . .

  “All ships! All ships!” he called over the squadron channel. “Russian carrier emerging from the triggah!” In another minute they would hear that warning back aboard the America. For right here and now, the Black Demons and the Headhunters might be able to do some real damage.

  He triggered a salvo of nuke-tipped Kraits, then swung around his grav projection, braking savagely. For a moment, he thought he might crash into the giant ship in front of him, but his AI squeezed an extra few Gs of lateral thrust and he sailed across the carrier’s hull, scant meters from the blurred expanse of power modules, sponsons, and point defense turrets racing by. For just a moment, he imagined himself plunging into the Russian carrier . . .

  But . . . no. In another instant, he was past the Moskva and decelerating for another pass. What had happened to his missiles?

  Intercepted. Clawed from the sky by the Russian point defense system.

  “Urgent message from the America,” his AI whispered in his mind. “All squadrons are to break off the attack and regroup with our carrier.”

  Behind his faceplate, Gregory scowled. Shit!

  Still, those few moments of heart-pounding combat seemed to have dissipated his blood-rage. He lined up for another shot, then loosed his last two Kraits at the now-receding Moskva.

  “Fox One!”

  One of his missiles was intercepted by a Russian pee-beep, but the second detonated just above the hull, a brilliant flash that left Gregory dazzled. As his vision returned, he could see extensive damage across the carrier’s portside. His warhead hadn’t actually impacted the target, and the Russian hull shields had diverted most of the hard stuff.

  But the Russian was hurt.

  And Gregory was out of shipkillers.

  So tempting . . .

  “All Demons! Break off! Rendezvous back at the America.”

  Gregory was shaking as he piloted his Starblade back to the carrier.

  Flag Bridge

  CIS CV Moskva

  Penrose TRGA

  1521 hours, GMT

  “Your information appears to have been accurate, Doctor,” Oreshkin said. “The America battlegroup is, indeed, at Omega Centauri. I wonder why?”

  Fedorov shrugged. “The prisoner believed they were hunting for signs of the Consciousness.”

  “Are there such signs?”

  “None that we’ve been able to detect, sir.”

  “First Officer!”

  “Sir!” Kulinin replied.

  “We will close to attack. Long-range missiles and beams, if you please. Commander Nikolayev!”

  “Yes, sir!” his air group commander replied over the com link.

  “Launch fighters.”

  “Yes, sir!”

  They had America pinned against the Ro
sette of black holes, positioned perfectly for attack.

  USNA CVS America

  Flag Bridge

  Omega Cluster

  1525 hours, FST

  Gray considered his options. He didn’t have a hell of a lot of them.

  Five surviving Russian destroyers were steadily approaching, and the carrier beyond was loosing clouds of fighters, even as America began recovering her own fighter groups. The America battlegroup was seriously outnumbered and badly outgunned. Even if somehow they were able to beat them off, America and her two escorts might well be crippled, her fighter squadrons shot to pieces, and—if the Acadia was destroyed in the fight—they would be unable to replenish their consumables.

  Discretion was decidedly the better part of valor in this confrontation. The question was where to run. He’d told Dr. Conyers that they could make the run all the way to Earth under Alcubierre Drive in three point eight years, but they would have to stop for resupply every month or so. If the Russian squadron pursued them the same way, then sooner or later they would catch up with the battlegroup while it was parked next to an asteroid somewhere taking on rawmat.

  Would the Russians give chase? Gray still had no idea why they were on the Russian’s shit list in the first place, though privately he suspected that politics were involved. Walker politics. Unless a war had broken out back home, but damn it, that made no sense at all. There’d been no crisis when America had cast off from Quito Synchorbital, no USNA-Russian tension of note, and no reason for the Russian carrier group to pursue them so avidly.

  It had to be Walker.

  “Admiral? PriFly.”

  “Go ahead, CAG.”

  “Our fighters are aboard. Do you want to launch the ready squadrons?”

  “Negative, CAG. Rearm and replenish.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  “Captain Rand.”

  “Yessir!”

  “Set course for N’gai . . . through the Rosette, if you please.”

  “What?” Rand sputtered, then somehow tried to regain some semblance of proper military decorum. “Sorry, Admiral. I mean . . . the Rosette?”

  “I’m not used to having my orders questioned, Captain. Lieutenant West!”

  “Sir!”

  “Pass the word to our escorts. They are to run interference for us while we and the Acadia go through the Rosette. They are then to follow us. Make sure they have the appropriate navigational data.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  “Admiral Gray,” Rand said. “That means threading past those energy jets from the black holes. We’ll be fried!”

  “We’ll make the passage under SAI control.”

  “Even then—Admiral, I recommend we look at other options. Going through the Rosette is suicide!”

  “Commander Mackey!”

  Luther Mackey, America’s Executive Officer, turned from his workstation. “Sir!”

  “I am putting you in command of this vessel. Mr. Rand . . . you are relieved.”

  “Sir! I protest—”

  “We’ll talk about it later.” On his main screen, the destroyers were closer, beginning to spread out. Probably a missile-launch formation. “Captain Mackey, did you hear my orders?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Can you carry them out?”

  “Aye, aye, sir!”

  Mackey didn’t miss a beat in his response, the ancient naval and Marine courtesy “aye, aye” they said stood for “I understand and I will obey.”

  Gray had known Luther Mackey for a long time. He’d been the skipper of the Black Demons for several years before he’d been bumped up to Executive Officer. Gray knew him to be a steady, reliable officer, which was exactly what he needed on America’s bridge right now.

  He hated relieving Rand in front of the entire bridge crew like that, but the man had been on the verge of refusing a direct order, and—just as important—arguing with him took up valuable time. Gray knew he would have to face the consequences of his action later, but he’d had to act now.

  The Birmingham and the Arlington were moving into position to block the enemy’s approach.

  “Lieutenant West.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Make to Acadia. Tell them we’ll go through first, but they should stick close behind us.”

  “Aye, aye, Admiral.”

  Slowly gathering speed, the America turned away from the fight and began descending into the maelstrom of radiation and whirling gravitational masses that was the Omega Rosette.

  He didn’t like running. But there was absolutely no point in fighting here save for survival. With another way out, even a desperate one, they were better off avoiding a pointless and probably fatal engagement.

  The question was whether they could survive the escape.

  Ahead, the six black holes of the Rosette steadily and swiftly circled their common center of gravity, each surrounded by its own accretion disk of starcore-hot plasma, each projecting straight threads of searing radiation from its poles. Those threads posed the greatest danger during America’s approach, sweeping through nearby space like powerful plasma beams. Composed of particles accelerated nearly to the speed of light by the powerful gravitational fields of the Rosette black holes, a touch by any of them would rip a starship apart.

  Konstantin Junior, however, had the con of both America and the Acadia, and was able to calculate velocity and course and angle to a degree that was literally superhuman.

  Astern, Arlington and Birmingham were exchanging fire with the oncoming destroyers, the range still too great to score any serious damage. The Russian fighters, however, were closing in.

  “Lieutenant West. Tell Birmingham and Arlington to follow us in.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Gray began to glimpse within the Rosette’s center the oft-noted snatches of other places, other starfields . . . even other universes. Traversing the Rosette gateway was very much like passing through one of the far smaller TRGAs. The ship making the passage had to stick to a very specific course through the gravitational vortex; missing the proper course by a few tens of meters could land you in the wrong place entirely . . . or even the wrong time.

  Things were worse with the far larger and more powerful Omega Rosette. Research ships had glimpsed entirely different universes through that central opening. Conversations with the Consciousness suggested that that alien group Mind might have slipped through from one of those. If Konstantin Junior wasn’t precisely on course . . .

  America fell into the Rosette, accelerating now toward the structure’s center of gravity. The Rosette’s diameter was some tens of thousands of kilometers; the individual black holes at this distance, even though they were artificially large structures each nearly the size of Earth, were too distant to show any detailed features, but the white-hot disks of plasma around them created a circle of brilliant, fast-moving stars.

  And still America fell. . . .

  Time was slowing as they fell deeper into the relativistic warp within the Rosette. Ahead, starfields shifted and blurred, switching from one scene to another with bewildering speed, now an open starscape much more thinly populated than the core of Omega Centauri; now a burning emptiness that might have been pure energy; now a field of ancient, red stars, shrunken and dwindled; now a younger blaze of hot blue-white suns . . .

  Now the heart of a galactic cluster, packed with suns and laced with incandescent plasma.

  And the starscape steadied on that last as Konstantin Junior made a final slight alteration to America’s course. And then . . .

  Emergence.

  They were through.

  “Lieutenant Vasquez!” Gray rasped. The sight of this star-packed glory always clutched at his throat. “What are we looking at? Are we where we’re supposed to be?”

  “Confirmed, Admiral . . . this is the N’gai Cluster. We’re 876 and some million years in our past.”

  “It doesn’t look much like the last time we saw it,” Mackey said from the command bridge.


  “Yeah, well, six hypernovae will do that, you know,” Gray replied.

  The explosion of six supergiant stars had filled the N’gai Cluster with hot plasma, but after three years, as expected, the gas had become tenuous enough that America was not in danger of vaporizing.

  Gray stared out into a thickly clotted starscape wreathed with tangled filaments and clouds of plasma. Astern, six black holes with searingly hot accretion disks orbited a common center of gravity where once six blue giants had formed the Rosette of Six Suns. To port, a few thousand kilometers distant, was a seventh black hole, its unimaginable gravity twisting the light from the stars beyond into a dazzling ring encircling the object. This one had no accretion disk, he saw. Under highest magnification, he could just make out the sphere of impenetrable darkness at the center of the optical distortion. Konstantin Junior estimated the diameter of the object’s event horizon to be 206 kilometers. The math suggested the black hole possessed a mass of approximately seventy times that of Earth’s sun.

  Where the hell had that come from?

  “What now, Admiral?” Mackey asked him.

  He didn’t answer immediately. They were here to find the fleeing Sh’daar fleet, and they at least had a vague idea of where they’d been going: roughly in that direction.

  But finding them was going to be like finding one particular grain of sand somewhere on a very, very large beach.

  “We wait for Birmingham and Arlington to come through the Rosette,” he said at last. “And then, I guess we’ll just have to see.”

  After another moment, he thoughtclicked an in-head channel. “Colonel McDevitt, this is Admiral Gray. We need to talk.”

  Flag Bridge

  CIS CV Moskva

  Omega Centauri

  1545 hours, GMT

  “Sir! The enemy has escaped into the Rosette!”

  Oreshkin scowled at the screen. The information had come too late for him to do a damned thing about it. The two American ships—a destroyer and a cruiser—were passing into the tortured space at the heart of the Rosette . . . and in an eye’s blink, they were gone.