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  “One octillion,” Gray said. “Ten to the twenty-­seven distinct spacetime pathways. Assuming that the Black Rosette is the same as the Six Sun rosette built eight hundred seventy-­six million years ago.”

  “The number may be very much larger now,” a voice said in their heads, speaking through their in-­head circuitry. The AI that ran America was always there, listening, and very occasionally putting in a word or two.

  “Why is that?” Gutierrez asked.

  “The black holes of the Rosette in Omega Tee-­Prime distort spacetime between them to a far greater degree than was true for the Six Suns of Tee-­Sub. The actual number of distinct spacetime pathways through Tee-­Prime may exceed one centillion—­or ten to the three hundred third power—­essentially, and for all intents and purposes, nearly infinite.”

  And that was a sobering thought.

  Omega Tee-­Prime was the shorthand term for the Omega Centauri cluster today, time now, in the year 2425. Omega Tee-­Sub, on the other hand, was shorthand for the unwieldy T-­0.876gy, a clumsy term pronounced “Tee sub minus zero point eight seven six gigayear” and identifying the N’gai Cloud of the ur-­Sh’daar, 876 million years in the past.

  If the Rosette Aliens were busily rewriting the cluster’s immediate past, Gray thought glumly, it might be necessary to come up with some new spacial-­temporal terminology as well. Time travel made everything so damnably complicated.

  And yet, the ability to reshape time was an obvious follow-­on to the ability to warp space. Ever since Einstein, physicists had known that space and time were not distinct entities, but dimensional aspects of each other, of spacetime. Human ships used projected, artificial gravitational singularities to move themselves through space; in theory, it should be possible to do the same to move through time, though that would require a lot of energy—­more energy than even a star carrier’s quantum power tap could supply. In another few centuries, perhaps . . .

  But the Black Rosette Aliens were doing it now.

  From America’s current position, the Black Rosette was made invisible by distance, but close-­up passes by the Endeavor before her destruction had shown tantalizing glimpses of alien scenes, alien starfields peeking out through the lumen of that hazy circle of rotating singularities.

  What, Gray wondered yet again, were the Rosette Aliens up to? Who were they? Where—­when—­did they come from? Were they Sh’daar? Transformed and transfigured ur-­Sh’daar? Or someone, something utterly and completely different?

  The stargods? It was as good a name as any . . . though the term Rosette Aliens, for now, carried less emotional baggage for the merely human observers on board America and her consorts.

  Gray checked the time. Walton’s Shadowstar should be approaching the Rosette fairly soon, now. And if Walton survived the flight, they just might learn something more about exactly what the Rosette Aliens were up to.

  Recon Flight Shadow-­One

  Omega Centauri

  1118 hours, TFT

  Lieutenant Walton was decelerating now, his Shadowstar flipped end for end so that he was slowing from very nearly the speed of light. He needed to be moving at a more sedate pace if he and the ship’s AI were actually to see and record anything as they made their close passage of the Rosette. He couldn’t see much at all right now. He’d reshaped the drive singularity forward to extend a stealth sheath aft over his fighter. From most angles, now, his Shadowstar was invisible, the light coming from space around him sliding around the craft without ever quite reaching it. As camouflage, it was moderately effective, though instruments and organic eyeballs might still see a distortion of the background stars as he slid past—­and the rapidly flickering gravity well of his drive singularity was, as always, a dead giveaway.

  So far, though, the Rosette Aliens hadn’t appeared to notice him. That . . . or they didn’t care.

  He found the thought disturbing, akin to the thought of humans paying no attention to an ant crossing the path in front of them.

  But if one of those humans chose to bring his foot down just so . . .

  “I recommend dropping the sheath,” his AI told him. “We are approaching our objective.”

  “Do it,” Walton said. “Let’s see what we have.”

  He braced himself . . . and just in time. The sheath fell away as the artificial intelligence running the Shadowstar reconfigured the drive singularity, and the dazzling light of the heart of a globular cluster flooded in.

  Millions of stars crowded one another across the spherical interior of that radiant sky. Streaks of blackness showed where the Rosette Aliens had been busy at their enigmatic work of demolition and construction. Visible, too, was the tangle of structures created over the past few months by the aliens, an incredibly vast spider’s web of pale blue light apparently anchored on and within the encircling stars.

  Ahead and to starboard, a cluster of spheres hung adrift in space, each gleaming silver and as reflective as liquid mercury. And to port: the Black Rosette.

  Whirling about their common center of gravity at 26,000 kilometers per second, the six black holes themselves were little more than a circular blur. Gas and dust streamed in from surrounding space, encircled the Rosette in a tight spiral radiating far into the short end of the electromagnetic spectrum and filling the sky with actinic blue-­violet light. Hard radiation glared from the annihilation of infalling dust. This was, Walton thought, an extremely dangerous place to be. His ship’s shields would hold off the radiation for a time, but not indefinitely.

  Walton’s Shadowstar was drifting rapidly across the face of that spiral, 100,000 kilometers away from the central maw. The expanse of space haloed by the rotating singularities revealed a starscape beyond, but not the vista of the Omega Centauri cluster.

  He glimpsed a starfield . . . but one far thinner and poorer than that of the interior of the cluster. That scene was replaced in an instant by utter strangeness, by twisted and entangled streamers of red and gold and blue, the heart, possibly, of a nebula . . . or just possibly something else entirely, something beyond human experience. After that, more starfields, coming in rapid succession, and then a vast and mottled expanse of deep red-­orange glare . . . the surface, he thought, of a red sun, a red dwarf, possibly, seen at close range. More starfields . . . and a panorama that seemed to show a spiral galaxy tilted sharply on end . . . and then a blast of blue light and hard radiation—­a supernova, perhaps—­or, again, something for which human astrophysics had no name.

  Walton had the distinct impression that the scenes revealed within the Rosette changed as his angle of sight changed. There were myriad distinct paths through that gravitationally tortured gateway . . . that rip in the fabric of spacetime itself, and he was glimpsing hundreds of them as his Shadowstar fell across the Rosette’s maw. So fascinated was he by the succession of alien vistas that his AI had to give him the warning.

  “We have elicited a response from the Rosette Aliens,” the Shadowstar’s artificial intelligence announced, its mental voice as calm and dispassionate as a netfeed announcement of next week’s weather over Omaha. “Directly ahead.”

  Walton jerked his attention from the Black Rosette, and turned it instead to a bright silver star moving now into his recon ship’s path. He enhanced the magnification, zooming in on a perfectly reflective sphere that did not register on radar or any of his other sensors, save those recording the visible portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. He couldn’t even guess at the range or size of the thing. It might have been a meter across and a hundred meters away, or a kilometer across and much, much farther away. Since it was visible, a laser pulse would have given him a precise range . . . but a laser pulse might be interpreted as an attack.

  Walton’s orders were specific: Do not provoke the aliens; do not initiate a hostile exchange.

  He wished the aliens themselves had received those orders. According to the guys and gals
in America’s intelligence department, they’d vaporized an unarmed survey vessel a few months ago, along with two escorting destroyers. That sounded like a pretty solid initiation of hostilities to him.

  But the scale and scope of the stellarchitecture visible now around the Rosette gave some pretty convincing testimony about the aliens’ technological abilities, suggesting that nothing the human squadron could do would pose a particular threat to them.

  The target ahead was growing steadily brighter. Since the thing appeared to be reflecting ambient light from the surrounding stars rather than glowing with its own, that suggested that he was closing with it.

  “Engage drive,” he told the AI. “Let’s end for end and scoot.”

  “That is not possible,” the AI replied.

  “Why the hell not?”

  “Unknown. Attempts to initiate singularity projection have failed. The Rosette Aliens may be manipulating local space in such a way as to damp out such attempts.”

  “Shit! What about the power tap?”

  The Shadowstar’s power plant was a scaled-­down version of the power taps on board America and all other human starships. Microscopic artificial black holes rotated around one another on a subatomic scale, liberating a fraction of the zero-­point energy available in hard vacuum at a quantum level. If the aliens had damped out his drive singularity, his power plant would have been affected too.

  And yet, his in-­head instrumentation showed a steady flow of energy.

  “Ship power tap is functioning at optimum,” the AI told him.

  “Can you explain that?”

  “No . . . other than to suggest that the Rosette Aliens are damping out a very small and very specific volume of space immediately ahead of the ship.”

  Walton had no idea how such a thing could be accomplished. An old, old phrase from the literature of some centuries before came to mind, a phrase suddenly sharply relevant. “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” He didn’t remember where the quote was from, and didn’t have the time now to look it up. He planned to do so once he got back to the America.

  If he got back to the America. The silver sphere ahead was now rapidly growing larger, approaching him at high speed. His AI flashed a full update back to the carrier group.

  And then the sphere, the encircling walls of brilliant stars, the mysterious and bizarrely twisted alien structures, the gaping maw of the Rosette, everything smeared halfway around the sky before winking into blackness. . . .

  Chapter Two

  20 January 2425

  Recon Flight Shadow-­One

  Omega Centauri

  1122 hours, TFT

  . . . and then exploded into visibility once more.

  Walton blinked. America hung in space 10 kilometers directly ahead. An instant before, he’d been almost 50 astronomical units away from the carrier . . . a distance of 7.5 billion kilometers, drifting at a velocity of a kilometer per second. Now he was traveling at the same speed, but his course had changed 180 degrees, and somehow he’d leaped across 50 AUs in an instant, and without accelerating to near c.

  He remembered the way the sky had smeared around him, as though the space through which he’d been traveling had been bent through 180 degrees. And an instantaneous jump of 50 AUs? That was simply flat-­out impossible. Even at close to the speed of light and subject to relativistic time dilation, he would have experienced some time making a passage that long . . . and fighters were too small by far to mount the drive projectors necessary for the faster-­than-­light Alcubierre Drive.

  Alien magic. . . .

  Working through his AI, which with a machine’s tight focus seemed unsurprised by any of this, Walton decelerated, drifting into America’s inner defense zone. “America!” he called. “America, this is Shadow One!”

  There was a real danger that the carrier’s automated defense systems would target the incoming fighter and destroy it. The Shadowstar’s IFF should have flagged him as friendly on America’s scanners . . . but Walton found himself nursing a profound mistrust of the technology. Right now, the universe didn’t appear to be functioning the way it should.

  And the recon fighter should not have been able to simply drop inside America’s defensive perimeter that way. It not only violated the rules and regs of combat operations . . . but it violated the laws of physics as well.

  “Shadow One, America!” the voice of the ship’s CIC called. “What the hell are you doing there?”

  “I . . . I’m not entirely sure, America. One second I was at the Black Rosette. The next . . .”

  There was a long pause from the carrier, as though they were waiting for Walton to finish the thought. “Very well, Shadow One,” CIC replied after a moment. “You are cleared for approach and trap. C’mon in.”

  “Copy. Accelerating.”

  He didn’t trust himself to say more.

  USNA CVS America

  Omega Centauri

  1205 hours, TFT

  “So, we’re left knowing even less than we knew before,” Gray said. “Super-­powerful aliens are dismantling a star cluster . . . and when one of our recon ships gets too close they teleport it across fifty AUs without even breaking a sweat. Recommendations?”

  Gray was in America’s main briefing room with his command staff and department heads. Half were there physically; the rest had linked in from other parts of the ship. One entire bulkhead had been turned into a viewall, which was displaying video of Walton’s flyby of the Rosette. At the moment, it was showing the alien structures, looming vast and shadowy across the backdrop of stars.

  “What . . . what they did to our recon fighter,” Lieutenant Commander Philip Bryant said slowly, shaking his head, “is flat-­out impossible according to all of the laws of physics we understand.” He was the America’s chief stardrive engineer, and arguably the ship’s officer most conversant with her Alcubierre Drive and the essential malleability of empty space in the presence of powerful gravitational fields.

  “The sheer power . . .” That was America’s other senior engineering officer, Commander Richard Halverson, the newly promoted head of the ship’s engineering department, and an expert on power taps and vacuum energy.

  “Yeah. How the hell are we supposed to fight something like that?” Commander Dean Mallory was America’s chief tactical officer. “They could swat us like a bug if they wanted.”

  “I don’t think the admiral was suggesting we fight,” Captain Connie Fletcher said. She was America’s CAG, an old acronym identifying a carrier’s Commander Air Group from back in the days of wet-­Navy ships and aircraft. “That would be pretty pointless, right?”

  “It would be more like fucking suicide,” Commander Victor Blakeslee, America’s senior navigation officer, said, scowling. “Recommendations? Hell, my recommendation is that we chart a course for home and high-­tail it.”

  “Assuming they let us go,” the voice of Acting Captain Gutierrez added. She was on America’s bridge, but telepresencing the planning session through her in-­head. “It might not be that easy.”

  “We have no reason yet to assume hostile intent on the part of the Rosette Aliens.” Lieutenant Commander Samantha Kline was the head of America’s xenobiology department—­“X-­Dep,” for short. “They could have vaporized Lieutenant Walton. Instead, they bent space to drop him back here.”

  “I would remind you,” Halverson said slowly, “that those . . . those things out there did vaporize the Endeavor, the Herrera, and the Miller. If that’s not a hostile act, what the hell is?”

  “The vid returned by the HVK robot is . . . open to interpretation, sir,” Kline replied. “That might have been an accident. Or a mistake . . .”

  “A mistake by beings that powerful?” Fletcher said. “Beings that much like . . . like gods? That’s a pretty scary thought all by itself.”

 
“They are powerful,” Gray said. He wanted to redirect the session away from the aliens’ godlike aspect, however. He didn’t want his staff demoralized before they even encountered the Rosette Aliens directly. “But they’re not gods. If they did make a mistake when they destroyed the Endeavor, that would pretty much prove it, don’t you think?”

  “More likely,” Dr. George Truitt said, “it simply means they don’t care. Keep in mind, ­people, that we could be dealing with a K-­3 civilization here.”

  Truitt was a civilian specialist assigned to America, and he was something of a wunderkind. He was a xenosophontologist, studying nonhuman minds and ways of thinking, and therefore worked in X-­Dep under LCDR Kline.

  Gray frowned at Truitt. In November, just two months ago, the man had been instrumental behind the scenes in devising a bit of offensive propaganda that had secured a Terran victory at Osiris—­70 Ophiuchi A II—­a colony world conquered by a Sh’daar client race called the Slan. By carefully analyzing communications with the Slan commander and what had been gleaned about their biology, Truitt and his xenosoph ­people had extrapolated a likely model of Slan psychology, one showing that they would be horrified at the idea of attacking their own community, an unthinkable act of barbarism . . . an act of animals. By beaming a message to the Slan suggesting that humans thought the same way Slan did, that humans actually shared the Slan collective-­based psychology, Gray had forced the technologically superior Slan fleet to break off and retreat . . . a singular, spectacular victory.

  And Truitt was the instrument of that victory.

  It was too bad, Gray thought, that Truitt was also an egoistic grandstander, pompous, and possessing of social graces approximately on a par with wolverines.

  “What the hell,” Mallory asked, “is a K-­3 civilization?”

  “Christ, you don’t know what Kardashev classification is?” Truitt said, glaring at Mallory. “I hope you understand tactics, Commander, better than you do technic sophontology.”