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  “It won’t be the first time you’ve committed treason for a higher good,” Konstantin said.

  Damn! Somehow the machine was reading his mind again. Or did it simply know him so well that it knew what he was thinking?

  “Not treason,” Koenig said. “Not quite.”

  This, Gray thought, was one of those classic situations where it would turn out to be treasonous if the expedition ended in disaster. If he succeeded, well . . . he might end up a hero.

  He didn’t care about that. What was important was the well-being of those under his command. He would have to make certain that if he was indicted for treason, his crew didn’t go down with him.

  Assuming, of course, that any of them returned from this insane adventure.

  “Konstantin,” Gray said. “How is it that you keep pulling shit like this and no one has unplugged you yet?”

  “An interesting question, Admiral,” the SAI replied. “I will give it due consideration and let you know after your return from the past.”

  “So when do you need my decision?” Gray asked.

  “As soon as possible,” Koenig replied. “By tomorrow, perhaps?”

  “What’s the rush? The Sh’daar fleet won’t be that much farther along if we wait a week.”

  “Agreed,” Konstantin replied. “However, President Walker is taking steps to block all access to other civilizations . . . especially those that were part of the Sh’daar Collective during the war. We don’t know what else he has planned, but it’s not impossible that he’ll decide to enforce some sort of departure embargo on Navy ships. There are secret files on-line to which I have access dealing with the technical means of disabling ships currently in port.”

  “Come on!” Gray said, shocked. “I know the guy’s an isolationist, but that’s going a little far, isn’t it?”

  “At this point, Trev, we have no idea what’s too far for this guy and what is not. He’s just shut down SIRCOM.”

  “That was your research group, wasn’t it?”

  “It was.” Koenig stressed the second word.

  Singularity Research Committee had been a Columbus-based think tank dedicated to studying potential aspects of the Singularity and formulating possible responses to it. The idea had been to guide Humankind into and through the more serious dangers of the Singularity, and the former President had been a senior member.

  “Walker is a loose cannon, making snap judgments and throwing his weight around,” Koenig continued. “We need to act before it’s too late to do anything constructive.”

  Gray nodded—that made sense—but he was still considering the idea of contravening a presidential order. The USNA wasn’t at war at the moment, so they wouldn’t kill him for treason. But he might be looking at a long term in prison or, far worse, loss of Net access or even a personality rewrite.

  That he would need to think about . . .

  “I’ll let you know as soon as I can.”

  Chapter Three

  06 April, 2429

  SupraQuito Complex

  Earth Synchorbit

  0725 hours, EST

  “I’ve got to leave, love.”

  “Not yet. Another minute?”

  “I want to be on board by oh eight thirty.”

  Laurie Taggart snuggled closer to Gray, holding him tight. “I wish I were going with you.”

  “Me, too.”

  They floated together in a tangle of arms and legs within a padded room. The Clarke’s Overlook was strictly a tourist hotel located close by the naval yards, but they offered decent accommodations including so-called honeymoon nests—rooms that could give you a decent night’s sleep, but which were primarily designed for zero-G sex. A hideaway closet contained a variety of soft bungie cords for holding a person close to one or more others despite their most vigorous movements.

  One bulkhead looked out into a dizzying panorama of orbital structures perched atop the Quito Space Elevator. SupraQuito orbited the Earth at an altitude and with a velocity that precisely matched the rotation of the Earth on the equator, which meant that the Clarke Overlook was in constant free fall.

  The two of them had met here before. Two years ago, Taggart had been transferred to Mars while Gray was flying a desk in Washington, but they came here whenever possible. As the old saying had it, Earth orbit was halfway to anywhere. This was the energetic equivalent of meeting halfway, even though Mars was at least a thousand times farther from here than Earth.

  Even so, it was hell making their schedules mesh, and Gray was glad for the opportunity, brief though it was.

  Taggert wasn’t as happy with the duration of this visit. “So . . . you’re off to meet the gods again?”

  He pulled his head back far enough to look at her face, haloed by a drifting blond tangle of hair. “You’re not into that AAC crap again, are you?”

  “No. Of course not.” She sounded uncomfortable. “Figure of speech.”

  For years, Laurie Taggart had been a member of the Ancient Alien Creationists, a church founded on the idea that an alien super-civilization had created Humankind millions of years ago and become the gods and goddesses of human history and myth. While serving as the senior weapons officer on board the star carrier America, she’d become . . . disillusioned. Earth’s explorations of the galaxy had come across technologies, artifacts, and civilizations so far beyond the human ken as to utterly defy comprehension. There were beings and technologies out there that so dwarfed the deities of any merely human mythology or religion to paltry insignificance. Human gods were so . . . so human—fallible and short-sighted and petty and childishly vindictive compared to the reality.

  But the stirrings of wonder she still felt when she witnessed that kind of scope and power took her back to the roots of her old faith and seemed, sometimes, to rekindle it.

  But Gray knew she didn’t like admitting that.

  “We are the Stargods,” he told her gently. “Or we will be. Just give us a few thousand years.”

  “Come the Singularity,” she said.

  The Singularity, of course, had been very much on his mind since the conversation with Koenig and Konstantin. “Even without the Singularity, we humans are on our way to being more powerful, more intelligent, more knowing than any mythological god ever was.”

  “And in the meantime, we are very, very small fish in an ocean filled with whales. You be careful out there, okay?”

  He kissed her deeply. “Believe me, I will be. I want to come home to this.”

  “Mmm. Are they expecting you this morning then? On the America?”

  “Actually, no. My orders read the seventh, tomorrow morning. I figured a surprise arrival would put me ahead of the curve.”

  “Then you have a little more time. C’mere. There are priorities, you know.”

  Two hours later, Admiral Gray sat within the cramped confines of the personal transporter’s narrow cabin. Too small to be a spaceship in its own right, too large to be a spacesuit, the PT drifted along a precisely calculated path between the main synchorbital base and one of the open receiving bays recessed into the curve of America’s massive flank. The two-kilometer trip would last just fifteen seconds.

  He used the time to watch the mammoth star carrier’s approach, feeling the gathering excitement.

  She was no longer the largest vessel in human space as she’d been when she was launched, but she still was as impressive as she’d ever been—1,150 meters long, a slender needle extending aft from her shield cap, the water tank shaped like a flat dome or the cap of a mushroom half a kilometer across and 150 meters deep. That tank held some billions of liters of water serving both as radiation shielding and as a store of reaction mass for maneuvering. A conning tower tucked up within the shadow of that shield cap housed the bridge; aft of that, four long, flat, massive hab modules rotated around the central spine swiftly enough to generate a half G of out-is-down spin gravity. The carrier’s landing bays and flight decks were housed there, along with living accommodations for near
ly five thousand crew members. The kilometer-long spine of the ship housed bank upon bank of quantum power converters, plus the twin magnetic railguns that emerged at the front center of the shield cap.

  The ship ahead swelled from a delicate toy to a dark gray metal cliff; magfields in the tiny opening of the receiving bay captured him, guided him in, then decelerated him with a gentle but firm shove forward.

  He was home.

  He’d docked with the carrier in a non-rotating hull section, so he was now in microgravity. Once the receiving compartment was pressurized around him, a hatch opened, its nanomatrix dissolving away, and he drifted out into the receiving bay. A larger hatch opened in front of him, and he used a grab rail to pull himself hand over hand into the quarterdeck.

  He saluted the flag painted on the aft bulkhead, then rotated to face the officer of the deck. “Permission to come aboard,” he said.

  The two saluted one another as the OOD said, “Granted, Admiral!” He sounded surprised. “Sir, we weren’t expecting you aboard for another twenty-four hours! No one told us—”

  “Just between you and me, Lieutenant,” Gray replied, “I hate those full-dress welcoming ceremonies.” And he winked.

  His quip wasn’t completely a lie. He did dislike the spit-and-polish rituals surrounding a flag officer coming aboard. But it would also give him a chance to check up on crew and vessel before they were ready for him. Stealing a march on Walker had other benefits besides a swift departure.

  Hand over handing to the elevator at the far side of the quarterdeck, he entered it, gave his destination, and held on as weight momentarily returned. How something could be called an elevator when there was no up or down was an amusing puzzle . . . but a moment later the door opened and he floated onto America’s flag bridge.

  “Admiral on the bridge!” a rating barked.

  “As you were.”

  Gray still wasn’t entirely sure why he’d finally agreed to this. A lot of it, he thought, probably had to do with wanting to ease the transition of the Singularity when it happened. If the chaos of the Schaa Hok was any indication, things were going to be rough when the transition began.

  But part of it, too, was a kind of personal defiance against abject stupidity. The government was making assumptions and carrying out programs based on ignorance and deliberately twisted facts. When that sort of idiocy had consequences affecting every human on the planet, the people who knew better had to do something.

  And while Gray was not certain that anything he could do would make one damned bit of difference, he was willing to be guided by those smarter than him once more.

  “Welcome aboard, Admiral,” the ship’s captain said. His name was Jason Frederick Rand, and he’d taken command of the America just four months earlier, when her former skipper, Sara Gutierrez, had finally received her well-deserved and long-overdue promotion to rear admiral.

  “Thank you, Captain,” Gray replied. He maneuvered himself to his command seat and let the chair adjust to the pressure of his body and hold him down. “Give me a derep, please.”

  Derep was a debarkation report—how soon could they depart.

  “We were counting on another three or four days, sir . . .”

  “We don’t have three or four days. How soon can we cast off?”

  “Sir, power systems and drives are on-line and ready to go. We’re waiting on another two deliveries of rawmats . . . and, of course, three quarters of the crew is scattered all over Earth and synchorbit.”

  “Recall them.”

  “Aye, aye, sir. But . . .”

  “What?”

  “There’s a major fault in the assemblers, Admiral. We’re getting black goo out of both the food and clothing nanoreplicators, and the ship Net can’t—or won’t—tell us what the problem is. We have both Compsys and Environmental looking at it, but there’s no telling when we’ll have it up and running again.”

  Damn. It’s always something.

  “Something in the software?”

  “We think so, sir. But we haven’t been able to pin it down.”

  “Okay. Stay on it and keep me in the loop.”

  Damn—this was a problem that needed to be addressed before they could leave. Rather than stores of food sufficient to last a crew of five thousand for months at a time during a typical deployment, America carried bunkers filled with rawmat—raw materials: carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, and a couple dozen other elements that the ship’s assemblers could put together to create food, clothing, spare parts, machine tools, anything, in fact, that the crew needed to continue functioning. From time to time the ship could take on additional rawmat from a convenient asteroid.

  But it sounded as though the computers that ran the nanoreplicators might have a programming fault, and there was no way around that.

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Aside from that, Admiral, everything’s in good shape.”

  “Okay. Pass the word to bring our crew back on board. I want to cast off the moment we have the replicator problem solved.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “How many Marines on board?”

  “About six hundred, sir. Third Battalion, 25th Marines. Lieutenant Colonel McDevitt.”

  Gray nodded. He wanted a full complement of Marines on board. The sabotage worried him. “Who’s our chief AP?”

  “Head of the astrophysics department is Dr. Conyer.”

  “Have him come see me in my office, ASAP.”

  “I’ll tell her, sir.”

  He arched an eyebrow, but accepted the correction without comment. “Very well. Keep on the replicator problem and give me a yell as soon as it’s corrected. I’ll be aft.”

  The admiral’s office suite was located aft of the flag bridge and included an outer office staffed by several secretaries and yeomen, a private office, and a briefing room. Within the solitude of his inner sanctum, he drifted into his chair and opened an in-head channel. “Can you get a handle on the replicator mess?” he asked in his mind.

  “I am working on it, Admiral,” Konstantin’s voice replied. “I suspect viral sabotage.”

  “Yeah, I was wondering about that. Kind of convenient, isn’t it? We can’t leave port with no way to dispense food for the crew.”

  “I agree. It is possible that President Koenig’s home has been . . . compromised.”

  “Marta?”

  Konstantin’s voice hesitated. “That seems unlikely, but I will look into it. I think it more likely that President Walker’s people have managed to bug the house . . . or Koenig himself. Creating true privacy is something of a challenge.”

  And wasn’t that the truth? Nanotechnology had made it possible to create spybots the size of gnats, and microphones and cameras that literally were microscopic. Gray knew that Koenig’s normal security systems were more than capable of defeating the more common means of spying on someone. The windows would be vibrating very softly, to blur out attempts to use a laser trained on the transparencies to pick up sound vibrations and record conversations inside. All communication devices would be constantly monitored so that they could not be switched on from a remote location and used for eavesdropping. Koenig’s in-head cerebral implants would be checked periodically, to make sure he’d not picked up a spy virus over the Net.

  But as quickly as threats could be detected and neutralized, it seemed, new ones were being dreamed up. Foreign intelligence agencies, industrial concerns, and even agencies within the USNA government would all want to keep tabs on the former President.

  It was even possible that Gray himself had been compromised. Those armored guards had checked him electronically outside Koenig’s home, but they might have missed something. His mind flashed back to that poser in the park . . . what was her name? De Sailles. She had touched his chest, he remembered, albeit very, very briefly. Had she passed on a nanovirus designed to turn his implants into listening and transmission devices?

  He made a mental note to have
a nanomedical expert give him a thorough scan, just to be sure. A chime sounded. “Enter.”

  An attractive woman of about Gray’s age floated in through the door. She wore a blue utility suit that marked her as belonging to the astrophysics department, and collar tabs that identified her as the civilian equivalent of a full commander. America carried a lot of civilian specialists on board; there were a number of skill sets that just didn’t come up with any regularity in the military.

  “Admiral Gray?” she asked. “I’m Carol Conyer.”

  “I’m pleased to meet you.” He gestured at a seat. “Strap in and be comfortable.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “I need your opinion about something, Doctor.”

  “Certainly, Admiral.”

  “Is the Omega Centauri triggah going to be passable?”

  “Ah.” Then her eyes widened as what Gray had said sank in. “We’re going to the Omega Cluster?”

  “That’s the idea. And from there to the N’gai Cloud 800 million years in the past.” He didn’t add they would be doing so if they could get away from the synchorbital facility.

  “Well . . . it’s been three years since the hypernova. Even though the Denebans appear to have blocked most of the hypernova blast, the core of Omega Centauri will still be a mess of high-energy radiation and extremely hot plasma. I’d need to check with the engineering department to find out if the ship can stand up to that kind of abuse.”

  “Actually, I was wondering more about the TRGA itself. Would the blast have hurt it in any way?”

  “Hypernovae release extremely powerful bursts of gamma rays,” Conyer told him. “When we didn’t know what they were, we tagged them ‘gamma ray bursters’—point sources of gamma radiation lasting as long as a minute, or even more. We would have to pass through an expanding shell of very hard radiation when we emerged inside the Omega Centauri core. Once we were there, though . . . well, it’s hard to imagine the TRGA being damaged, if that’s what you mean. The plasma wavefront would have engulfed it several hours after the blast, but it would be tenuous enough that it shouldn’t harm the structure itself.”