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  One minute left. Birmingham, Arlington, and Seare were loosing volley after volley of AMSO rounds, targeting the volume of space directly in front of the oncoming ships and KK missiles. The Acadia waited until the wall of shield missiles was past, then accelerated in the same direction, headed directly for the oncoming ships. Gray wanted to call Ferguson again, wanted to tell him not to cut things too close, but James Ferguson was skilled and experienced. He knew what he was doing and would look after his ship.

  The remaining seconds dwindled away, a relentless countdown.

  An instant before zero, a bright flash strobed in the darkness, eye-searingly savage. The first flash was followed by a second . . . a third . . .

  Several hundred kilometers out there in the dark, high-velocity clouds of AMSO sand were slamming into incoming KK rounds at relativistic velocities, each impact the equivalent of some hundreds or even thousands of tons of high explosives. In moments, dozens of flashes silently flared, then dimmed across the dark and empty sky.

  The scattering of flashes died away. Seconds later, surviving KK rounds began arrowing past and through the USNA squadron.

  Those rounds weren’t aimed, of course. There was no way to accurately aim a weapon at a pinpoint target from ten light-minutes away. But there were so many of them, launched in a tightly packed cloud, that a few were sure to hit simply and purely by chance.

  The Seare shuddered violently and slewed to port, a dazzling pulse of light erupting from her stern, and Gray’s heart sank. Damn! Ruler-straight threads of raw light streaked past the America from the detonation aft—fragments of impactors converted in an instant to lines of fast-moving plasma. Had the destroyer not intercepted that warhead, Gray knew, it would have slammed into America’s stern at eighty percent of the speed of light.

  Four hundred seventy-one men and women had just died to protect the far larger carrier.

  “Watch that wreckage!” Rand snapped. The mass of wreckage was tumbling now, spilling fragments in a silvery arc as it turned. Parts of her central spine were crumpling as Gray watched; Seare and the other ships of the USNA squadron were powered by tiny singularities—artificial black holes—and the destroyer’s power tap singularities didn’t simply go away when the ship was destroyed. They were moving through the wreckage’s center of mass now, feeding greedily on the debris.

  “Maneuvering, Captain,” the helm officer reported. America was using some of her reaction mass to nudge the massive star carrier to the side, avoiding the spill of wreckage. America had magnetic screens in place, of course—hull-conforming shielding designed to protect her from radiation and relativistic impacts at near-c velocities—but the largest pieces were too massive and could cause serious damage to America’s aft hull if they struck.

  Some hundreds of kilometers aft, the Acadia was weathering a storm of missiles. A KK projectile grazed her forward shield cap, the flash loosing a geyser of water freezing instantly to sparkling particles of ice. “Took a hit there, America,” Captain Ferguson said over the open channel. “Nothing major. Cargo hatches are open. Commencing roll.”

  The Acadia was on a direct heading toward the oncoming attacking ships. Despite the damage she’d just taken, she began rolling around her long axis.

  She was a bulk rawmat carrier, designed to pull up alongside an asteroid and use clouds of nanodisassemblers to devour the rock and transport individual particles, most the size of grains of sand, back to her cargo holds. Ferguson had released the containment fields in his holds and opened the outer bay doors. As Acadia rolled, centrifugal force dropped the holds’ contents into space in several fine, spiraling plumes of dust, expanding outward from the ship. With a rotation rate generating one gravity, the dust clouds expanded a rate of ten meters per second. When her holds were empty, Acadia reversed course and moved back toward America.

  “Okay, Admiral Sandy,” Ferguson said. “Hope you know what you’re doing! We’re plumb out of rawmat now.”

  “Good job, James,” Gray replied. “We’ll stock up at the first supermarket we encounter. Sensors!” he then called out. “Can you read any life signs on the Seare wreckage?”

  A long and painful delay, seconds following seconds, marked Vasquez’s hesitation as he studied his readouts. He was searching for intact pockets of heat radiation, the expected leakage from sealed compartments still holding atmosphere at seventeen to twenty degrees. “I’m sorry, Admiral. I’m not getting anything.”

  Gray had not expected there to be survivors, not with a blast that savage, but you never knew. The debris field had spread out across a huge area of the sky aft, but a substantial portion of the spine, including the hab modules, was visible tumbling off to starboard. His own readouts were showing pockets of searing heat and a blaze of intense X-ray radiation from the wreckage—the product of those rogue singularities chewing through mass deep inside.

  No, there would have been be no survivors.

  VFA-198 Hellfuries

  Penrose TRGA

  79 light years from Earth

  1239 hours, FST

  Lieutenant Julianne Adams hurtled along America’s spine, the massive bulk of the carrier’s quantum tap generators blurring past her as she dumped the Starblade’s velocity. She’d seen the blast that had destroyed the Seare just astern of the star carrier, and she wondered if anybody had survived.

  Her wingman, Lieutenant Robert Spahn, was off her portside. “Where the hell are we going, Julia?” he called, sounding impatient. “The squadron’s forming up eighty klicks from here!”

  “Just need a second, Spanner,” she called back. “I want to see if anyone survived on the Seare.”

  “Survived that? Don’t be ridiculous!”

  But he stuck with her as their Starblades passed a hundred meters above America’s massive aft drive projectors and decelerated hard at the fringes of a fuzzy, expanding cloud of debris.

  Another brilliant flash, this one larger and brighter than the others. Something—an enemy fighter, or possibly a battlespace drone—had just slammed into the spreading spiral of debris laid down by Acadia. More explosions followed, and local space was suddenly filled with hurtling debris.

  Fighters emerged from the debris cloud, and Adams’s computer identified them as the new Yastreb fighters—the name was Russian for “Hawks.” At least six of them had been destroyed by impacting the cloud, but the spiral of rawmat was only about a kilometer across by now, too small of a wall to catch every one of the incoming Hawks. Adams estimated at least two squadrons—say, twenty-four fighters—in this first wave. A quarter had been knocked down by the squadron’s improvised defenses, but the rest were flashing silently in past America and her consorts.

  Standard star carrier tactics called for dropping out of Alcubierre Drive at a distance, then sending fighters in toward the target at high velocity, usually right behind an initial bombardment of missiles or KK projectiles at near-c. They would do as much damage as was possible with beams and missiles, softening up the target for the capital ships trailing behind.

  The Seare’s wreckage would have to wait. “Let’s take them!” she called to Spahn, and the two fighters spun to port and accelerated. The enemy fighters were moving much too fast for a human brain to track, but the fighters’ AIs predicted firing solutions and, with Adams’s approval, launched a spread of VG-92 Krait missiles. Nuclear fire blossomed, silent and stark against the night, casting weirdly moving shadows through the cloud of dust and ice particles surrounding the Seare’s shattered hull.

  Adams decelerated sharply; some of those chunks of radiating debris were the size of houses, and everything in the sky was moving.

  Missiles were inbound, tracking her. Shit!

  Maneuvering sharply, she ducked behind one large piece of debris just as two nuclear-tipped missiles swung to intercept her . . .

  . . . and slammed into the wreckage, a white supernova of blinding intensity filling all of space.

  Adams’s Starblade died as she lost consciousness.

&
nbsp; Chapter Six

  12 April, 2429

  USNA CVS America

  Flag Bridge

  Penrose TRGA

  1252 hours, FST

  Gray watched the blossoming white flowers of nuclear fury strobing against the darkness. America’s fighters were engaging the enemy fighters ship to ship in a savage knife fight. At least five more enemy fighters died within a few seconds, but two of his Starblades were scratched as well.

  The fighters America had launched moments before possessed very little in the way of maneuverability. In hard vacuum, fighters were unable to pull off the fancy zooms and curves of winged vehicles in atmosphere, and maneuvers were limited to slight adjustments from side to side or up and down. Even so, the dogfight might well scatter them all over the sky, leaving America and her two surviving escorts to deal with the approaching squadron of Russian capital ships.

  Captain Rand barked an order, and America’s main batteries opened up—powerful high-energy lasers, or HELs, and the searing, gigajoule lightning of particle-beam projectors, the PBPs, or “pee-beeps.” Enemy fighters died in that computer-directed crossfire.

  But not enough.

  “Captain Rand,” Gray said. “I suggest you bring our fighters back aboard.”

  “Already gave the order, sir. It’s getting too hot out there for the little guys.”

  “We’re also going to need to accelerate,” Gray told him. “And soon.”

  “Through the TRGA?”

  Gray felt Rand’s shock. “We have no choice, Captain.”

  It had taken Gray several minutes to arrive at that decision. Those capital ships—six destroyers and a very large carrier—would be arriving all too soon, coming in close behind the fighter wave. The question was what to do about them. The lack of information—the failure of the drones to return—worried him, but if they stayed here, the Russian heavies would pound America, Birmingham, Arlington, and Acadia into drifting wrecks soon after they arrived.

  “Why the hell are the Russians attacking us, anyway?” Rand demanded. “What’d we ever do to them?”

  “I suspect that they’re being used by somebody else,” Gray replied. “Someone who doesn’t want us going through that gate.”

  Astern, Acadia had returned from her quick out-and-back to lay down her rawmat minefield. To starboard, Russian fighters continued to flash past. America’s heavy weapons did their best to claw the swift-moving intruders from the sky.

  “Combat Officer! How long before the enemy heavies get to us?”

  Commander Billingsly was the squadron combat officer. “Uncertain, sir. We’re having trouble seeing through the debris clouds astern. Best guess? Another fifteen minutes.” With lower rates of acceleration, the Russian capital ships would not have been able to get anywhere near the speed of light in the past ten minutes.

  “Very well. Captain Rand—we need to move now! Have your people ready for maneuvering as soon as I give the word.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  Minutes passed, dragging. The Russian fighters had all vanished into the distance ahead, well beyond the loom of the Penrose TRGA. America’s fighters were coming back on board, their numbers depleted.

  Gray wished there was some way to find out what was happening beyond the TRGA that didn’t risk losing the entire squadron, but there was no way he was aware of to avoid it. Take an alternate path, perhaps, one that would bring them out someplace other than where they needed to go. But that was a recipe for disaster as well, since a blind TRGA jump could bring you out at another TRGA on the far side of the galaxy.

  No, they would try the path they knew and hope the drones had just been delayed.

  “All fighters are back on board, Admiral.”

  “Very well, Captain.”

  “All ships report ready for gating, Admiral,” Janice West told him.

  “Thank you, Lieutenant.” He opened a squadron command frequency in his mind, feeling the touch of each of the other captains. “All ships!” he said over the link. “Stay tight and close. Accelerate to one kilometer per second relative. Try to stay together.”

  The squadron began drifting slowly ahead. Russian fighters were beginning to pass again, this time coming from forward. They’d decelerated to a relative halt, then reversed their acceleration to make the return. America took a hit on her shield cap . . . and another . . .

  The only weapon she had that would bear directly forward was her pair of magnetic accelerators, launch tubes for fighters that could double as mag-lev cannons. Aiming them at something as small and fast as a fighter was an exercise in futility.

  Faster, now. The mouth of the TRGA yawned directly ahead, the space around it slightly blurred by the twisting, relativistic masses inside. Through the opening, he could see stars.

  Here we go.

  And then, as America dropped into the groove of her precisely calculated trajectory through the lumen of the spinning tube, Gray realized with a cold shock that something was terribly, terribly wrong . . .

  “Hold it!” Admiral Gray yelled. “Damn it, hold her on course!”

  America bucked and shuddered as she moved down the length of the TRGA.

  The stars—the stars visible straight ahead down the length of the TRGA cylinder—the stars were moving!

  The only possible explanation for that was that Omega, the TRGA at the other end of this transit, was in motion, tumbling end-for-end, and that was starkly impossible.

  America was tightly gripped by the gravitational forces inside the cylinder, and those forces were now creating a considerable pressure pushing Gray back against his seat. Centrifugal force, he thought. From the TRGA’s spin . . .

  There was also a rapidly building vibration, sharp enough to rattle his teeth. The circle of light ahead filled with whirling stars grew larger . . . larger. . . .

  Emergence.

  Light exploded around the America as she shot from the maw of the titanic cylinder. “My God . . .” Gray said, his voice an awed whisper.

  America had been within the heart of the Omega Centauri Cluster more than once before.

  Omega Centauri now was a seething ocean of light, its heart filled with an anomalous blue nebula, its encircling walls a tangle of millions of stars as bright as Venus seen from Earth, crowded together so closely they averaged one to two tenths of a light year between each.

  Directly ahead, six searingly brilliant disks were arranged in an unnatural circle. Beams of lightning-sharp light lanced from each disk, two of them extending ninety degrees from the planes of the disks’ rotation. Gray could see where each beam had burned through the surrounding nebula, evaporating it with a blowtorch kiss.

  Gray was having trouble piecing together what he was seeing.

  He dragged himself away from the awe-filled sky and checked the flag bridge screen showing the view aft.

  The Omega TRGA had been constructed within a few hundred thousand AU of the black hole Rosette. Its official designation was Dunlop, after the Scottish astronomer who in 1826 had first identified Omega Centauri as a globular star cluster, not simply a fuzzy star. No one called it that, however. Human stellar navigators had always called it simply “Omega,” a name that somehow seemed more fitting in this spectacular setting.

  Whatever its name, the TRGA, as he’d guessed, was in a slow tumble end-over-end, and as he watched, the Birmingham emerged, flung by centrifugal force added to her own speed into space. A moment later, Arlington emerged . . . followed by the Acadia. The four ships were moving in four different directions, but all appeared to be in one piece. A cluster of signals alerted Gray to other Earth assets here: several hundred tiny smartdrones. They’d emerged safely from the spinning TRGA but had been unable to get back in, and now they were requesting retrieval.

  “Have the others form up on us,” he told Lieutenant West. “Captain Rand, please bring us to a halt relative to the TRGA.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  Gray turned his attention back to the glowing cloud filling the
surrounding space. “God . . . but this place has changed!”

  VFA-198 Hellfuries

  Penrose TRGA

  79 light years from Earth

  1325 hours, FST

  Adams struggled back to full consciousness. She’d been . . . dreaming, she thought, dreaming of falling and falling and never hitting bottom. Then she opened her eyes and by the dim glow of the cockpit lights she could make out the close, almost formfitting embrace of her fighter around her.

  She remembered a flash . . . a shock . . .

  Adams wasted no time in running through a quick assessment of her condition. Her left arm hurt—a lot—and she thought it was broken. Her flight suit had already injected her with anodyne nano and frozen into a rigid support for her arm. Her in-heads were operational, but most of the sensors in her Starblade were off-line, as was the ship’s AI. Power was on battery, and life support was down. She had, she estimated, enough air remaining in her cockpit reserves to last her perhaps ten hours, before CO2 levels would rise enough to put her to sleep again . . . this time permanently.

  She needed to see out. If America was still in the area, she might be able to attract their attention somehow. The fighter had manually operated flare launchers.

  She began searching for a working external camera. Most ship systems were off-line, but there were some emergency support systems that should be . . .

  Ah! There. A window opened in her mind, giving her a view of space outside the hulk of her crippled fighter. Fragments of the Seare drifted close by. Beyond, a massive black shape blotted out the stars.

  At first, she felt a prickle of excitement . . . until she realized that the shape was only superficially like America, or any of the squadron’s capital ships. Using the camera’s zoom feature, she zeroed in on an illuminated patch on the blunt, bullet-shaped shield cap, and was able to pick out six letters: MOCKBA.