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  Moskva—the Cyrillic letters spelling out the Russian for Moscow. That must be the Russian star carrier that had launched those Hawk fighters. She adjusted the camera’s angle, but could see no sign of the America. There was the perfect circle, imbedded in hazy light, of the Penrose TRGA, but America and her consorts were nowhere to be seen.

  She did see a smaller craft, however, a bulbous body painted in yellow-and-black stripes. The Russian name, shmel’, meant “bumblebee,” though USNA pilots had inevitably christened them “smellies.” It was a SAR tug—search and rescue—and it was combing the battlespace looking for survivors of the fight . . . or disabled fighters from either side.

  Which meant Adams faced an agonizing dilemma now. Should she hole up and stay very quiet, hoping the Russian searchers would miss her craft adrift with so much other space junk? Or should she signal them and wait for them to pick her up?

  How much data was she carrying in-head? What did she know that the Russians could use? What could be, should be, scrubbed?

  She didn’t want to surrender.

  But she didn’t want to die, either.

  After a long moment’s thought, she accessed her in-head software and purged any and all data that carried a security classification of secret or higher. There wasn’t all that much. They didn’t tell fighter pilots more than they absolutely needed to know.

  Then she reached for the handle that would trigger her emergency flares.

  USNA CVS America

  Observation Lounge

  Omega Centauri

  1412 hours, FST

  All of space, it seemed, was filled with blue light. Despite the intervention of the Denebans three years ago, the entire core of the globular star cluster had been filled by the remnants of a titanic stellar explosion, a thin haze reaching out for a distance of almost a light year. It had to be residue from the exploding star; globular star clusters had little in the way of dust and gas; a dwarf galaxy like the N’gai Cloud would have had its dust and gas stripped away when it was devoured by the Milky Way.

  The ionized gas in this part of the cloud was at a temperature of several million degrees; fortunately for the USNA squadron, the gas was so diffuse—a few molecules per cubic meter—that there was little heating on their outer hulls. Even so, the background radiation was still quite high, high enough to fry unshielded electronics—or humans—outside the ships’ protective shielding.

  The gas was being supercharged, both by the incredibly close-packed stars of the cluster—many only a fraction of a light year away—and by the lightning bright jets from six black hole accretion disks.

  The nebula hadn’t been there the last time he’d been here. Now it was so thick it dimmed the thronging stars beyond. The brightest and most optically brilliant objects in that sky, however, were opposite from the TRGA and a long way off—six tiny disks of intense white light, each speared through its center by a blue-white thread of radiance so intense they would have blinded unprotected eyes. The computer orchestrating the light show on the bulkheads of the observation chamber had stopped the brilliance of those threads down to where you could look at them, but the glare still was uncomfortable.

  “So I guess those accretion disks are matter from the supernovae,” Gray said. Those were new additions to the starscape as well—accretion disks around the individual black holes of the Rosette. It wasn’t hard to imagine how they’d come into existence. As the plasma heart of an exploding star had squeezed through from N’gai and the remote past, much of it had been captured by the six black holes orbiting here at the core of Omega Centauri. What had not been immediately swallowed by the black holes had orbited them. Each black hole now was imbedded in a flat disk of plasma whirling about its singularity and generating death screams of X-rays and gamma as it finally spiraled into the object’s event horizon.

  “Those . . . those things,” Gray told Dr. Conyers, indicating the fast-orbiting black holes, “are a lot farther apart than they used to be. The Rosette used to be just a few thousand kilometers across.”

  The two of them were adrift in America’s forward observation lounge, located above and abaft the flag bridge. The screens, tuned to show a seamless, panoramic view of surrounding space, displayed images larger and sharper than the smaller screens on either of the ship’s bridges. Forward, over a third of the sky was blotted out by the underside of the shield cap, which extended from the vessel’s spine like the canopy of an umbrella. In every other direction, however, up, down, aft, and to either side, the supernova nebula stretched in writhing coils and waves and fractal surfaces, all of them frozen in an instant of time. They showed something of the sheer violence that had created them, though distance and scale robbed them of any sense of actual movement.

  “Well, try cramming a blue giant star with a diameter of five to ten times the radius of the sun through a gravitational vortex less than an AU across,” Conyers told him. “What comes through is going to tend to expand rather violently . . . violently enough to actually nudge six black holes apart from one another.”

  “That’s scarcely credible.”

  “I know.”

  “I just wonder what the explosion was like on the N’gai Cloud side of the Rosette.”

  “They’re probably black holes now. They would have picked up a lot of additional mass when the star projectile went into the vortex, right? Enough to trigger six supernovae. The remnant of the star used by the Sh’daar to trigger all of this probably didn’t make it through, though. It will be interesting to go there and find out.”

  “Assuming we can manage that trick,” Gray said. His own voice sounded glum. “We were going to use the Omega TRGA to get to N’gai, but we’re not going to make it through that.” He indicated the slowly tumbling TRGA astern.

  “Even with super-AI to calculate trajectory and velocity?”

  “I’ll need to talk with Konstantin about that, but I doubt it will make a difference. Where and when we come out of a TRGA depends on the path we trace going through. Our vector has to be precise. If we miss it, we could end up . . . God alone knows where. Or when.”

  “We should still be able to get back to Earth, though. Under Alcubierre Drive, right?”

  “That won’t be a problem. It’ll just take forever to crawl across sixteen thousand light years.” He did a fast calculation in his head. “Three point eight years, actually, at fifteen light years per day. But we’ll be able to handle that okay. That’s why we have the Acadia, to top off our rawmat reserves along the way. I’m more concerned about the Consciousness.”

  “It’s dead, isn’t it?”

  “Well, I would think so,” Gray replied. “After all of this. For a while, this region of space was filled with enormous shapes and structures, things light years in length . . . and those are all gone, now. The Consciousness ought to be dead, but no one’s seen a body. I wouldn’t care to poke around if there’s a chance it might still be there . . . and conscious.”

  “Very funny.”

  Gray closed his eyes and accessed his command link with the bridge. “Lieutenant West? Anything from our pickets?”

  “No, Admiral. Their last report was that everything was clear.”

  “No drones?”

  “Negative, Admiral.”

  “Okay. Good.”

  Gray had given orders to move the squadron to a point several AUs away from the tumbling TRGA, but he’d also ordered the deployment of a couple of fighter squadrons to keep a close eye on the thing. If those Russian destroyers started coming through, he didn’t want America or her battlegroup to be caught napping.

  So far, however, there’d been nothing—not even drones sent through to check that the TRGA was working.

  “Birmingham . . . Arlington . . . I want you two positioned on either side of the TRGA. If the Russians come through, hit them before they have a chance to react. Understand?”

  “Understood, Admiral.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  He’d done everything he could,
covered all bases, but the lack of activity on the part of the Russians was reassuring.

  Slowly, Gray allowed himself to relax.

  VFA-96, Black Demons

  Omega Centauri TRGA

  1412 hours, FST

  Lieutenant Commander Donald Gregory watched the slow tumble of the Omega TRGA and struggled to wall off his grief. For a third time, a woman he’d cared for deeply had failed to return from a mission. Three Hellfuries had been lost in the battle on the Penrose side of the gate, and Julia Adams had been one of them.

  Damn it, he’d thought he was over this, that nothing could shake him.

  He’d been wrong.

  He watched the TRGA and wished—prayed—that the Russians would come through.

  He considered the unthinkable: piloting his Starblade back through the TRGA and emerging among the Russian ships. He would die, but how many could he take with him?

  The problem with that—besides being a flagrant violation of orders, of course—was that his Starblade’s AI didn’t have the navigation information that would take him safely through back to his own time. Hell, with that tumble he probably wouldn’t be able to set up a workable passage even with the appropriate nav data. Worse, his AI would probably refuse the command. It might assume he was off his nut and take him back to America.

  That was the trouble with intelligent machines, Gregory thought. They wouldn’t let you be truly, spontaneously human.

  Hell, maybe he was off his nut. But at the moment all he wanted in the entire universe was to strike back at the bastards who’d killed Julia.

  VFA-198 Hellfuries

  Penrose TRGA

  79 light years from Earth

  1612 hours, FST

  Lieutenant Adams was not dead—not yet, at any rate. Humanoid robotic figures had emerged from the SAR tug, grappled with her Starblade, and used disassembler torches to slice her fighter open. Strong hands had reached into the cockpit and dragged her from the corpse of her Starblade and hauled her back to the Russian tug. Fifteen minutes later, she was aboard the Moskva.

  They’d stripped her down to her skin—a precaution against any micro-nano weapons she might have hidden in her environmental suit—and suspended her in midair. Focused magnetic fields held slender bracelets locked to her wrists and ankles, pulling her into a taut X with her feet centimeters above the cold tile deck. The room was bare, with metal bulkheads and a single gleaming white console off to one side. It was dark, too, with the only light coming from the instrumentation on that sinister-looking console. She estimated that she was under half a gravity—so the room was somewhere inside the Russian carrier’s rotating hab modules.

  What was that console for? What did it do? Her mind was racing, providing lots of disturbing possibilities.

  The thought of torture filled her with an unholy dread. Damn it, she didn’t know anything. Her captors, surely, knew the identity of the USNA ships that had just gone through the gate, and that was probably where they were going as well. What could she possibly add to that?

  After an unbearable wait, dragging hours in which to study the morbid collection of electrical equipment and instrumentation on the console in front of her as the strain on her shoulders slowly grew to a scream, her interrogator entered the room. He was small, almost prissy-looking, with a cheerful smile and a computer tablet in one hand. “Good morning, Lieutenant Adams,” he said. He had the slightest trace of a Slavic accent.

  “It’s afternoon, asshole,” she growled back. God, her shoulders hurt. . . .

  “By your reckoning, yes. But here on board the Moskva it is just after midnight. Moscow time, you understand. Not that day or night makes any difference out here in space and light years from Earth, of course. . . .”

  She didn’t reply. But when she checked her in-head clock she realized with a jolt that they’d somehow switched that off. She felt a moment’s panic. What else had they taken from her? And how? Standard interrogation technique, she knew, would involve scrambling her sense of time. Everything her captors said to her would be designed to disorient her, to cut her adrift . . . and, ultimately, to make her come to trust them.

  That, she thought, was not going to happen. Not if she could help it.

  “And how did you know my name?”

  “The shipnet linked with your in-head software, of course, as soon as you came on board. You’ll notice that we disabled your clock, as well as your various internal communications devices.” Stepping close, he reached out and stroked her bare hip, and her skin crawled. The hand traced its way up her side and caressed her breast.

  She twisted, trying to avoid the touch. “Don’t touch me, you bastard!”

  He chuckled and stepped back. “You will have no connection with local networks except for those that we provide. After all, we can’t have you uploading any malignant software into our system, can we? And now . . .”

  Turning away, he stepped up to the console and gestured within a control field. Instantly something dropped out of the darkness above, laced its way around her head, and snapped her skull into rigid immobility. Some sort of nanometal clamp, then, something locking her head immovably in place.

  “So . . . it’s torture?” she said, jaws clenched. “You haven’t even asked me any questions yet! Maybe . . . maybe I’ll cooperate!”

  Her interrogator still had his back to her as he did something at the console. She struggled against her high-tech bonds with a predictable lack of success. She could hear the click of metal and plastic, and somehow that was more disturbing than the bastard’s touch.

  “Nothing so medieval, my dear,” the man said. When he turned back to face her, he was holding a spray injector—the kind used to infuse large numbers of nanomachines into the circulatory system. “Torture tends to be counterproductive, you know. The subject will say anything to make the pain stop. This, though—this shouldn’t hurt at all.”

  He pressed the injector up against the angle of her jaw and pressed the trigger. She felt a slight sting as the nano moved through her skin, followed by a warm and drowsy sensation spreading slowly through her body.

  “Actually, Lieutenant, we don’t want you to talk. Even if you did, it would not be the truth—or, worse, it would be a mixture of truth and fiction which would be difficult to unravel. But no matter. We have a much more reliable library of data right there inside your lovely head, and all we have to do is reach in and pluck it.”

  Her RAM. He was going after her internal RAM.

  She tried to fight it, struggling against her bonds.

  “It will be so much easier for you if you simply relax, my dear,” the interrogator told her. He set aside the empty injector and picked up the computer tablet again. “You are completely in my power and will not be going anywhere. Understand? Simply relax and let the ship’s computer read you.”

  “Go . . . to . . . hell. . . .”

  She was fighting hard now. She didn’t feel pain, exactly, but there was a growing, overwhelming pressure inside her head, the feeling of utter violation as something intruded, smashing its way into her memory, into her most private thoughts.

  Julianne Adams, she thought, fighting. She could feel the sweat dripping down her face . . . and the intolerable pressure growing inside her skull. Lieutenant. Serial number 3876–223 . . .

  You are helpless, Julianne, a voice said inside her skull. It was not the voice of her interrogator. Naked . . . vulnerable . . . helpless . . . and you are ours to control, to do with as we decide. . . .

  Damn it, they still hadn’t asked her any questions.

  Chapter Seven

  12 April, 2429

  USNA CVS America

  Admiral’s Office

  Omega Cluster

  1252 hours, FST

  “Any sign at all of the Consciousness?” Gray asked his senior xenosophontological department people.

  Dr. George Truitt gave an airy wave of his hand, indicating the expanse of star-bejeweled space projected across the bulkheads and overheads of Gra
y’s shipboard office. “It’s gone. Obviously.”

  “Why obviously?”

  “If you’ll recall, Admiral, the entity we knew as the Consciousness had been busily constructing something here within Omega Centauri, a far-flung and extremely impressive array of large parts of unknown function. Some of those structures appear to have been called out of the fabric of spacetime itself and were light years long. And now they’re gone. All gone.”

  “The lack of the Rosette entity’s toys doesn’t mean the entity is gone,” Dr. Samantha Kline said. “I actually doubt that the Consciousness can be hurt in any meaningful way. It existed at least partially within other dimensions.”

  “Why the hell should it stick around after its toys are gone?” Truitt demanded. “With the loss of its instrumentality, I would suggest that the Consciousness is either dead or it has retreated . . . elsewhere, quite possibly back to the universe from which it emerged in the first place. But it is not here.”

  “I would have to agree,” the voice of Konstantin Junior added. “We know that the Consciousness appeared to leave with the Denebans, translating, we think, to a parallel universe or some higher plane of existence. My impression as we watched them go was that the Consciousness was gone and would not be coming back.

  “Even so, ” Konstantin continued, “there was a chance that it did not, in fact, leave this spacetime frame of reference. I have, therefore, been searching this entire volume of space across a great deal of the electromagnetic spectrum, but I see no indication of intelligence.”

  “Not even other civilizations within the cluster?” Captain Rand asked.

  “So far as we know, Captain,” Truitt said, “there were no other civilizations here. Worlds, yes, of course. But the stars here are so close together—averaging 0.16 light year separation—that having habitable worlds be habitable long enough to develop native civilizations is most unlikely.”

  “There used to be civilizations here,” Gray pointed out. “Hundreds of them.”