Streaker

That was the slang term among pilots for a ship so badly damaged that it was sent hurtling clear of battlespace on a vector that would take it into the cold and empty Beyond. Connor knew there would be no SAR vessels, no search and rescue to track her course and come to pick her up. The Slan, her telemetry told her, were breaking through everywhere. Huge vessels that most likely were Slan troop transports were entering the atmosphere and closing with the Silverwheel colony.

Her AI did suggest that at least some repairs were possible. She directed the damage control systems to focus on repairing the quantum tap array, with a view to bringing her main power systems back on-line. With enough power, anything was possible.

Without power, she was dead …

For Brea, who made it all possible

Table of Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Epilogue

By Ian Douglas

Copyright

About the Publisher

Prologue

Agletsch Data Download 783478

Extant Galactic Civilizations

Classification: Red-Alfa

Civilization Classification Code: A548B7C

Polity Name: Sh’daar

OTHER NAMES: Sh’daar Empire, Sh’daar Network, N’gai Cloud Civilization

HOMEWORLD: Unknown, but assumed to be a number of planets located within the core of Omega Centauri T-0.876gy, a small, irregular galaxy located roughly ten thousand light years above the plane of the Milky Way’s spiral arms and 876 million years in the past. This dwarf galaxy was absorbed by the Milky Way approximately 700 million years ago, and exists now, in vastly reduced form, as the Omega Centauri globular star cluster, some sixteen thousand light years from Sol.

HISTORY: In the remote past, the N’gai Star Cloud was dominated by the ur-Sh’daar, a collective of advanced, star-faring civilizations. At a time estimated to be between 876 million and 900 million years in the past, the ur-Sh’daar went through the so-called Vinge Singularity, when accelerating technology effected a still poorly understood transformation that brought about the collapse of the ur-Sh’daar culture. While a majority of the sentients comprising the ur-Sh’daar seem to have vanished—translated, perhaps, to a parallel universe, an otherwise inaccessible higher dimension, or even a virtual reality of their own making—many beings were unable or unwilling to make the transition. Known as Refusers, these remnant groups and cultures rebuilt their civilization after the galactic catastrophe that became known as the Schjaa Hok—the “Transcending.” These Refusers ultimately became the Sh’daar.

GALACTIC CONTACT: The ur-Sh’daar created a number of artificial wormhole pathways between their galaxy and the Milky Way, variously known as gateways, as Sh’daar Nodes, or as TRGA cylinders—for the Texaghu Resch gravitational anomaly, the first such device discovered by Humankind. Since these pathways traversed spacetime, meaning space and time, some gave the ancient Sh’daar access to their remote future—our present. There is evidence of Sh’daar activity within our own epoch around twelve thousand years ago, with the extermination of a race called the Chelk, somewhere in the vicinity of the Texaghu Resch star system and the TRGA cylinder.

Over the next twelve thousand years, numerous other technic species within Sol’s galaxy were either destroyed or forced to abandon or curtail certain lines of scientific research or technological development—notably the so-called GRIN technologies: genetics, robotics, information systems and processing technologies, and nanotechnology. Among these are Sh’daar client races with which Humankind has been at war since 2367, including the Turusch, the H’rulka, the Nungiirtok and their Kobold symbiotes, and the Slan. One other Sh’daar client species within our own galaxy with which Humankind has been in contact since 2312 is the Agletsch, a mercantile race that has provided Humankind with much of what it knows about the Sh’daar.

SH’DAAR POLITY COMPOSITION: As noted previously, the Sh’daar properly is a grouping of numerous technic civilizations, none even remotely human in appearance or psychology. Some, including the Sh’daar Refuser remnant, appear to exist now solely in electronic form, occupying computer networks or artificial bodies mimicking their ancient existence as ur-Sh’daar. Other Refuser species still exist in corporeal form—including the Sjhlurrr, the F’haaz-F’heen swarm symbiotes, the Adjugredudhra, the Groth Hoj, the Zhalleg, the Baondyedd, and numerous others. The total number of distinct species within the Sh’daar Network numbers in the thousands.

TECHNOLOGY: Though the Sh’daar seem determined to limit the technology of other species in certain key areas, their overall level of advancement is somewhat beyond that of Humankind circa 2400. This seeming paradox is best explained by their desire to prevent Transcendence in other technic species, a process that appears to be linked to GRIN technologies but not to gravitics and drive technologies, military weaponry, or energy. The Sh’daar seem to fear those technologies that bring about radical change in body or mental processes within both artificial and organic intelligences.

According to Agletsch sources, the Sh’daar possess the technology necessary to detonate stars and obliterate entire star systems.

Whether the Sh’daar xenotechnic paranoia is religious or philosophical in nature, or based on the Sh’daar equivalent of hardheaded practicality, is at this point completely unknown …

Partial extract from Agletsch data transmission

14 March 2420

Chapter One

25 September 2424

TC/USNA RSV Endeavor

The Black Rosette,

Omega Centauri

16,000 light years from Earth

1330 hours, TFT

Nothing like it had been seen ever before, even in a galaxy as strange and as wonder-filled as the Milky Way. The USNA deep-space research survey vessel Endeavor edged as close to this particular wonder as her captain dared, as clouds of drones and AI reconnaissance vessels probed the outermost fringes of the Rosette’s twisted central vortex.

They called it the Black Rosette—six black holes balanced in a tight, gravitational embrace and whirling about a common center. Each was slightly larger than Earth; each possessed a mass of some forty times Earth’s sun and was moving at almost 26,000 kilometers per second … better than 0.08 c. A total mass 240 times that of Earth’s sun, rotating that quickly, twisted the fabric of the spacetime within which it was embedded and did unexpected things to the geometry of local space. From the perspective of the crew on board the Endeavor, organic and otherwise, it appeared that the central void between the whirling black holes was filled with soft white starlight. As the Endeavor drifted past the open face of the Rosette, however, details of that light shifted and changed, revealing, it seemed, a succession of starscapes, densely packed alien star-clouds and constellations flickering from one to another … a gateway into myriad alternate panoramas of thick-strewn stars.

At certain angles, Endeavor’s sensors detected fierce storms of radiation emerging from the gateway; at others, the emerging radiation was at normal background levels, though a certain amount of hard gamma continued to flood through local space from the six mutually orbiting black holes. The whirling sextet appeared to be enmeshed in a thin, hot cloud of gas drawn from surrounding space, and the planet-sized black holes were made somewhat visible as the resultant blue-violet plasma was greedily devoured in shrieks of gamma and X-ray radiation.

Endeavor’s commanding officer, Captain Sheri Hodgkins, checked the ambient radiation levels on the research vessel’s skin and decided that they were quite close enough. In fact …

“Pull us back a few hundred kilometers, Mr. Colger.”

“Aye, aye, Captain. Maneuvering …”

Hodgkins was linked through her cerebral implants to the ship’s AI, and in the window open within her mind she could see the Endeavor pulling back slightly from the massive whirlpool ahead. Like most large star-faring vessels of Earth, Endeavor was mushroom-shaped, her labs and drives within her axial stem, her hab and command modules rotating about the stem, and both tucked away within the shadow of an immense mushroom cap. The water within the shield cap both provided fuel for her fusion drives and protection from sleeting radiation at near-c velocities. The shield was serving now to deflect or absorb most of the radiation from the Rosette ahead; her magnetic hull shields provided some protection, but she didn’t want to take chances with the radiation storm outside the ship’s hull.

Endeavor’s two escorts, the destroyers Miller and Herrera, maintained their formation on the survey vessel. No one was quite certain what the Sh’daar response would be to a survey probe this deep inside their cluster. For sixteen years the Omega Treaty had held. And yet …

“Captain, we’re detecting movement inside the vortex.”

“What kind of movement?”

“Multiple targets at very high speed! Closing vector! …”

“Helm! Pull us back! Comm! Alert our escorts!”

But the Miller was already breaking in two, its central spine and portions of its mushroom cap dissolving in a smear of white hot plasma. Herrera had time to lock on and trigger her main particle beam weapons, but within seconds her grav shields had overloaded and she was being pounded into fragments by a storm of relativistic particles snapping up out of the vortex.

Endeavor was hit, her shield cap ripping open and disgorging a vast and glittering cloud of gleaming crystals as her water reserves hit hard vacuum and froze. Hodgkins grabbed the arms of her command chair as the bridge shuddered, then tore free, tumbling wildly into space.

“Comm! Emergency broadcast! …”

… and then the bridge was engulfed by the expanding white flare of a small detonating sun as her fusion core ruptured.

Five seconds later, the AI of a robotic HVK-724 high-velocity scout-courier on station 1.5 million kilometers away noted the destruction of the expedition’s three capital ships and immediately engaged its primary program.

Earth lay sixteen thousand light years away. At its maximum Alcubierre warp effect, the courier would arrive in another forty-four days.

7 November 2424

Confederation Naval Base Dylan

Arianrhod, 36 Ophiuchi AIII

0618 hours, TFT

“Bay doors are open,” the voice said in her head. “VFA-140, you are clear for launch.”

Lieutenant Megan Connor felt her fighter shake and tremble, the shock of a nearby explosion propagating through rock, the ferrocrete of the fighter bay dock, and the structure of her fighter. “Copy, Arianrhod Control,” she said. “On my command, Dracos, in five … four … three … two … one … launch!”

Acceleration slammed her back against the embrace of her fighter’s cockpit as she hurtled down the magrail toward a distant point of light. The point expanded with startling swiftness, then exploded around her, a burst of brilliant, golden daylight as she emerged into the open air.

She thoughtclicked a control, and the intermittent singularity off her fighter’s bow flared into a dazzling arc-bright glare, the microscopic black hole gulping down atmosphere in flaring blue-white light. Behind her, a pair of incoming missiles slammed against the mountain housing the Confederation base but she held her Stardragon level, forming up with the other fighters matching her vector to left and right. The Silverwheel Sea, vast and straw-yellow, surged beneath her fighter’s keel.

More missiles incoming. “Going vertical!” she called to the others, “in three … two … one … break!”

Together, the flight of nine SG-112 Stardragons swung to an ascending vector, streaking up into a brilliant golden sky stacked high with billowing clouds. Falling skyward at five hundred gravities, the fighters swiftly punched through the clouds and fast-thinning atmosphere and into open space.

“Combat mode,” she snapped. “Formation break!” The Dragons’ adaptive nanomatrix hulls shifted and flowed, changing from sleek, black deltas to Y shapes, the weapons pods extended at the ends of the three forward-canted wings. Those two incoming missiles had curved upward, following the flight of Draco squadron Stardragons all the way up from the deck. Lieutenants Allende and Larson, bringing up the rear of the formation, loosed bursts of KAM pellets—kinetic-kill anti-missile projectiles that slammed into the Slan warheads and detonated them 10 kilometers astern.

Within Connor’s in-head display, a Slan destroyer changed vector to intercept them, the image magnified to show the flat blade of a hull and eight projecting shark fins, the vessel painted a flat white with bold red slashes and blotches. Little was known about the Slan save that they were another Sh’daar client race. The characteristic color scheme of their warship hulls, Intelligence thought, might represent some predator from the Slan homeworld, but even that much was pure guesswork.

She selected the destroyer with her inner eyes, selected a weapon—a VG-44c Fer-de-lance antiship missile—and clicked the blinking launch icon in her mind. “Ferdie armed!” she cried. “Fox One!”

A nuclear-tipped missile slipped from her low-keel fin and streaked toward the destroyer. The other fighters were peeling off in every direction, engaging a sky filled with targets …

The star 36 Ophiuchi was a triple-star system just 19.5 light years from Earth, and 10 light years from the enemy-occupied system of 70 Ophiuchi, and the world Osiris. The A and B components, both K2-class orange stars, circled each other in an extremely elliptical mutual orbit lasting 570 years, the two coming as close to each other as 7 astronomical units and receding out to as far as 169 AUs. Currently, they were 30 AUs apart, and 36 Oph B appeared as a tiny orange spark in the blackness well beyond the nearer disk of 36 Oph A. A third, smaller red-orange star, 36 Ophiuchi C, orbited the two main stars at a comfortable distance of 5,000 AUs, or some eight hundredths of a light year, a spark so wan and dim it could not be picked out by the naked eye.

The system was still young—less than a billion years old—and filled with asteroidal debris and comets. A dozen comets blazed with icy light, their tails smeared across the heavens away from the orange sun. The planet dubbed Arianrhod by its colonizers was properly 36 Ophiuchi AIII, the third of four small and rocky planets. Located a little more than half an AU from its sun, it lay near the center of the system’s habitable zone. Mostly covered by liquid water, the world was twice the mass of Earth. The major landmass was the Caer Arianrhod Archipelago in the southern hemisphere, and was the location of the research colony of Silverwheel.

Arianrhod offered Confederation xenoplanet specialists the splendid opportunity to study an Earthlike planet still in the final stages of formation. Earth itself must have looked much the same 3.5 to 4 billion years ago. The atmosphere was a poisonous brew of carbon dioxide, methane, nitrogen, and sulfur dioxide. Volcanoes dotted the vast and rolling oceans, and asteroids and comets continued to slam into the young world, generating apocalyptic tidal waves. Silverwheel, most of it, was underground, as was the large USNA naval base protecting it. The land, when it was above water, was rocky, barren, and lifeless.

Yet, despite this, life bloomed in the oceans, raising questions about the nature, variety, and extensiveness of early life in Earth’s seas. It was known that life had appeared in Earth’s seas within a scant few hundred million years of the formation of a solid crust … but that life had remained single-celled and relatively simple for the next 2.5 billion years or so, and hadn’t learned how to manage the multicellular trick until about a billion years ago. Multicellular life forms, some of them as complex as things like colonial jellyfish and free-swimming tunicate worms, had already evolved in Arianrhod’s seas.

Theorists had suggested that life might have evolved not once, but many times on Earth; others suggested that radiation from the planet’s sun had given evolution a swift kick in the ass. Arianrhod offered xenobiologists the unparalleled opportunity to watch the process in action. The planet had been named deliberately for an ancient Celtic goddess of fertility, rebirth, and the weaving of cosmic fate. Someday, in a billion years or so, this world might be another Earth; in the meantime, it offered Humankind an unparalleled chance to study planetary evolution. Silverwheel’s twenty thousand inhabitants were almost all scientists and their families.

The Slan attack had not been entirely unexpected.

Osiris, 70 Ophiuchi AII, had been hit and overrun twenty years ago by a combined Turusch-Nungiirtok assault force. Osiris, though, was one of a handful of so-called garden worlds, planets with oxygen-nitrogen atmospheres and extensive biospheres where humans could live and work without cumbersome biosuits or nanoskins. The government council at Silverwheel had been hoping that the enemy wanted to take over pleasant, Earthlike worlds, not poisonous biomes-in-the-making like Arianrhod. And as year followed year, they’d begun to relax. Arianrhod did not appear to be on the enemy’s target list.

Until now. Unlike the civilian government at Silverwheel, the Navy had long suspected that one or another of the Sh’daar client species would make a grab for 36 Ophiuchi, and deployed three fighter squadrons to defend the system. Two, the Dracos and the Reapers, had been stationed at the naval base protecting Silverwheel, with a third, the Blood Knights, operating out of an orbital base called Caer Gwydion. Picket drones in the outer system had noted the approach of a sizeable naval force two days ago, apparently coming from the general direction of 70 Ophiuchi.

The fleet, which had turned out to be Slan, was a mix of the lance-blade destroyers and a large number of planetary bombardment vessels, code-named Trebuchets by Confederation Military Intelligence. The three squadrons had been flying almost nonstop, with brief returns to base for rearming and repairs between missions. Caer Gwydion had been struck by a trio of two-hundred-megaton warheads ten hours ago and turned into an expanding cloud of hot gas.

But the surviving fighters continued to hurl themselves at the enemy force, as their numbers dwindled and casualties mounted.

Lieutenant Sheridan’s Stardragon took a direct hit from a Slan beam weapon, her fighter vaporized in an instant, like a moth in an open flame.

“All Dracos!” Connor called. “Vector on the Trebs on planetary approach! Let’s see if we can break up that attack!”

The alien Trebuchets were ungainly, boxy affairs utterly unlike the sleek destroyers. Each was a little more than 200 meters in length, painted black with random, bright green slashes, and carried piggyback a single massive nuclear missile with a five-hundred-megaton fusion warhead. They approached in waves, lining up on the target planet and loosing the missiles as they streaked inbound. Even from 15,000 kilometers out, Connor could see the periodic twinkles of detonations concentrated on the northern coast of the Sumatra-sized landmass where Silverwheel lay buried, and more planetbusters were inbound. Even the deeply buried research colony wouldn’t be able to hold out for much longer against that savage planetary bombardment.

Dropping into a trajectory that put her on the stern of one of the inbound Trebs, she selected the target with a thought, then thoughtclicked the mind’s-eye icon for a VG-10 Krait, armed it, and loosed it, sending the smart missile streaking in toward the falling enemy bomber. Before the missile could cross the intervening gulf, however, the enormous missile strapped to the Treb’s dorsal hull released, drifted clear, and then began accelerating toward the planet. Connor targeted the missile as well, sending a second VG-10 streaking after it.

She couldn’t take the time to watch the results of her shots, but spun her Stardragon end for end, decelerating sharply, then spun through 90 degrees to acquire another target. She marked a second Trebuchet and sent another Krait smart missile flashing toward it.

Surrounding space was filled with pulsing flashes of silent light, the brilliant detonations of nuclear warheads in space, and with softly glowing clouds of expanding debris, chunks of shredded spacecraft, and occasional disabled fighters tumbling end for end, streaming atmosphere. Through her communications link, Connor could hear the calls and warnings of the other pilots in her squadron:

“Draco Three, Draco Seven! You’ve got a Stiletto on your six …”

“I see him, Seven! I can’t shake him!”

“I’m on him! On my mark, break high and right … three … two … one … break!”

“Draco Ten! Draco Ten, this is Four! Close and assist!”

“Copy, ten! Arming Kraits! …”

“Stilettos! I’ve got six Stilettos, bearing one-seven-niner …”

“Fox One! Fox One! Missiles away!”

“Let’s nail those Trebs at zero-one-eight!”

“Hit! I got one! I got one!”

“Draco One! Watch it, Skipper! Three Stilettos high and on your six! Coming out of the sun! …”

With a thought, Connor spun her fighter around, flying backward now, as she searched the sky through her Stardragon’s enhanced senses. Stiletto was the Confederation name for the Slan equivalent of the space fighter, a slender, three-winged delta like an arrowhead, built around a powerful spinal-mounted fusion weapon that could chew through even a Stardragon’s nanomatrix hull with a direct hit. The modern space fighter was designed to repair battle damage even while the craft was still in combat, but a beam of mag-bottled fusing hydrogen coming in at a substantial percentage of c could overwhelm the best defenses and leave very little behind but expanding hot gas.

“Copy!” Connor yelled, and she fired another Fer-de-lance, targeting the middle of three enemy fighters bearing down on her. VG-44c shipkillers were intended for use against large enemy vessels … a hundred thousand tons and up … but a big enough plasma ball might take out all three of the deadly Slan fighters. If it could get through …

No joy. A fusion beam snapped out from one of the Stilettos and vaporized the missile a thousand kilometers short. A second Slan beam lanced across the intervening gulf and narrowly missed her Stardragon as her fighter’s AI, anticipating the shot with reactions far faster than any human’s, jinked to starboard.

Connor launched a cloud of spoofers—pencil-sized projectiles that continually broadcast the image, mass, and RF noise of a Stardragon, creating a cloud of images where an instant before there’d been one. Enemy sensors and computer targeting would be good enough to maintain a target lock despite the decoys, but a burst of gravitic pulses scrambled the Slan targeting picture. A second fusion beam swiped through the decoys, vaporizing dozens of them but missing her. She fired another Fer-de-lance … then a third and a fourth, hoping to overwhelm the Slan fighters’ defenses.

At her back, her first Krait detonated astern of the Slan Trebuchet, a blossoming white fireball that consumed the enemy vessel in a searing, hellish instant. Connor’s fighter continued to twist and dodge, accelerating hard into a new vector that should take her past the fast-approaching limb of the planet. The first Fer-de-lance aimed at her pursuers was vaporized by an enemy fusion beam. Damn …

Something slammed into her fighter, a savage shock that put her into an uncontrollable tumble. She scanned the data scrolling through her mind, lists of damage, of system failure, of power-plant shutdown. “Dracos, Draco One!” she called. “I’m hit!”

The second Fer-de-lance was wiped from the sky. The Slan fighters were closing fast …

“Draco Two!” she added. “Do you copy?”

“One, Six,” another voice replied. Draco Six was Lieutenant Yamaguchi. “Two’s bought it. Can I assist?”

“Controls and power unresponsive,” she said. “You’ve got the squadron.”

“I copy, One. Vectoring for—”

Yamaguchi’s voice was chopped off by a burst of fusion-beam static.

An instant later, her third Fer-de-lance swung through a broad curve and swept into the midst of the Stiletto fighters now just 3,000 kilometers distant. The explosion lit up the sky, and as the light faded, nothing but fist-sized debris tumbled out of the thinning plasma cloud.

Connor began assessing the situation. Her power plant was off-line; the pair of microsingularities that pulled unimaginable power from hard vacuum had evaporated. Her magnetic shields were down too, as well as her fighter’s gravitic drive. Weapons were dead. So was maneuvering. Life support was still going, thank the gods, sustained by her reserve fusion generators, and so were her flight sensors, her instrumentation, and her AI, but precious little else was working.

She asked the AI to plot her course toward Arianrhod, watching the curved green line come up on her in-head, skimming past the vast bulk of the world. She was falling at nearly 20 kilometers per second, her speed when she was hit. That was a good 5 kps or better than the planet’s escape velocity, and it looked like she was going to skim the atmosphere, then whip around, clean and clear, and continue falling out into deep space.

Connor wasn’t entirely sure how she felt about that. It meant she wasn’t going to burn up in the atmosphere in another few hundred seconds … and that meant that she had some time to let the ship regrow some of the damage.

But a quick, fiery death during re-entry might be better than freezing or asphyxiating as her life support gave out … or starving to death when the onboard nanoprocessors failed.

She didn’t have a lot of options.

Five minutes later, she hit atmosphere, her crippled Stardragon shaking and trembling as it shrieked through the tenuous outer layers and skimmed across gold-yellow oceans and swirling cloud banks just 80 kilometers up. Arianrhod’s atmosphere, under higher-than-Earth-normal gravity, was compacted more than the gas at this altitude over Earth. Near the surface, the atmospheric pressure was something like five times the pressure at Earth’s surface. Here, it was tenuous to the point of near vacuum … but Connor was traveling fast enough that hitting it jolted her with savage ferocity, and the black outer layers of her nanomatrix hull began to heat from friction. The temperature inside the close embrace of the cockpit climbed. Her pilot’s skin suit struggled to dump excess heat. She might still plunge deeply enough into thick air to burn up, a blazing shooting star streaking from the day side of the planet across the terminator and into night.

And then, miraculously, the trembling stopped, and she was outbound once more.

Blessedly, the brief passage through atmosphere had arrested her craft’s tumble as well. The sky no longer pirouetted around her head. She’d lost some velocity in the near passage, but she was still falling outbound at 16 kps … more than enough to escape from Arianrhod forever.

Streaker. That was the slang term among pilots for a ship so badly damaged that it was sent hurtling clear of battlespace on a vector that would take it into the cold and empty Beyond. Connor knew there would be no SAR vessels, no search and rescue to track her course and come to pick her up. The Slan, her telemetry told her, were breaking through everywhere. Huge vessels that most likely were Slan troop transports were entering the atmosphere and closing with the Silverwheel colony.

Her AI did suggest that at least some repairs were possible. She directed the damage control systems to focus on repairing the quantum tap array, with a view to bringing her main power systems back on-line. With enough power, anything was possible.

Without power, she was dead …

Almost five and a half hours later, a robotic HVK-724 scout-courier in a cold, distant orbit 40 AUs from Arianrhod caught an emergency transmission sent from Silverwheel. The transmission included an update on the battle for the 36 Ophiuchi system … news of the orbital Caer Gwydion station plus three fighter squadrons destroyed, of serious damage to the main colony facility on the surface, of reports of landings by heavily armored assault forces and the destruction of the Dylan underground naval base.

The scout-courier engaged its primary program, dropping into Alcubierre space and vanishing from the sane and normal matrix of spacetime. It had taken the signal 5.3 light minutes to crawl out from the planet, but at its maximum Alcubierre warp effect, the courier would cross the 19.5 light years between 35 Ophiuchi and Sol in just one hour, eighteen minutes.

It was pure coincidence that news of two Confederation naval disasters would arrive at Earth within a day of each other.

Freedom Concourse

Columbus, District of Columbia,

North American Union

0749 hours, TFT

“Captain Gray, Comm. Important message coming through, priority urgent.”

Trevor “Sandy” Gray, commanding officer of the star carrier America, paused in mid-stride as the AI voice spoke in his head. Around him, the Freedom Concourse was thronged with people, part of the brawling, noisy celebration following the president’s re-election. “Go ahead,” he thought.

“Voice only, full immersion, or text?”

“Text, please.”

A window opened in his mind and the words scrolled down.

PRIORITY: Urgent

FROM: Confederation Naval HQ

TO: All CN Commands

Courier packet reports Confederation research colony Silverwheel on Arianrhod, 36 Ophiuchi AII, has just fallen to Slan assault forces …

The message, terse and to the point, went on to say that at least twelve Saber-class destroyers, fifty Trebuchet-class bombardment vessels, and a large number of Stiletto fighters had taken part in the attack, and that both the colony and the underground naval base were now presumed lost. The final attack had gone down less than two hours ago.

The message was signed Ronald Kinkaid, Admiral, CO CNHQ, Mars.

The words faded, and Gray’s awareness returned fully to his surroundings. A man, fashionably nude except for animated tattoos and an anonymously opaque sensory helmet bumped into him from behind. “Sorry, Captain.”

“S’okay.” The man’s tattoo display included the word FREEDOM stretching from collar bone to groin, flashing across the entire spectrum of colors and highlighted by the strobe and flash of fireworks writhing across his skin.

Gray shook his head and started walking again. The crowd was thick enough that stopping in midstream could be hazardous. Ahead, the government building towered above the plaza in a series of curves and ornamental buttresses, and the mob appeared to be centered on the building’s base.

Koenig’s victory, he thought, appeared to have opened the Freedom party floodgates, an anti-Confederation mandate for USNA freedom.

Or possibly, the cynic within Gray’s mind suggested, it was just that Americans enjoyed the popular sport known as politics. Give them something to cheer about, to demonstrate about, to vote about, and they were there.

It was, he thought, exactly the right sentiment at exactly the wrong time. If 36 Ophiuchi had fallen to the Slan fleet, it meant that the Sh’daar were on the move once more, and it meant that North American independence simply was not going to happen. Humankind, a united Humankind, would have to face that threat, and all the popular demonstrations, all the fireworks, all the noise on the planet wasn’t going to change that.

Gray had come down on a shuttle early that morning specifically to offer his personal congratulations to the president … but this, he decided, would not be the best moment for personal visits and reminiscences.

He hesitated a moment, bracing himself against the crowd, then turned and began to retrace his steps toward Starport Columbus.

Gray needed to get back to Synchorbit, back to the ship, and quickly.

He was almost all the way back to the Star Carrier America, on board the shuttle, when the second message of disaster arrived.

Chapter Two

8 November 2424

Approaching USNA Naval Base

Quito Synchorbital

1435 hours, TFT

Lieutenant Donald Gregory eased back the acceleration of his SG-92 Starhawk as the seagirt dome of NAS Oceana dropped away behind him and was swiftly obscured by clouds. Sunlight exploded around him as he pierced the cloud deck and the sky almost immediately deepened from blue to ultramarine to black.

In close formation with him, the eleven other Starhawks of VFA-96, the Black Demons, arrowed skyward, boosting in high-velocity mode. Nanosensors embedded within his fighter’s fluid outer coat fed data directly to his brain, allowing him to see with crystalline clarity in every direction, and to see the blacker-than-black long-tailed teardrops of the other fighters of the squadron formation, forms that would have been invisible to the unaugmented eye or brain.

“Keep it tight, chicks,” urged the taclink voice of their squadron leader, Commander Luther Mackey. “Hold formation. Show the braid we’re as sharp as any hotshot Vee-crappers.”

“Yeah, Boss, but how do you really feel about ’em?” Lieutenant Nathan Esperanza cut in. Several of the others in the squadron chuckled.

“Hell, I think he just wants a crack at the Sh’daar,” Lieutenant Caryl Mason said, “assuming the scuttlebutt is true, of course.”

“Oh, it’s true,” Esperanza said. “I got a buddy in Base Commo who saw the intercepts. One of our survey vessels got nailed out at Omegod Cent, and the Slan overran Arianrhod. That’s why the recall.”

“It don’t rain but it pours,” Lieutenant Jason Del Rey observed.

“Why bother with grapevine shit?” Lieutenant Joseph “Happy” Kemper said. “Just ask ol’ Nungie. Get the straight shit hot from the source.”

“Fuck you, Kemper,” Gregory said with a quiet calm he didn’t quite feel. Nungie had not been his choice as a squadron handle, and he despised the implication.

“Keep it down, people,” Mackey said. “Engage squadron taclink.”

Gregory gave the mental command that synched his fighter’s AI to the rest of the squadron. The twelve Starhawks were now, in essence, a single organism hurtling up and out of Earth’s embrace.

“On my mark, acceleration at two thousand gravities,” Mackey added. “And three … and two … and one … mark!”

Gregory couldn’t feel the savage, gravitationally induced acceleration. His fighter fell toward the tightly projected artificial singularity pulsing at a billion times per second out beyond the blunt prow of his Starhawk, its gravity acting on every atom of his body simultaneously. He was in free fall, his vector matched perfectly with those of the other ships in his squadron. Earth, filling the sky aft with white swirls and mottled banks of white cloud, began dwindling rapidly into the distance astern. Starhawks were capable of boosting at fifty thousand Gs, which could accelerate them up to close to the speed of light in under ten minutes. Within the relatively close confines of Earth orbit, however, it was necessary to keep to a more sedate pace. It would take forty-two seconds to reach the midpoint of their journey, at which point they would flip end for end and decelerate the rest of the way in to their docking with the carrier.

Ten more seconds.

Seething, Gregory tried to put aside Kemper’s gibe. It wasn’t worth saying anything. Protests would just elicit more of the same; he knew that much from long experience.

For years, Gregory had wanted to be a fighter pilot, wanted to be a member of that elite fraternity so bad he could taste it. Star carrier pilots were the aristocracy of the Earth Confederation’s military, but that wasn’t what had led him to volunteer … or to endure the years of training and heavy-duty AI downloads that had made him one. Born on the colony world of Osiris—70 Ophiuchi AII—he’d been eight when his world had been subjected to a savage bombardment by a Turusch battle fleet, followed by Nungiirtok assault forces landing in wave upon relentless wave. That had been early in 2405, just less than twenty years earlier.

Gregory still had acid-sharp memories of that time … especially of the moment when his father had put him aboard a freighter packed with refugee children at Nuit Starport days before the final collapse. He still remembered shrieking that he didn’t want to go … remembered his father’s calm assurances that they would be together again soon …

It hadn’t happened. When the Sh’daar Treaty was announced seven months later, Osiris remained under Nungiirtok control. The Earth Confederation government had attempted to open negotiations with the martial beings, but no progress had been made in all that time.

Year had followed year, and Gregory had grown progressively more bitter. It seemed clear to him that the Confederation wasn’t going to force a confrontation. Even now, there was no formal contact with the Nungiirtok, no way of even determining if his mother and father were still alive.

Three years ago he’d joined the North American Star Navy, applying for a training slot as a combat pilot. The star system of 70 Ophiuchi was strategically important, quite apart from its value to Gregory personally. Just sixteen light years away from Sol, it formed the deadly tip of a salient driven deep, deep into the Confederation sphere, and gave the Sh’daar client races a base within easy striking distance of Earth. Surely, it was only a matter of time before the Earth Confederation moved to get Osiris back … and Gregory intended to be there when it happened.

The other members of his squadron, though, had given him the handle Nungie, and joked that he was working for the Sh’daar. Gregory could have ignored that much. The problem was that there was an undercurrent of hostility, even paranoia there. They kept asking him if he was carrying a Sh’daar Seed inside his head …

Midpoint. Surrounding space slewed wildly across 180 degrees, and now a vastly shrunken Earth lay directly ahead, but still dwindling in apparent size. Forty-two and a half seconds after boost, the Black Demons were now traveling at over 850 kilometers per second. Still pulling two thousand gravities, they were decelerating now, backing down toward their destination.

The Sh’daar War had lasted for thirty-eight years, from the time the Agletsch had delivered the Sh’daar Ultimatum until Admiral Koenig’s brilliant and unexpected victories at Texaghu Resch and Omega Centauri. Most civilians thought of the war now as history, while most military personnel were content to wait and see. By any reasonable assessment, the Sh’daar represented a technology some thousands of years in advance of Humankind, and yet they had just stopped.

Smart money said that they weren’t yet done with the upstart Earth Confederation.

Slowing rapidly, the Black Demons drifted tail-first past the collection of spheres, struts, holding tanks, domes, and rotating hab modules that comprised the synchorbital part of the Quito space elevator. Anchored deep in the solid rock of Mt. Cayambe, on Earth’s equator 36,000 kilometers below, the elevator had offered cheap, easy, and high-volume access to space since the early twenty-second century.

The synchorbital naval base was located a dozen kilometers from the upside terminus of the elevator, a vast structure including hundreds of docking spaces and gantries for military vessels. A joint project of the Confederation and the United States of North America, it housed some thousands of military personnel, as well as home port facilities for those warships, the bigger ones, unable to enter planetary atmospheres.

Largest of these was the TC/USNA star carrier America.

Mushroom-shaped—1,150 meters long—CVS America was docked at a special gantry offering multiple mag-tube access for personnel and supplies. The forward cap, 500 meters across and 150 deep, served as both radiation shielding and as a holding tank for 27 billion liters of water, reaction mass for the ship’s maneuvering thrusters. The slender, kilometer-long spine held quantum-field power plants, maneuvering thrusters, and stores, while two hab rings, counter-rotating and tucked in close behind the shield cap, carried the ship’s human complement of 4,840. Around her, like swarming midges, a cloud of drones and remote vehicles kept watch, or serviced her external hull.

“VFA-96,” a new voice said. “You are cleared for two-by-two trap in Landing Bay One. Please alter your hull shape to facilitate capture.”

It was a woman’s voice, but with the precise diction and phrasing that likely indicated an AI, an artificial intelligence.

“Copy. Black Demons on docking approach,” Mackey’s voice said. “Morphing from sperm mode to turkey. Okay, people. Switch to AI approach.”

Maneuvering to approach over the immense vessel’s stern, the Black Demons shifted their hull structure from their high-boost configuration—popularly known among the pilots as “sperm mode”—to flight mode. The nanomatrix hull of an SG-92 allowed the craft to mold itself into a variety of shapes during flight. In atmospheric or flight mode—“turkey mode” in the pilot lexicon—growing wings that better allowed the landing bay magnetics to trap inbound fighters. Massing just twenty-two tons—her usual weapons loadout massed more than that by a considerable margin—the bulk of Gregory’s Starhawk flowed like water at his thought command, extending delta wings, negatively charged to give the flight deck something to grab.

The first two fighters, Lieutenants Anderson and Rivera, dropped into their final approach side by side, sweeping up along America’s spine from tail toward the base of the mushroom cap. The next pair followed twenty-eight seconds later—Esperanza and Nichols—followed by Mason and Del Rey.

Next up on the list were Gregory and his wingman—Lieutenant Jodi Vaughn. Fighters didn’t use their gravitational drives for maneuvering close aboard a carrier, not when the microscopic knot of a twisted spacetime comprising the craft’s drive singularity could shred the fabric of a capital ship’s hull like a particle cannon. Cutting their drives, Vaughn and Gregory opened aft venturis and fired their maneuvering thrusters. Jets of plasma, using super-heated water as reaction mass, bumped them into their final vector at three Gs—a kick unlike the free-fall acceleration of a gravitational drive.

Dropping into a landing approach, Gregory’s AI adjusted his ship’s velocity as America’s long spine blurred overhead. The landing-bay entrance yawned wide ahead, rotating around to meet him, his onboard AI microadjusting his velocity and attitude to meet it. The landing bay was rotating at 2.11 turns per minute, providing the module’s out-is-down spin gravity. The bay’s entrance swung around every twenty-eight seconds, just as each incoming fighter pair was there to meet it.

Traveling at 100 meters per second, they flashed into the shadow beneath the carrier’s spine, the domes, blisters, and sponsons housing the ship’s drive projectors blurring past, seemingly just above his head. It took them almost ten seconds to traverse the length of America’s spine. At the last instant, his AI tapped his starboard-side thrusters to find the moving sweet spot that matched perfectly the 7-meters-per-second lateral movement of the rotating landing bay. The moving opening ahead suddenly appeared to freeze motionless in space, as Vaughn and Gregory flashed across lines of approach-acquisition lights.

When the fighters hit the flight deck’s magnetic tangle-field, he felt again a sudden shock of deceleration, and the side-by-side fighters came to rest. Magnetic grapples embraced his fighter and moved it forward to a nanosealed patch on the deck. A moment later, he was dropping through the seal to the pressurized deck one level below.

His neural feeds cut out, and abruptly Gregory was enfolded in a tight, close, suffocating darkness. He thoughtclicked the cockpit open, and the hull melted away around him as he emerged into the bustling noise and glare and movement of the pressurized hangar bay. A robot, all arms and spindly plasteel framework, met him on the access scaffolding, its optics adjusting independently as it scanned him and his fighter. “Welcome aboard, Lieutenant,” the machine said.

“Move your metal ass, damn it,” a human flight chief said nearby. As the robot shifted to one side, a crew chief appeared. “Hey, Lieutenant. Welcome aboard the America.”

Gregory removed his flight helmet, blinking under the harsh lighting filling the cavernous space, and nodded. “Thanks, Chief.”

He wasn’t home, but maybe, maybe, someday, if he was lucky, the star carrier America would get him there.

TC/USNA CVS America

USNA Naval Base

Quito Synchorbital

1440 hours, TFT

“VFA-96 is recovered, Captain,” America’s CAG reported.

“I see it, Connie. Thank you.”

Back on board his ship, now, after the shuttle flight up from Columbus, Captain Gray relaxed in the embrace of his command seat on the carrier’s bridge, allowing incoming streams of data to flood through his consciousness. With his cerebral implants hardlinked to the carrier’s artificial intelligence, he could follow all of the preparations for getting the immense vessel ready for debarkation directly, as though he himself was the central awareness of America’s AI network. Through the AI’s electronic eyes, he’d watched the Starhawks of VFA-96 hurtling in, two by two, and trapping on America’s Bravo flight deck. A shift in perception, and he was watching now as the Starhawks peeled open and the pilots emerged.

Gray had a special fondness for the old SG-92 Starhawks. As a raw, newbie lieutenant twenty years earlier, he’d flown a Starhawk as part of the long-disbanded VF-44 Dragonfires. Those fighters were considered relics nowadays, compared to the much newer and more powerful SG-101 Velociraptors, the SG-112 Stardragons, and other modern space fighters. There was talk of retiring the Starhawks permanently … but the Navy had been dithering on the issue for several years, now, and if the scuttlebutt was true, if the Sh’daar were coming back, that procrastination was a damned good thing. Earth would need a lot of fighters in the coming months, if Endeavor had been burned out of the sky by Sh’daar clients … and if the Sh’daar were planning on moving in from the Ophiuchan colonies.

Hell, even if the Sh’daar had nothing to do with the Endeavor attack, the Slan capture of 36 Ophiuchi meant that Earth was going to need every fighter available, and now. There wouldn’t be time to grow new Velociraptors or Stardragons, not when every moment counted in intercepting the aliens before they reached Solar space. America and her battlegroup had been on full alert since the news of Arianrhod’s capture and of Endeavor’s destruction had come through from Mars. Supplies for an extended deployment were coming up through the space elevator now, or arriving down-tether from Anchorage, the small asteroid 36,000 kilometers farther out that kept the elevator structure taut and in place. Crews on liberty and leave on Earth and on the moon were being recalled, and two fresh squadrons—VFA-96 and VFA-115—had just arrived.

Similar preparations were under way on board all of the ships in CBG-40, the designation for America’s current battlegroup. The expectation was that they would be getting the affirm-go from Geneva at almost any moment.

The only real question was where the battlegroup would be deployed … Omega Centauri, as originally planned? Or to a much closer objective, to 36 Ophiuchi?

Gray pulled back from the interior view, shifting instead to America’s logistical displays. Supplies of raw material—carbon, nitrogen, and the other elements necessary to nanufacture food and most other consumables used by the nearly five thousand personnel on board—were stored in sponsons along America’s kilometer-long spine. Hydrogen, oxygen, and water itself were tapped from the 27 billion liters of water stored in America’s shield cap. While the carrier could resupply from convenient asteroids in almost any star system, Gray wanted to have every stores module full-up before they departed Solar space. Faced with a hostile unknown, there was no telling how long it would be before they would have the luxury of resupply.

“Connie?” he asked. “What’s the logistics status for the Wing?”

Captain Connie Fletcher was America’s CAG—an anachronistic three-letter acronym for commander air group, even though the squadrons on board the carrier comprised a wing, not a group, and rarely operated within a planetary atmosphere. The Navy was nothing if not wedded to tradition, and some of the terminology had stuck through four centuries from the days of ocean-going navies and pre-spaceflight aircraft carriers.

“We’re at ninety-four percent,” she told him. “We’re still waiting on the plutonium and the depleted U.”

“Expedite that.”

“We are, Skipper.”

Plutonium was necessary for the nuclear-tipped missiles carried by America’s fighters, Kraits, and the newer Boomslangs, Taipans, and Lanceheads. Depleted uranium was used in the cores of kinetic-kill rounds for the fighters’ Gatling weapons and for larger mass-driver weapons.

“And your crews?”

“We currently have four hundred ninety-six personnel still ashore, Captain. But the alert is out and they’re all on the way back … all except for five hospital cases and thirty-nine in one slammer or another.”

“Very well. Let me see.” Five medical no-shows and thirty-one under legal detention out of over 2,500 fighter-wing personnel wasn’t too bad at all. Extended liberty always meant a few people getting into fights or getting so brain-buzzed they ended up AWOL. Some ninety of America’s non-aviation personnel had reported sick or under arrest as well.

The data from Wing Personnel joined to the streams moving through Gray’s consciousness, and he filed it with the rest. He would need it all in order to compose readiness reports for Mars, for Columbus, and for Geneva.

There were times—lots of them—when Gray seriously wished he was still a Starhawk driver, with no more administrative responsibilities than his own evaluations and flight status uploads. Point him at an enemy-held star system and boost him in at 99.7 percent of c, and he knew exactly what was expected of him.

No more. He’d left the old VF-44 in 2406, deployed to Mars HQ for three years, then served on board the light carrier Republic, first as assistant CAG, and later as CAG. In 2414, he’d been given command of a Marine light carrier, the Nassau, but five years later he’d taken a career side-step to serve as executive officer of his old ship, America.

And now, with the rank of captain, he was America’s commanding officer, and flag captain to the battlegroup commander, Rear Admiral Jason R. Steiger.

Not bad at all for a monogie from the Periphery, the Manhattan Ruins.

Best, perhaps, not to think about that …

He focused instead on the matter of America’s Alcubierre Drive, and Engineering’s concerns that the ship would have trouble matching the emergence ZOP—the zone of probability—of the rest of the fleet.

Executive Office, USNA

Columbus, District of Columbia

United States of North America

2050 hours, TFT

The fireworks were spectacular.

Hands clasped behind his back, the newly elected president of the United States of North America stood before the viewall in his office. Its luminous surface was currently set to display in real time the scene in the Freedom Concourse outside. The Concourse, some eighty stories below, was still packed with cheering people as the dark skies overhead pulsed and rippled and flared with celebratory pyrotechnics. It was odd, Koenig thought, that in an age when most entertainment was downloaded directly into people’s brains through nanochelated implants, audiences still seemed to have that primal, almost atavistic need to come together in massed crowds, packed in shoulder to shoulder and shrieking at the tops of their lungs.

“It’s quite a show, Mr. President,” his aide, Marcus Whitney, observed.

“Eh?” Alexander Koenig said. “Oh, yes. Yes, I suppose it is.”

“The crowd’s enthusiasm seems a splendid validation of your policies, sir. Two nights, now, and still going strong!”

“Ha. Makes me wonder what I’m supposed to do for an encore.”

Those crowds, he thought, might not be so enthusiastic if the Sh’daar Treaty unraveled within the next few days, as it showed every sign of doing. He’d downloaded a fresh report from Mars only hours ago: Endeavor and two Confederation destroyers had been lost out at Omega Tee-prime. Intelligence suspected that the Sh’daar were behind the attack. This news, coming so close on the heels of the disaster at Arianrhod, seemed to promise the final collapse of the Sh’daar Treaty.

“They re-elected you because they know how you feel about the Confederation, Mr. President. You promised to give North America more sovereignty within the world government.”

Koenig grunted at that. The Pax Confeoderata had been formed in 2133, a union popularly known interchangeably as either the Earth or Terran Confederation. The creation of a single polity embracing most world governments had been a necessity arising from the chaos of the First and Second Sino-Western Wars, the Blood Death plague, and the widespread devastation caused by the Chinese asteroid strike into the Atlantic Ocean. The Pax had held now for almost three centuries and had followed Humankind to the stars.

But with the apparent defeat of the Sh’daar twenty years before, there’d been a resurgence of spirit, of independent thought and goals—and a new wave of calls for American independence from Geneva. North American sovereignty. It was an intriguing dream and one that Koenig himself very much wanted to see realized.

If the Sh’daar were renewing the old conflict, though, this was exactly the wrong time in which to do it. If ever Earth needed to stand united, this was the time.

Koenig had retired from the USNA Navy in 2408, four years after his startling victory over the Sh’daar. Elements within the American party had pointed out that his popularity would all but guarantee his election as president of the USNA.

His refusal to follow Confederation government orders in the face of Geneva’s blunt stupidity had had a lot to do with that. He’d ordered his battlegroup to leave the Sol System deliberately before orders to the contrary could arrive, won a surprising victory at Alphekka, skirmished with a French squadron at HD157950, and eventually beaten Sh’daar client forces at Texaghu Resch. Ultimately, Koenig had taken CBG-18 through a Sh’daar transit node into the remote past to confront the Sh’daar puppet masters within their home galaxy and epoch … though that hadn’t been clear at the time. The Sh’daar threat had collapsed with astonishing suddenness, resulting in the treaty guaranteeing Earth’s interstellar borders.

When CBG-18 had returned to Earth, Geneva had had little choice but to forgive Koenig’s de facto mutiny and declare him a hero.

He’d resisted getting into politics, but the ongoing battle with Geneva over Periphery Reconstruction had drawn him in, and he’d been elected to the USNA Senate in 2410. As North America began rebuilding the shattered, half-submerged cities along its drowned coastal areas, Geneva insisted that these regions, formally abandoned by the USNA centuries before, now properly belonged to the Pax world community. Once again, the former admiral had aligned himself against the Terran Confederation government, this time in the senate halls in both Columbus and in Geneva. In 2418, Koenig had left the Senate to run for president, and been elected to a six-year term.

And now, just two days ago, he’d won a second term.

The big question was what Geneva would decide to do in light of the news of the twin naval disasters … and whether President Koenig would be able to support their decision, whatever that might be.

And would the American public, caught up in their new enthusiasm for independence, support him if he decided that he must first support a united Earth?

Much depended on the alien Sh’daar, and at the moment they were a complete unknown in the equation.

The Confederation maintained at best only a tenuous connection with the Sh’daar. The so-called Sh’daar Empire, the remnants, apparently, of an ancient extragalactic federation of mutually alien civilizations, maintained a far-flung polity of mutually alien species, both now and in the remote past. That they feared the Terran Confederation, despite their considerable technological advantage, was indisputable. But Humankind understood them so poorly, even down to exactly what it was about humans that the Sh’daar feared.

Attempts to open new negotiations with the aliens through their usual representatives, a species called the Agletsch, had repeatedly failed. The Sh’daar had ignored Geneva’s call for a dialogue over the Osiris question, refused to put human diplomats in touch with the alien Nungiirtok still occupying the 70 Ophiuchi system, and rejected point-blank Confederation requests to revisit Omega Tee-sub, as the Sh’daar home cluster in the remote past was commonly known.

And now, according to the packet that had just arrived at Fleet HQ in Mars orbit, the Navy survey vessel Endeavor and her escorts had been destroyed by unknown attackers at the central core of Omega Tee-prime.

“Tee-sub” was a manageable shorthand for “T-0.876gy,” an unwieldy mouthful pronounced “Tee-sub-minus zero point eight seven six gigayear,” a physics notation referring to an epoch 876 million years in the past. Tee-prime, on the other hand, was Time Now, November of the year 2424 in common usage. Time travel, Koenig reflected, not for the first time, made things almost unendurably complicated. And conducting a war across a span of almost a billion years made everything infinitely worse.

Sixteen thousand light years from Sol lay the largest globular star cluster in the galaxy, Omega Centauri, a swarming beehive of 10 million suns packed into a sphere just 230 light years across. Close inspection, however, had proven that Omega Centauri was not, strictly speaking, a proper member of the cloud of regular, smaller globular star clusters orbiting the center of the Milky Way galaxy, but the stripped-down core of a separate dwarf galaxy devoured by the Milky Way hundreds of millions of years in the past.

Some 876 million years ago, Omega Centauri had been an irregular galaxy much like the Greater Magellanic Cloud of the present day, hanging just above the far larger galactic spiral. That Omega Centauri, existing almost a billion years ago and known to its inhabitants as the N’gai Cloud, was the home of some thousands of mutually alien civilizations called the collective name Sh’daar.

The central core of Omega T-0.876gy and Omega Centauri Tee-prime were in fact one and the same, the same star-swarm in two epochs, separated by just less than a billion years. The ancient version teemed with life, with inhabited worlds and with the incomprehensibly vast structures of a highly advanced and utterly alien technology; the modern version was uninhabited, its worlds silent and empty, the polyspecific civilization it once had held long vanished.

Why? What had happened to them?

The Sh’daar weren’t discussing it, obviously. In fact, they’d long seemed distinctly nervous about the entire topic, and lately all communication with the Sh’daar had ceased.

It was distinctly possible that the Sh’daar were on the point of renewing the war, and that, Koenig thought, could be very, very bad news indeed for all of Humankind.

He turned from the viewall display. “Marcus?”

“Sir?”

“Get me time with Konstantin. The sooner the better.”

“Yes, sir.”

The problem, Koenig thought, demanded more-than-human consideration.

Chapter Three

9 November 2424

Sh’daar Node

Texaghu Resch System,

210 Light Years from Sol

0105 hours, TFT

Red Mike fell through emptiness, accelerating gently toward the blurred haze of distorted light now only 10,000 kilometers ahead. At his current velocity, he would reach the maw in another fifteen minutes.

“Deep Peek, Peleliu,” a voice whispered within his awareness. “You are on course and clear for departure.”

“Copy,” Red Mike replied, using a tightly packaged, low-powered, and coded burst transmission. “Further communications suspended until mission return. Deep Peek out.”

His ship was a black lump of nanomatrix artfully shaped to look like a meteoroid, a small chunk of nickel-iron massing just thirty kilograms. Red Mike was an artificial intelligence, a complex set of interlocking software downloaded from the far larger AI on board the Marine assault ship Peleliu. His name was taken from U.S. Marine history, from Lt. Colonel Merritt A. “Red Mike” Edson, the commander of the 1st Raider Battalion in World War II. A patch of the rock’s outer surface a few centimeters square provided his sole data feed from the universe outside. He was tumbling slowly, so he could see his objective only intermittently for a few seconds at a time.

The maw was growing larger, more defined. Red Mike was not capable of emotion as humans understood the word, but he was as focused, as aware as any human combat pilot entering a dangerous flight zone under enemy observation. Just how good were the Sh’daar servants watching the gate, and could they see him from the other side?

Properly known as the Sh’daar Node or as the TRGA, for the Texaghu Resch gravitational anomaly, the maw was the product of an unimaginably advanced technic civilization, an artificial construct located just 210 light years from Sol at a star called Texaghu Resch. A mass equivalent to that of Earth’s sun had somehow been crushed down into a cylinder twelve kilometers long and one wide, rotating about its long axis at close to the speed of light.

Centuries earlier, the mathematical physicist Frank Tipler had described theoretical devices—black holes stretched into spaghetti-thin strands and set spinning at billions of rotations per second—that became known as Tipler machines. Their rotation, Tipler postulated, would open closed, timelike curves through spacetime, allowing access across vast distances of space … and through time as well.

Ultimately, a flaw was discovered in the concept; a Tipler machine would have to have infinite length to function as a shortcut across space or time. The Sh’daar, however, appeared to have found a slightly different approach. The movement of that much mass dragging on the fabric of spacetime opened paths inside the rotating cylinder. Twenty years ago, Admiral Koenig had taken Carrier Battlegroup 18 through the Sh’daar Node at Texaghu Resch and emerged … somewhere—somewhen—else.

At first, Koenig’s tactical group had assumed they’d jumped some sixteen thousand light years, to the heart of a globular star cluster called Omega Centauri. Only later did they discover the truth: that they’d jumped to that cluster in the remote past, when it was still the core of a small galaxy just outside the spiral arms of the Milky Way.

The TRGA/Sh’daar Node was much more than a kind of super-high-tech galactic transport system.

It was also a time machine.

For Red Mike, the thought of traveling across tens of thousands of light years and hundreds of millions of years of time in a single swift leap was not at all daunting. Both distances were mere sets of spacetime coordinates reflecting the knowledge that the universe was both far larger and far more complex than cosmologists had thought before the Einstein revolution. Tipler machines and the TRGA cylinder both were derived ultimately from the Van Stockum-Lanczos solutions to the equations of General Relativity, and therefore could claim Einstein as their father.

But Red Mike was concerned, in a coldly calculating AI sort of way, about whether or not Sh’daar technology would be able to pick him out from among the molecules of nano-embedded nickel-iron encasing him. The microcircuitry within which his consciousness resided took up less volume than a human brain and resided among the shielding atoms, woven through and among them within the nanomatrix, rather than inside a hollow within the core. Both ends of the TRGA cylinder attracted matter—dust, gas, and small bits of meteoric rubble—and drew them in and through constantly, sending them through the lumen of the cylinder in gravitational currents running both ways, in and out. The planners of Operation Deep Peek were counting on the Sh’daar watchers on the far side of the gate to assume that Red Mike was just another chunk of interstellar rubble.

To pull it off, Red Mike would have to power down to almost nothing, cutting back to the point where he was radiating heat at just a few degrees above absolute zero. He could accomplish this by dropping into power-saving mode, his conscious awareness slowed to a rate so sluggish by human standards that, for him, the minutes flickered past like seconds.

An instant before entering the maw, the encircling sphere of stars warped and puckered, the infalling light wildly distorted by the sharply bending fabric of space. His passage through the rotating cylinder was a blurred instant … and then he emerged far indeed from Texaghu Resch, a place where stars blazed around him as if from a solid wall, where only scattered and isolated patches of black, empty space peeped through the dazzling mass of closely packed suns.

Red Mike’s inbound trajectory had been carefully adjusted to match that of CBG-18 twenty years before … which should mean that he’d emerged deep within the central core of the Omega Centauri galaxy, and at T-0.876gy, almost 900 million years in the past. However, according to the Van Stockum-Lanczos solutions, different paths through the distorted spacetime vortex within the rotating cylinder would translate to different paths through both space and time; it was distinctly possible that Red Mike had emerged off-target, somewhere and somewhen else.

Confirming his exact spacetime coordinates was vital.

It would also be extremely difficult.

Executive Office, USNA

Columbus, District of Columbia

United States of North America

1124 hours, TFT

It was the next morning before President Koenig’s request could be processed and time secured on the Tsiolkovsky Array. Konstantin worked on a twenty-four-hour schedule, but there was always a backlog of high-priority requests. Geneva had been attempting, in fact, to designate Konstantin as a Confederation asset, but so far the USNA had managed to block the move, and individual governments within the Confederation could still consult the technological oracle on a first-come-first-served basis.

At the designated time, Koenig settled into his office chair, placed the neuronet contacts exposed on the palm of his hand against the chair’s contact plate, and thoughtclicked a connection through to Tsiolkovsky.

Located on the far side of the moon from Earth, the crater Tsiolkovsky was a somewhat irregular 180-kilometer depression with an off-center central peak. Named for the Russian physicist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the feature was one of the very few dark-floored maria features visible on the moon’s far side, its central peak looking like an island within a circular, black lake.

Buried deep within the central peak was a man-made cavern housing the Tsiolkovsky Array, originally the control center for a farside lunar radio telescope, but now the site of a long-running experiment in artificial hyperintelligence.

Konstantin was a fifth-generation digitally programmed and enhanced artificial intelligence, a machine mind running within a vast network of Digital Sentience DS-8940 computers. What made Konstantin unique was that humans had not programmed him; he was an AIP.

During the first half of the twenty-first century—possibly as early as 2020, though definitions were fuzzy and the records from four centuries earlier were frustratingly inexact—computers with human levels of intelligence had made their first appearance, machines with the equivalent of around 10¹⁴ neural connections. According to the records, those early human-equivalent systems and networks weren’t conscious—at least the software engineers involved were fairly certain that they weren’t—but under the relentless, driving whip of Moore’s Law, computer power had continued to double and redouble, until by the middle of the century such markers as numbers of neural connections or raw processor speed simply were no longer relevant. By 2084, a computer had written a complete operating system for a new generation of information processors—the first AIPs, or artificial-intelligence-programmed machines. One early AIP—an IBM-Lenovo Mk. 1 Brilliant e-Mind—had been instrumental in designing the first Earth-to-Synchorbit space elevator, in the early 2100s.

Within another century, computer programs and operating systems were routinely written by computers, which were designing ever more brilliant and innovative systems. Nowadays, most computers possessed something on the order of 10¹⁷ neural connections; a typical ship network might boast 10¹⁹, while Konstantin was rumored to possess about 10²⁴.

But … just exactly what did it mean to say that a computer was 10 billion—10¹⁰—times more powerful than the human brain? It wasn’t a matter of speed; computers had been faster than humans at basic arithmetic since ENIAC in the late 1940s, and had been more complex, at least in terms of the numbers of interneural connections, since the 2020s.

And even now, experts engaged in acrimonious debate over whether Konstantin or any of his electronic kin were even conscious in the same way as were humans. They acted as if they were … and when asked directly they claimed to be so. But if modern AIs had been programmed to act as if they were self-aware, how would humans even know?

It didn’t help, Koenig thought as he felt the return-flow of data flooding into his brain, that computer intelligence was of a vastly different type than most known organic minds—humans and the Agletsch, for instance. It was difficult to pinpoint exactly how it was different … but the machine network’s thoughts, quick, all-encompassing, and fluid, were unlike those of humans both in their precision and in their scope. It seemed as though Konstantin was considering everything about each question, every angle, every possibility, before it spoke.

A window opened in Koenig’s mind, and he saw Konstantin’s avatar.

White-haired, balding, with a small, square beard at his chin and antique pince-nez, the image of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky was anachronistically seated within a data-feed donut, a circular workstation ringed with large viewscreens, ghostly virtual control panels, and floating display monitors. The real Tsiolkovsky, Koenig knew, had been a hermit who’d spent most of his life in a log cabin on the outskirts of Kaluga, in Russia, when he wasn’t teaching high school mathematics in a nearby school.

He’d also been one of the twentieth century’s foremost technophilosophers, an advocate of space colonization who’d believed that Humankind one day would spread throughout the galaxy, perfecting itself as humans became immortal. Eventually, Tsiolkovsky had become known as the father of spaceflight, and had been the first person to describe how a space elevator might work.

The image turned in its seat, peering querulously at Koenig over the top of its pince-nez. “So, the president of North America,” it said, speaking English. “Until you Americans learn to take a truly global view, there is little I can do for you.”

“I am not here on behalf of just Americans, Konstantin,” Koenig replied. “The decisions I must make have … a more-than-global significance. They will affect all of Humankind.”

As always, there was a hesitation, a two-and-a-half second pause as the signal crawled from Earth to the moon, and the response crawled back.

“Indeed.” Was that a twinkle in the old man’s eye? It was there and gone so swiftly Koenig couldn’t be certain he’d really seen it. The illusion of life, he had to admit, was perfect.

Koenig became aware of a low-voiced susurration in the background, a sea of many voices, none distinct enough to make out. The display monitors surrounding Tsiolkovsky, he saw, showed a dozen different scenes from around the world and out in space. He recognized a Senate debate in progress on the floor of the Neocapitol Tower in Columbus, and the face of Ilse Roettgen, the president of the Confederation Senate, delivering a speech in the Legislators’ Grand Hall of the Ad Astra Government Complex in Geneva. There was an external view of a large, rotating nanufactory in synchorbit, and another of a freighter landing at Crisium Starport. Papess Maria II spoke to an enthusiastic crowd packed into St. Peter’s from her apartment balcony, while under a cold, white moon, armored Chinese troops and hunter-killer robots hunted insurgents in a Philippine jungle. The Washington Monument rose from flooded swamps interrupted here and there by the white and gray of vine-shrouded granite buildings, but in the distance, hovercranes floated above the mangrove forest, where the domed Capitol Building, after more than three hundred years, once again stood on dry land.

The monitor images were flickering from one to another in rapid succession, thousands, perhaps, each appearing for a few seconds before being replaced by something else. The whisper in the background was a blend of countless voices emerging from the virtual sea.

“Kazakhstan is approaching a crisis point,” Konstantin said in a far-off voice, seemingly distracted. One monitor briefly showed the rusted hulk of a robotic harvester half submerged in blowing sand. “They still rely primarily on organic crops rather than agronanufactories, but increasing desertification, especially in the West, has sharply reduced the area of grain-growing regions and make famine likely. I estimate an eighty percent probability that something in excess of fifteen million humans will die of starvation and disease within the next five years.

“The Chinese Hegemony, on the other hand, has surplus agronanufactory capabilities, but, seeking a buffer against Russia, will demand political concessions from Astana in the East—in particular the arcologies at Almaty, the largest Kazakh population center.

“A serious confrontation is developing between your United States of North America and the Earth Confederation government … particularly with members of the European Union. The Verrazano Seacrete project is nearing completion, making possible the full-scale renovation of the Manhattan Ruins. The Potomac Dam has made possible the draining of the Washington, D.C., ruins, where approximately forty percent of the submerged land has already been reclaimed.

“Geneva, however, is arguing that since the North American government renounced all claim and control over the Periphery centuries ago, control and ownership now legally reverts to the planetary government, under laws designed to allow the annexation of failed states as legal wards of Geneva. More worrying still, there is currently a bill within the Geneva Senate calling for an invocation of the Confederation’s Military First Right, which would put the USNA Navy under the direct control of Geneva. I estimate a thirty percent chance of armed conflict breaking out between the United States of North America and the Earth Confederation. If such a conflict escalates beyond regional clashes, and if neither party backs down, the exchange could become a full-blown civil war fought in space as well as on Earth, leading to the deaths of hundreds of millions of people.”

“And why are you telling me all of this, Konstantin?”

Again, that hesitation. It made the old-man avatar seem more human. “To be certain that you understand the complexity of the global balance at this point in time. Humans are not rational creatures when it comes to either politics or to claims of national sovereignty. They are not rational in terms of perceived external threat. The destruction of the Endeavor can only further complicate matters, and could easily lead to a full break between the USNA and Geneva, with consequences that would threaten human civilization.”

“I understand that. I also understand that there are no easy solutions.” He wondered, though, if Konstantin grasped that fact.

“If the Chinese hegemony were to donate nanufactured food to Kazakhstan as a humanitarian gesture, without demanding recompense in land and population centers, famine would be averted without forcing a political crisis. If, rather, Kazakhstan cedes control of her eastern provinces to the hegemony, including the city of Almaty, famine will again be averted, since the feeding of the citizens of Almaty would then be the responsibility of the Hegemony government. Unfortunately, neither outcome is likely.” Konstantin paused, a distinctly human affectation. “I despair, sometimes, of you humans. Your passions may well destroy you.”

“My concern right now is that we might be destroyed by the Sh’daar.”

“A valid concern.”

“The Sh’daar seemed worried about the possibility that humans could defeat or destroy them by somehow accessing the past. Their past. I’d like you to tell me if this is possible, and how we might bring it to pass.”

“Ah,” Konstantin said. “The time-travel option.”

“Is it possible?”

“Time travel is possible, yes, at least within certain constraints. The Sh’daar Node, certainly, clearly allows access to both past and future, within certain limits.”

Koenig started to give a sharp reply, but bit it off. “I know,” he said instead, with a mild shrug. “I was there, remember?”

Twenty years earlier, Koenig had led Carrier Battlegroup 18 through the Sh’daar Node and emerged within the central core of Omega Centauri T-0.876gy, almost a billion years in the past. The fact that the Confederation military had been able to reach so far back into time appeared to have caught the Sh’daar utterly off-balance, to the point that they’d requested what amounted to a truce rather than risking a temporal war.

And that was what had led Koenig to link with Konstantin. If the Sh’daar were afraid of something, that implied that it could be used as a weapon.

Time travel as a weapon. The obvious possibility, there, was that humans might travel back to some point before T-0.876gy and somehow edit the Sh’daar out of existence. That course, however, carried considerable risks for both sides. The Sh’daar had first interacted with Humankind almost sixty years earlier, in 2367. If that bit of history changed, all recent human history would be rewritten as well—the Battles of Beta Pictoris and Rasalhague, of Hecate and 9 Ceti, the loss of Sturgis’s World, Mufrid, and Osiris, and even relations with other star-faring species—the Agletsch, the H’rulka, the Turusch, and others. How much else might be edited into nonexistence?

With a different history, people alive now—like Koenig—might be dead. But people who’d died during the war with the Sh’daar would be alive, and people never born in Koenig’s universe would also be alive.

Koenig felt an icy, inner shock. Karyn—Karyn Mendelson—would not have died in the high-velocity impactor attack at Mars.

Yes … so very much would be different.

But the change would also run full-boost into that hoary puzzle central to all discussions of time travel: the grandfather paradox.

A man uses time travel to go back and kill his father’s father—or otherwise divert him—so that the man’s father is never born. The man himself is never born … and so cannot go back in time to change the flow of history. But then … granddad lives, the man travels back into time, and on and on, around and around, a paradox without end.

Only in this case, entire civilizations were on the wheel. If CBG-18 succeeded in editing out the Sh’daar, the Sh’daar War would never be fought, CBG-18 would never have found the Sh’daar Node and used it to change the past, so the Sh’daar would live … on and on and …

Karyn Mendelson would be alive …

But Konstantin was speaking to him, dry words within his mind. “The possibility of a serious paradox, of a so-called grandfather paradox, would not be an issue, at least not to human civilization at large.”

“Eh?” Had Konstantin somehow been eavesdropping on his inner thoughts? “Why not?”

“Quantum theory predicts that any change to the flow of time as we experience it would simply result in a branching through to another parallel universe, one of what may be an infinite array of universes where every possible determination and outcome not only may occur, but must occur.”

Koenig was startled. He’d heard that theory, but so far as he knew it was only theory. “Is that proven?”

“Proving it would require experimentation that would eliminate access to the original universe and strand the experimenters in the product of a different causal outcome.”

In other words, the man who went back and killed his grandfather would find himself in a universe where he’d never been born. The universe from which he’d originally come would be forever closed to him, since further attempts at time travel would carry him back and forth only along this new time stream.

And if CBG-18 managed to eliminate the Sh’daar in the remote past, the fleet’s personnel might take comfort in existing in a universe cleansed of that enemy, but they could never go home to the universe and time line from which they’d come. If they were somehow able to return to 2424—and that in itself would be a real problem without the Sh’daar Node time machine—it would be to find a completely different world. Karyn would be alive … and in a relationship with another Alex Koenig, assuming the two had gotten together in a universe without the looming threat of the Sh’daar.

Even so, it was tempting. Karyn … alive …

“You’re saying that it’s all futile,” Koenig said after a moment’s unhappy thought. “If we managed to stop the Sh’daar in the far past, we, the squadron, would find ourselves in a different universe … but this universe, the one we left, would not have been changed at all.”

“Obviously,” Konstantin said, “since it would be necessary to travel through a Sh’daar Node to effect the requisite changes.”

“So far as this universe was concerned, CBG-18 would have just disappeared … and the Sh’daar would still be here.”

“Precisely.”

“So what would be the point?”

“None, really. According to the many-universe hypothesis of quantum physics, all possibilities, all possible outcomes exist, each within its own universe. This would be the case whether you traveled through time or not, and the only witnesses to such change would be you and those traveling with you.”

“It’s not my intent to be some damned time-traveling tourist,” Koenig said, angry. “The point is to stop the Sh’daar … in this universe.”

“Indeed.”

“So my question for you is … is there any way to use time travel—or the threat of time travel—to influence Sh’daar intentions? To make them back off … or to defeat them on a strategic level?”

“That will depend, President Koenig, more on the Sh’daar than on us. We don’t know exactly what it is that the Sh’daar fear … or why they asked for a truce twenty years ago. And if the Endeavor and her escorts were destroyed by Sh’daar action—and I should point out that we do not as yet know that it was the Sh’daar who attacked our survey squadron—we do not know what their current motivations might be.”

That gave Koenig pause. He’d not thought of this new possibility. “You’re saying the Endeavor might not have been destroyed by the Sh’daar?”

“We know only that there was an attacker,” Konstantin told him, “not who or what that attacker was.”

“But the Sh’daar … damn it, Konstantin. Who else could it be?”

“President Koenig, you humans must learn to take the longer and larger view, and not assume that all of the cosmos centers on your small experience. There are something on the order of 50 million species in this galaxy alone that humans would probably recognize as intelligent. We know of two that are so highly advanced that humans would be justified in thinking of them as quite literally godlike—the ur-Sh’daar and the Starborn.”

Koenig considered this. Little was known about either culture. What little information they did have had been acquired by a fighter pilot twenty years ago—“Sandy” Gray—during a mind-to-mind encounter with the Sh’daar.

The ur-Sh’daar—the prefix ur was from the German, and carried the meaning of “original,” “primitive,” or “proto.” According to Gray, during his intelligence debriefing, the ur-Sh’daar had been a multispecies interstellar culture occupying a small galaxy—Gray’s Sh’daar source had called it the N’gai Cloud—that possibly had been ejected from the Andromedan galaxy during a collision billions of years before. That cloud eventually had been captured and devoured by the Milky Way, and all that was left of it now was the star cluster known as Omega Centauri.

At some point close to a billion years ago, before Omega Centauri was absorbed by the far larger spiral of the Milky Way galaxy, the ur-Sh’daar had entered something known as the Technological Singularity. In brief, their technological prowess had advanced so far, so fast, that they had become—to use Konstantin’s word—godlike. Though the details were still poorly understood, the ur-Sh’daar had all but vanished … into another dimension, into higher planes, into the remote future … no one knew for sure. What was known was that the Sh’daar were the residue, the lower-tech cripples, the ones left behind when the gods blinked out of the here and now.

As for the Starborn, even less was known about them. One of the Sh’daar client races, a very powerful, technically advanced civilization of huge gas bags that had evolved in the atmosphere of a planet much like Jupiter in Earth’s solar system, was known as the H’rulka. The question was how a species resembling titanic Portuguese men-of-war adrift in the upper atmosphere of a gas giant could possibly have developed mining, smelting, and advanced spaceflight when they had neither free oxygen in their atmosphere to support fire, nor a solid planetary surface from which to mine metals.

The H’rulka themselves spoke of the “Starborn,” an advanced species that had come to them before they’d joined with the Sh’daar, taught them how to filter metal from the atmosphere, and given them the technology to reach, first, their world’s system of moons, and then the worlds of other stars. Confederation Intelligence assumed that the Starborn were the Sh’daar … but Koenig had never bought that. The Sh’daar, apparently in terror of the technic singularity that had taken the ur-Sh’daar beyond their ken and left them behind, seemed driven to prevent the development of high technology, not foster it. Koenig was pretty sure that whoever or whatever the Starborn were, they were not Sh’daar, and most xenosophontologists seemed to agree with him.

Nor did it seem likely that they were related to the ur-Sh’daar, evolved in a different galaxy some billions of years in the past. The H’rulka, though the xenosophs weren’t sure of the details, had been given their technological boost something like twelve to fifteen thousand years ago, after which they were contacted—and subsumed—by the modern Sh’daar, who’d found a means of reaching from the N’gai Cloud of 900 million years ago to the Milky Way galaxy in the recent past.

“You’re saying we need more data,” Koenig said after a long moment.

“That would certainly help, Mr. President. We have no way of evaluating the threat with little or no hard information. I would recommend deploying a carrier battlegroup to Omega Centauri to confront whatever it was that destroyed the Endeavor. Once we know whether we are facing Sh’daar, ur-Sh’daar, Starborn, or something else entirely, we may be able to formulate a more comprehensive plan of action.”

It made sense. A modern starcarrier battlegroup was the most flexible, most powerful means of confronting an unknown nonhuman threat.

“That would make sense, Konstantin,” Koenig said. “The America battlegroup is already preparing for a deployment out to Omega Centauri. However … the decision will be Admiral Steiger’s, and the Confederation Naval Command. The Slan capture of 36 Ophiuchi may … complicate matters. A lot.”

“Indeed. However, if the Sh’daar clients follow past tendencies, they will pause to digest what they have swallowed. The need for information about the identity of the destroyers of the Endeavor is critical.”

“Will you make that recommendation to Geneva?”

“In so far as my recommendation carries any weight there, yes, of course. Keep in mind, however, that I am technically the … property of the United States of North America, and that my input would be considered politically suspect by Geneva. At least until they succeed in assuming control of this facility by mandating that I am an asset for all of Humankind, not just for North Americans.”

“Politics …”

“As you say. It is a political issue, certainly.”

“I will do what I can, Konstantin,” Koenig said. “I can’t make any promises.”

“Keep me informed,” Konstantin told him. “I have a keen interest in how this will play out.”

So do I, Koenig thought. Karyn … alive …

Chapter Four

9 November 2424

Omega Centauri

T-0.876gy

1546 hours, TFT

It had taken hours, but Red Mike at last was able to confirm his location both in space and in time.

The encircling panorama of stars was nearly solid, but individual stellar spectra could be identified like fingerprints, and the patterns of stars, distinguished by color, age, and luminosity, matched perfectly the photographs taken by the CVS America twenty years ago when she’d passed through the TRGA cylinder and entered this space and time. A careful search across that glowing backdrop had revealed the Six Suns, a circlet of brilliant blue stars half a light year away, each forty times the mass of Sol, all orbiting a common center of gravity.

That was Red Mike’s final confirmation. He had stepped across from Omega Centauri Tee-prime to Omega T-0.876gy, the dwarf galaxy falling in toward the spiral arms of the Milky Way more than 800 million years in the past.

Omega T-0.876gy, the N’gai Cloud of the Sh’daar, pulsed and throbbed with electronic life.

A quartet of deep space fortresses guarded this end of the TRGA cylinder, small asteroids bristling with weaponry and sensory gear. They’d ignored him as he drifted out of the cylinder, apparently unable to detect him when his internal energy currents were channeled down to such a low, slow level.

Deeper into the central core of the tiny galaxy, toward the blue-hot mystery of the Six Suns, radio and laser communications wove a complex and tangled network of technic civilization. Numerous planets were in high-velocity transit in the distance, their wakes of distorted space visible across several light years. The Sh’daar, it had been discovered twenty years ago, were able to move entire planets by warping a bubble of space around them—the faster-than-light Alcubierre Drive on an unimaginably huge scale.

Red Mike noted the fact of the moving planets, but remained incurious as to where they were being taken, or why. He detected the movement of starships as well. Many would be piloted by the Sh’daar equivalent of AIs, electronic life forms more akin to Red Mike than to their organic predecessors. Others, he knew, were piloted by organics. By Refusers …

The tiny probe spent several more hours recording and mapping, all the while using local magnetic fields to very slowly decelerate until its velocity was zero relative to the surrounding space. Then, equally slowly, it began accelerating once more, moving back in the direction from which it had come.

There appeared to be no response from the fortresses, no indication that he’d been noticed.

With luck, the Sh’daar instrumentation on those guardian fortresses had not picked up the tiny surge of electromagnetic energy from a thirty-kilogram lump of nickel-iron when it unobtrusively reversed its course.

Squadron Common Room

TC/USNA CVS America

Quito Synchorbital

1820 hours, TFT

“Look, I know how you feel, Nungie,” Lieutenant Willis Cross said with a careless shrug as he entered the common room.

“I told you, Nape. Don’t call me that.”

“Okay, okay … but you gotta take the big picture, y’know? The universe doesn’t revolve around you and your personal problems!”

Cross and Gregory had just had chow at the Hab Two mess hall, and were contemplating a free evening. Gregory glanced at the viewall display covering two bulkheads—a real-time view of Earth and the synchorbital base outside—then slumped into one of the low, deeply cushioned seats that had been grown out of the deck. Vincent Ramey had told him at chow that, yes, the scuttlebutt was true. America was being deployed to Omega Centauri.

Gregory had been in the Navy long enough that he put little credence in scuttlebutt—an ancient naval term for shipboard rumor. Such rumor routinely took on a life of its own, no matter how outrageous or unlikely it might be. But when you heard the same story again and again from a number of different sources, no matter how outrageous it might be, it seemed more and more possible with each hearing. The word circulating through America’s hab decks now was that a survey vessel, the Endeavor, had been attacked and destroyed by the Sh’daar at Omega Centauri, that Sh’daar forces were emerging in force from the Black Rosette, that America and her battlegroup were to be deployed there immediately. Cross and several others had been talking about the rumors at chow. Gregory had been resisting buying into the tales. Almost a month earlier, he’d heard stories circulating through the junior officers’ quarters to the effect that the battlegroup was bound for Osiris, for home, and he didn’t want to surrender that hope just yet.

“Having the Nungies parked just sixteen light years from Sol is not my ‘personal problem,’ okay?”

Gregory slapped his left palm down on the table next to his chair, allowing the exposed circuitry woven into the skin across the heel of his hand to come into contact with the table’s linkpad. Coffee, he thought, and added his personal code. A couple of seconds later, the coffee materialized on the receiver plate next to the pad, built up atom by atom so quickly it seemed to flash into solidity out of nothing in an instant. He picked up the mug—cool to the touch, with an animated image of America dropping out of Alcubierre Drive in a dazzling pulse of light—and sipped the coffee—hot enough to scald, with his preference of cream and sugar automatically added.

Cross dropped into the seat next to Gregory’s and ordered a glass of scotch on the rocks. Alcohol would have been unthinkable on board a USNA ship a couple of centuries ago … but the swarms of nano circulating through his body would block damage to his organs, and permit a pleasant buzz without allowing him to get drunk.

“Maybe ‘King’ Koenig doesn’t agree with you,” he suggested after taking a sip.

“The way I heard it, the Confederation bigwigs were in a panic over just how close the Nungies and their friends were. They were pushing for an Osiris relief expedition.”

“Some of them, maybe,” Cross admitted. “And the Chinese want Everdawn back, and the Islamics want Mufrid back and … fuck it. It’s all just politics anyway.”

Gregory nodded in glum agreement. The Confederation seemed glacial in its resolve to win back worlds and systems taken from Sol decades before. There was plenty of talk, sure … talk about Humankind claiming its place among the stars, about systems belonging to humans but now ruled by beings so alien that a meeting of minds with them was virtually impossible. But, somehow, nothing was ever actually done after all of the promises and resolve. The Islamic colony at Mufrid—Eta Boötis IV—was the perfect example. Evacuated when the Turusch had invaded in 2404, Mufrid had been briefly freed a few months later when America and a small fleet returned and raided the system.

But the battlegroup had moved on and Eta Boötis had been abandoned. The evacuees rescued from the planet’s inhospitable surface, some thousands of them, had been shipped back to Sol and ultimately transferred to refugee camps on Luna and within the Islamic Theocracy on Earth, where they remained to this day—still waiting.

It was all so … stupid.

Despite the clamor in some quarters of the Confederation itself, the Directorate in Geneva appeared to be in no hurry to reclaim Osiris or any of the other worlds taken from Confederation control during the past half century. As Cross had pointed out, it was all about politics. Neither the Theocracy nor the Chinese Hegemony were members of the Earth Confederation. Both, in fact, had been enemies of the Confederation at various times over the past few centuries, and Geneva certainly was not going to take care of their territorial issues with aliens before their own problems were addressed.

Confederation, Theocracy, Hegemony, and the Independents—none seemed able to confront the Sh’daar clients as a united front, as Humankind rather than a ragged confusion of separate nation-states.

“So,” Gregory said, “you coming in with me?”

Cross downed the last of his drink and made a face. “Might as well. They’re not letting us off the damned ship, that’s for sure.”

“All liberty cancelled,” Gregory said. “I know.”

“I can see calling back the guys who might’ve gone Earthside or out to Luna. But why do they have to lock us up like we were prisoners, or something?”

Gregory shrugged. “You played the sexinteractives at Angelo’s lately?”

“Yeah, man. Hot. You’re not only there, smack in the middle of the fantasy of your choice, but it feels like your nerves are ’cubing on double capacity.”

“Yup. Direct nanostimulation of the midbrain to stimulate a dopamine dump. Instantly addictive. Maybe they just don’t trust us to come back to the ship.”

“Aw, it’s harmless as long as you’re pumped full of anti-a,” Cross said. “Battlegroup Command is just on a power trip, is all.”

“Or,” Gregory said, settling back in the chair and closing his eyes, “maybe they just want to make sure we review this stuff.” He brought his palm down on the contact plate and relaxed.

He had to deliver a mental code group, to get clearance. The information he was downloading came from the Agletsch, by way of Naval Intelligence, and was not for public access.

After a moment, the data began scrolling past his mind’s eye.

Executive Office, USNA

Columbus, District of Columbia

United States of North America

2034 hours, EST

“What the hell do your … masters think they’re doing?” Koenig demanded.

He was in a virtual conference, standing in a … place, a world with towering mountains of ice on the horizon, and a night sky ablaze with the shifting green and red hues of a spectacular aurora. Stars gleamed, myriad pinpoints peeking through the auroral haze, and the intricate clots and twists and curlings of the Milky Way stretched across the zenith.

It was a real place, Koenig knew, a Confederation colony established in 2294 by settlers from North America and Russia. Themis was the human name for the cluster of cities on the great southern continent of Zeta Doradus V, some thirty-eight light years from Sol. The place was surprisingly Earthlike in a galaxy of hundreds of billions of planetary bodies, most of which were quite different, quite alien from Earth. A living, vibrant world of vast oceans, violet forests, and brilliant sunlight, Zeta Doradus was best known as the place of First Contact—Humankind’s first meeting with an extrasolar species.

Two of them—Gru’mulkisch and Dra’ethde—stood before Koenig now, looking up at him with almost comical twists to their stalked eyes—four apiece, rising from the spidery, flattened, sixteen-legged bodies covered in a velvety-brown leather patterned with gold and blue reticulations. Humans called them “bugs” or “spiders,” but in fact they were not much like either, with unsegmented bodies, an unpleasant mode of eating through their bellies, and sixteen limbs—short at the back and quite long at the front. Both were female; their male companions, like the mates of female Angler fish on Earth, were small parasites attached to their bodies. Properly, the beings were known as Agletsch.

“The masters have told us nothing, President Koenig,” Gru’mulkisch said, speaking through the small translation device affixed to what might approximate its chest. “It is not in their nature to do so, yes-no?”

“Are you certain that the attackers at Omega Centauri were Sh’daar?” Dra’ethde added. “Others might use the ancient transport systems. Others occupy the Great Deeps of the stars.”

Koenig glared at the two small aliens. He’d known these two particular individuals for a long time, ever since he’d commanded CBG-18. When the fleet had departed for Operation Crown Arrow, striking deep into Sh’daar space in order to buy time for a desperate Earth, he’d taken them along as native guides.

It was still difficult sometimes to follow how they thought. Their social conventions were strange—their need for privacy when they ate, for example. These two seemed to have been around forever, and had aged, outwardly at least, not at all. He didn’t know how their life span compared with that of humans. Were they still young? Old? Did age even make a difference for entities so alien, so different physically and emotionally from Humankind?

Generally, the Agletsch seemed friendly, unassuming, and at times eager to help … though they were not always forthcoming with important information. The Agletsch were interstellar traders. What they traded was information, exchanging data about star systems and life forms and interstellar civilizations for information about Earth and humanity, occasionally leavened with the stores of heavy elements that appeared to be a common medium of trade throughout the known galaxy, in particular platinum, iridium, rhenium, as well as some of the longer-half-lived artificials—neptunium-237, and californium-251.

And they gave nothing away for free.

“There are times,” Koenig told them, “when we do not ask you to sell us information because we do not know what to ask. If there is a threat to my species—whether it’s the Sh’daar or some other predatory race out there, I want to know about it.”

“This we understand, Mr. President Koenig,” Dra’ethde told him. “And if we had something definite to trade to you on the matter, we would be certain you were aware of the fact, yes-no? But in this instance we are … bleep!”

Koenig smiled. Agletsch translators sometimes encountered concepts they couldn’t handle in English, and the result was a brief, shrill, electronic tone. In twenty years, the Agletsch had gotten a lot better with English, but they still occasionally bleeped out.

“We are as ignorant as are you,” Gru’mulkisch supplied.

“I see.” Agletsch translations could also sometimes come across as blunt to the point of rudeness.

“The destruction of your Endeavor,” Dra’ethde continued, “may well have been caused by Sh’daar forces … possibly by elements of the Sh’daar Network in disagreement with current policies.”

“The Sh’daar don’t speak with one voice?” Koenig said, feigning surprise. “How very … human! I never would have thought it of them!”

“The Sh’daar Network is unimaginably vast,” Gru’mulkisch told him, missing the irony in Koenig’s voice, “extending, as it does, across a large part of this galaxy, and across an immense gulf of time. There can be, there often is … dissonance among disparate parts of the system.”

“They have my sympathies,” Koenig said with dry amusement.

Who speaks for Earth? That had been the cry of Carl Sagan, a late-twentieth-century cosmologist and philosopher. After four centuries, it was still an open question. It was interesting that the galaxy-spanning Sh’daar, unimaginably more advanced than Humankind, had the same problem.

“What you call the Black Rosette, however,” Dra’ethde said, “remains a mystery to us. Over hundreds of millions of years, it has evolved into something quite beyond its builders’ original intent … beyond even their imaginings, yes-no?”

“Evolved how?”

The two Agletsch went into a momentary huddle, conversing with each other in a rapid-fire burst of eructations. Native Agletsch speech was produced by a kind of controlled belching impossible for humans to imitate. Their translation devices handled English fairly well … and also translated burps to Drukrhu, an artificial trade pidgin that had established the Agletsch as the galaxy’s premier data traders, diplomats, and interspecies liaisons.

The two faced Koenig again. “Since there is no certainty,” Gru’mulkisch said, “since the information is largely supposition, we expect only first-level compensation.”

Koenig opened a window in his mind and entered a thoughtclicked notation. Trade with the Agletsch was based on a well-established scale of prices for specific types of information. Some things—a complete description of a previously unknown alien star-faring civilization, for instance, including their location within the galaxy and a description of their world, were classified as Level Eight, and had a base price of some tens of tons of rhenium, or slightly less of artificial heavy elements. If Geneva could add new information to the exchange, the price in metals came down … but in fact there was surprisingly little that Humankind knew that the Agletsch did not. Earth depended on heavy metals as the medium of exchange with the interstellar trading network.

And as head of the USNA, Koenig had to check large transfers of metal with the government in Geneva.

This time, though, he could make the decision by himself. Level One information could be obtained for only a few hundred kilograms of rhenium or iridium, an amount easily within the reserve capabilities of North America.

“Done,” he said. “Is half platinum, half iridium okay?”

“Satisfactory,” Gru’mulkisch said. “As you put it … done.”

“You are aware, of course,” Dra’ethde told him, “of the Six Suns located within the N’gai Cloud of nine hundred million years ago …”

The virtual panorama around Koenig shifted, showing now a view recorded by the America twenty years earlier, within the core of Omega Centauri T-0.876gy. The planetary surface was gone, and Koenig now drifted in open space, a space completely filled by brilliant stars. Ahead, six particular stars blazed in a hexagon flattened by an off-center viewing perspective, each blue-hued and intensely brilliant. They burned so brightly that the near-solid wall of millions of bright background stars faded into the haze of light, lost in the glare.

Looking away, Koenig saw silhouettes against the encircling haze—several small worlds visible as perfectly black disks, along with a number of smaller, more complicated structures—deep-space factories or bases, perhaps—along with several immense starships. Two minute knots of gold and blue-white fuzz marked a pair of artificial singularities—Sh’daar Nodes leading to other, distant locations in space and time.

“Of course,” Koenig said. The image, he realized, was being stopped down to tolerable levels by the software running this digital illusion. Had he been seeing those brilliant stars as they really appeared from that distance—roughly 300 million kilometers, two thousand times the distance between Earth and Sol—he would have been immediately, searingly blinded.

“These stars,” Dra’ethde continued, “were artificially created by merging lesser, older suns together, yes-no? Each of those stars masses some forty times the mass of your Sol. They were positioned roughly fifty astronomical units from one another, and set into motion about their common center of gravity.”

Koenig nodded understanding. Human astronomers had known of the phenomenon within globular clusters called “blue stragglers” for centuries. Stars were so close-packed within the heart of such clusters that collisions were fairly common at the core. When two ancient red giants merged, they formed a single new star, a blue-hot stellar resurrection, young and hot, an anomaly among millions of ancient red suns.

“The ur-Sh’daar,” Gru’mulkisch said, “engineered the merging of old stars to create more massive, younger stars. Our supposition is that they created the stellar hexagram you see here to create multiple gateways through space and time.”

“The rapid rotation of these super-massive stars would distort the region of space between them,” Dra’ethde added, “opening a myriad of what you call wormholes, and allowing rapid passage from one region of spacetime to another.”

“We’d already figured that much out twenty years ago,” Koenig told them. There was even a term for the process now: stellarchetecture, using entire stars to build artificial structures or devices on a literally astronomical scale. “But the TRGA cylinders—the Sh’daar Nodes—those already do that. How are the Six Suns different?”

“A Sh’daar Node is only about one of your kilometers wide,” Dra’ethde told him, “and involves the mass of one star the size of your sun. The hexagon of six stars is nearly one hundred of your astronomical units across … roughly fifteen billion times larger than a TRGA cylinder, and with a total system mass of two hundred forty of your suns. The number of distinct and separate spacetime paths through the volume defined by the Six Suns is not infinite, but may be a number so large as to be indistinguishable from infinity in any practical sense.”

“We estimate ten to the twenty-six distinct spacetime pathways,” Gru’mulkisch said.

Koenig gave a low whistle. One octillion paths. That was more than any survey could possibly map, a number that might as well be infinite. “Why would they want so many?” He asked.

“In part,” Dra’ethde said, “the Six Suns were designed as a cultural center, a kind of monument to the greatness of ur-Sh’daar technology and power. There is also evidence that they were … experimenting with the structure space.”

“Experimenting how?” Koenig asked.

“We believe that the Six Suns served as a portal to other destinations than ordinary spacetime,” Gru’mulkisch told him. “They may have been trying to reach another universe, another brane altogether.”

The shock of the cold statement was like a blow. They’d been trying to reach not just a remote region of space and time, but another universe?

For centuries, now, cosmologists had hypothesized a large number of universes—possibly an infinite number—existing side by side within a kind of higher dimension or hyperspace physicists called the bulk. Each universe in this series was called a brane, from membrane, and appeared flat—two-dimensional, like a sheet—from the perspective of the bulk, but three-dimensional and coexistent with the other universes when viewed from within. Such a “universe of universes” was called the multiverse.

By definition, those other universes were forever unreachable, completely unconnected with the familiar universe of Sol and Earth and all that Humankind knew. Each existed as a self-contained and isolated sphere of existence with its own set of physical laws, its own nested set of time lines, its own reality. This was something quite different from the more familiar branching of reality invoked in discussions of time travel in order to exorcise the dreaded grandfather paradox. Such branching universes—the so-called many-worlds solution to the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum physics—were accessible if time travel into the past was possible. Koenig himself had proven that accessibility by reaching Omega Centauri T-0.876gy.

Whether unreachable branes or the accessible temporal branches of a quantum tree properly described the multiverse—or whether reality somehow incorporated both types of parallel universes—was still a matter of heated discussion. Physicists had proven the existence of alternate universes in the mid twenty-first century by showing that some types of subatomic particles that seemed to vanish from this universes in fact had moved … someplace else, but they still argued about what might be on the other side.

By definition, there was no way to reach another brane, and yet Gru’mulkisch was telling him that the ur-Sh’daar had managed to do so … or at least that they’d tried. The mere fact that they’d attempted it said something profound about the level of that civilization’s technology … and about their understanding, their mastery of the cosmos.

“So … I was asking you about the evolution of the Six Suns,” Koenig said after digesting this information. “We’ve already figured out that the Black Rosette is what the Six Suns turned into … evolved into. Stars with forty times the mass of Sol would be ephemeral … a lifetime of only a few million years.”

The more massive a star, the greater the pressures within its core, and the faster it burns through its supply of hydrogen before detonating as a supernova or, for the most massive stars, as an even more powerful hypernova. What’s left after the explosion is most of the star’s mass compacted down to a black hole, a singularity with gravity so powerful that not even light could escape.

“Yes,” Gru’mulkisch said. Her four stalked eyes twisted in a dizzying and untranslatable pattern. “We’re not sure how long the Six Suns existed in their original configuration. The ur-Sh’daar built them, merging sun with sun over the course of millions of years to keep them burning. The Sh’daar, however, apparently lost this technology and, eventually, all six of the stars aged, exploded, and collapsed. Over many more hundreds of millions of years, the black holes descended into tighter and faster orbits, until they became what you call the Black Rosette.”

“The Black Rosette,” Dra’ethde added, “covers a much smaller area of space, of course. However, the gravitational vortices it generates are, we calculate, much more numerous, much more far reaching than the ur-Sh’daar originally planned.”

“More than an octillion spacetime pathways?”

“Considerably more. It may reach across a large portion of the multiverse, and involve both the creation and the destruction of this universe.”

Koenig was silent for a long moment. When he didn’t respond immediately, Gru’mulkisch added, “We told you that much of this is supposition on our part.”

“I know,” Koenig said. “I was just realizing what it was like to be a small child getting his first glimpse of a quantum power tap.”

“I do not understand,” Gru’mulkisch said.

“It looks so pretty,” Koenig said, “with that blue glow surrounding a couple of orbiting microsingularities … but I’m a kid and I have no idea at all what it does, how it works … and I don’t realize that if I’m not very careful, it could swallow me whole.”

Chapter Five

10 November 2424

Sh’daar Node

Texaghu Resch System

210 Light Years from Sol

1024 hours, TFT

Red Mike fell clear of the TRGA cylinder’s entry, once again back in Time Now. Ahead, the Marine light carrier Nassau waited with her escorts. Mike sent the coded, tightly compacted message declaring his arrival and accelerated for home.

“Welcome back, Red Mike,” a voice said within the probe’s consciousness. “Happy birthday!”

It took Red Mike several seconds to decide what the officer on board the carrier was talking about. AI reconnaissance probes are not in the habit, after all, of thinking about birthdays.

But he could reason, within certain parameters, and he did possess a simple outline of history within his files, designed to give him both context and a framework for his conversations with humans. The date—November 10—was the 694th anniversary of the creation of the original Continental Marines, at Tun Tavern, Philadelphia in 1775. The later United States Marines and, now, the USNA Marines, continued the tradition of observing this date with what amounted to a religious fervor, celebrating it with parades, speeches, cake cuttings, and formal balls wherever possible. The Nassau, a tiny microcosm of the Corps with several thousand Marines embarked on board, was no exception.

Red Mike was as incurious about human traditions and customs as he was about anything else not specifically within his purview, but the birthday greeting did raise one question. If the Marines were busy cutting cakes and making speeches … were they ready for what appeared to be gathering just on the other side of the Sh’daar Node?

TC/USNA CVS America

USNA Naval Base

Quito Synchorbital

0840 hours, TFT

Gray was in his office going through the daily briefings when Rear Admiral Steiger’s avatar entered Gray’s inward awareness. “Excuse me. Sandy?”

“Yes, sir?”

“I’ve been directed to link with Geneva for a strategic conference. I’d like my flag captain there with me.”

“Yes, Admiral. That sounds promising. You think we’re getting our flight orders?”

“I do. The question is, what’s our destination?”

Gray gave a mental shrug. “Seems fairly obvious to me, sir. All of those simulations of a deployment to Omega Cent we’ve been running … and then we get word of the Endeavor.”

“Maybe … maybe. Unless the Confed Senate decides we need to block the Slan at 36 Oph. But the real question may be when is our destination?”

“Through the TRGA? Maybe so. But we’re going to need more than a carrier battlegroup to take on the Tee-sub minus Sh’daar. When is the linkup?”

“Twenty minutes.”

Gray checked his inner clock. Nine hundred, then. Barely time to download the latest intel feeds. “I’ll be there, Admiral.”

There was a lot to go through. Nano reconnaissance probes returning from the 70 Ophiuchi star system suggested that the Turusch and Nungiirtok were preparing for something, bringing in more forces from elsewhere. Probes from 36 Ophiuchi seemed to show the Slan working on consolidating their conquest. More ships were arriving in-system, big ships. Likely they were digging in, preparing for a possibly human counterattack … but it was also possible that they were preparing a new assault of their own, one aimed, quite probably, at Earth.

And there was more. Signals Intelligence satellites in the Kuiper Belt had picked up the whisper of high-velocity microprobes churning through the fabric of space on outbound vectors, and the likeliest explanation was that Sh’daar clients were already scouting the solar system in preparation for an attack.

Gray was put rather forcibly in mind of the situation President Koenig—then Admiral Koenig, commander of CBG-18, had faced twenty years ago. Convinced that the only way to stop the expected Sh’daar assault on the Sol System was to take the war into Sh’daar space, Koenig had arranged to miss expected Confederation Naval Command orders to stay in Solar space by leaving before they arrived. Later, he’d fought a French squadron sent to bring the “rogue” battlegroup in.

The decision, as it turned out, had been the right one. A renewed Sh’daar assault on Earth had not materialized, and Koenig had gone on to discover their spacetime and force a truce. Biographers had pointed out, however, that had he been wrong Koenig would have been reviled as the man who’d abandoned Earth to the Sh’daar forces.

The Confederation might well want the battlegroup to stick close to the Sol System, just in case the Sh’daar struck out from Ophiuchus.

It was time. Gray alerted his personal AI that he was not to be disturbed, then opened a channel through to Admiral Steiger. The Admiral’s AI routed the connection to Geneva, and Gray found himself in a virtual conference.

The European Unionists tended to be conservative in their virtual backgrounds. The venue was a large conference room, with two walls and the ceiling set as windows, the other two walls showing gently shifting abstracts of pastel light. Twelve men and women were seated around the conference table—it had the appearance of mahogany—half in EU military uniforms, the others in civilian dress. Through the windows, Gray could see the labyrinth of the Plaza of Light outside, a hundred stories down … and beyond it, the glitter of late-afternoon sunlight on Lake Geneva.

“Admiral Steiger,” a bearded EU admiral named Longuet said. “Captain Gray. Thank you for linking in. We need to discuss a change to your upcoming mission.”

“We feel that a deployment to Omega Centauri is not … critical at this time,” one of the civilians added. Her name was Ilse Roettgen, and she was the president of the Confederation Senate.

“Indeed, ma’am?” Steiger said. “Our operational plan has been set for some weeks, now. In light of the new reconnaissance information from Omega Centauri, it seems to me that the mission is, if anything, more critical than ever.”

“Not in light of the information from 36 Ophiuchi,” Admiral Longuet said.

“We are in the process of assembling a strike force,” another civilian said. Gilberto Lupi was the Brazilian imperial minister of Defense. “We intend to take back 36 Ophiuchi, before the enemy entrenches himself, before he becomes too strong for us to oust him.”

“I see,” Steiger said. “And I take it you’ve consulted with my government on this?”

“There is no need,” Longuet replied. “We are invoking Military First Right.”

Gray felt an inner jolt at that, a kind of psychic shock. Military First Right? After almost three centuries, it was possible that the Pax Confeoderata was about to fail.

And when it did, the USNA Star Navy would be smack at the heart of the storm.

First Right had not been invoked before, not since it had been passed by the Confederation Senate twelve years earlier. The law was assumed to be unenforceable in America. It looked like that assumption was about to be tested.

The Confederation had arisen from the ashes of the Second Sino-Western War, a sharp and brutal conflict fought in the first half of the twenty-second century. The Battle of Wormwood and the subsequent fall of a small asteroid into the Atlantic Ocean had seriously weakened the old United States politically, forcing the union, first, of several North American nations into the USNA, followed by the merging of the USNA with the newly founded Earth Confederation. Under the original terms of the amalgamation, each member state kept control of its own military—especially its spaceborne forces. For a state’s military to be put under the direct control of the Geneva government required, literally, an act of that state’s congress … in the case of the USNA by a two-thirds’ majority vote in both the Senate and the House.

But in 2412, Geneva had passed the Military First Right Act over two dissenting votes, Great Britain and the USNA. The star navies of Earth’s Confederation were the property, the military arm, and the responsibility of the Earth Confederation, not of any lone member state. North America, of course, and Great Britain had disagreed. For the two of them, ancient allies, the Earth Confederation had always been a loose alignment of independent nation-states, a planetary government more in name than in fact.

That this belief put the USNA at odds with every other Confederation member state save one seemed to have mattered little. Not until the Sh’daar Ultimatum in 2367 had there been a serious need for a united Earth military … and even then, the union had been an awkward and incomplete cooperation rather than a single-fleet command. Military First Right had been intended to change that … and, obviously, to prevent a repeat of the so-called Koenig’s Mutiny, which had led to his defeat of a combined French-British fleet at HD157950 in 2405.

That Koenig’s decision had been right was immaterial. He’d decided to face the Sh’daar forces in their own space, rather than assuming a purely defensive posture within Earth’s solar system, but, in so doing, left Earth open to a possible attack … an attack that, thank God, had never materialized. Geneva had acted to prevent such a situation from ever happening again—or, at least, so they’d planned it. That the Military First Right Act might backfire on them and lead to a civil war and the collapse of the Confederation seemed never to have entered their minds.

“This,” Longuet said, indicating another Confederation officer at the virtual table, “is Admiral Christian Delattre. He and his squadron are en route now to join the America battlegroup at Synchorbit. He will be assuming command of the battlegroup, at which point he will transfer his flag to the America, which shall become his flagship. Admiral Steiger, you will remain in command of the USNA battlegroup, but you will take your orders directly from Admiral Delattre. Is this understood?”

“I will need confirming orders from Columbus, sir,” Steiger said.

“No, Admiral, you will not,” Mykhaylo Serheyev said. Gray had to check a mental sidebar to see who the man was—the prime minister of the Ukrainian Union. “The Act of Military First Right is specific on this point. There was a final vote on this in Geneva just this morning, one that passed with a comfortable majority. Carrier Battlegroup Eighteen is now under direct Confederation control.”

“Nevertheless,” Steiger said, “it is my duty as a USNA officer to confirm these orders through my own government.”

“Of course, feel free to consult with your government,” Roettgen said. “But you are now working for us.”

“And if you resist, gentlemen,” Longuet added, “you will be replaced by officers who see political reason, by Confederation officers without your, ah, conflict of interest.”

And with a jolt, Gray was back in his office, alone with the monitors and virtual screens at his workstation. He and Steiger, it seemed, had just been summarily dismissed.

Not good, he thought. Not good at all …

Executive Office, USNA

Columbus, District of Columbia

United States of North America

1215 hours, EST

“Ms. Valcourt would like a moment for consultation, Mr. President,” his secretarial AI told him. “She says it is most urgent.”

Koenig looked up from a report displayed on his desktop—the Confederation robotic freighter Dione was landing at Giordano Bruno Base on the moon with an unusually large shipment of supplies—and sighed. He’d been expecting this. “Very well. Link me in.”

Julie Valcourt, a Canadian, was Speaker of the North American House, and one of Koenig’s more powerful opponents in the government. A member of the Global Union party, she was an outspoken advocate for the Global Union platform—that the USNA must fully integrate into the Confederation government.

“Good afternoon, Mr. President,” she said. “I haven’t yet had the opportunity to congratulate you on your victory.”

“Thank you, Madam Speaker,” Koenig replied. He knew, however, that congratulations were not the primary thought on Valcourt’s mind. The woman never did anything without a frank political motive behind it. “That’s very kind of you.”

“Not at all. The people, as they say, have spoken.”

“Well, some of them have.”

The news downloads were calling Koenig’s election victory a landslide and a popular mandate, but Koenig knew better. The population of North America currently stood at nearly three quarters of a billion people. Of those, perhaps half had bothered to link in and vote, and the only reason that the Freedom party had won was the stark fact that the Global Unionists and the Progressives hadn’t been able to agree on a common anti-Freedomist platform. The Progressives, like Koenig’s own Freedomists, wanted to extend the franchise to AIs; the Unionists feared the loss of human sovereignty and the possibility of second-class status for organic citizens somewhere down the line. But the Progressives felt that the military needed to be run by the Confederation, which of course was where they parted company with the Freedomists.

As a result the Progressives and the Unionists had knocked each other out of the running … but Koenig remained painfully aware that he’d been re-elected with just 44 percent of the vote. Despite the fireworks displays and enthusiastic mobs in the concourse, less than a quarter of North America’s population had actually voted for him.

“I thought,” Valcourt continued, “that you should know that the Europeans are going to be trouble.”

“Tell me something I don’t know.”

“They approached me yesterday with a question.”

“Yes?”

“Is the USNA population going to accept a Confederation take-over of our military?”

“Military First Right,” Koenig said, nodding. “I know.”

“You know?”

“I was informed a few hours ago. Geneva has assumed command of one of our carrier battlegroups.”

“I … didn’t think they would move this quickly. Have you agreed to this?”

“Apparently, it doesn’t matter whether we agree or not. The battlegroup commander was simply told how it would be. We need to decide how we’re going to respond, however. We could refuse …”

“Civil war? A complete break with the Confederation?”

“It could come to that.” He thought for a moment. “Tell me, Madam Speaker, how did they approach you? In person?”

“No. It was a direct e-link.”

“Did you record it?”

“Apparently, Mr. President, the link was one-view specific.”

“Ah.”

E-links allowed data to be downloaded directly into the hardware nanotechnically grown within most people’s brains. Neural connections allowed what amounted to telepathy, mind-to-mind, as well as the downloading of information from the Global Net, direct interfaces with AIs or with machines—anything from a spacecraft to a door. And anything that was downloaded, from a conversation to an encyclopedia reference, could be stored … usually. Private messages could be embedded with code that erased the data as it was being transferred to memory. The recipient retained his or her organic memory of the message—though this was often fuzzy and indistinct, like the fast-evaporating memory of a dream—but there was nothing on record, nothing that could be uploaded to a database as, say, evidence for criminal proceedings.

“That message could be interpreted as an attempt by a foreign government to manipulate the election,” Koenig said.

“‘Foreign government’? Sir, this is the Confederation we’re talking about! Earth’s government!”

“The relationship of the USNA to the Confederation is still … let’s just say it’s still being tested. What I’m saying is that interfering with a nation’s choice of its own government violates the provisions of the Confederation Charter.”

“We’ve been part of the Confederation for three hundred years! We were one of the founding states of the Pax!”

“Yes, and the original constitution stated that each nation within the Pax was sovereign, that it would determine its own form of government and that it would retain control of its own military forces. This First Right thing is something new … an abridgement, an erosion of our rights under that charter.”

“Sometimes, rights must be surrendered for the good of the whole,” Valcourt said. “An individual doesn’t have the right to kill another person, where a national government can wage war and kill millions.”

Koenig gave a mental shrug. “I know we don’t agree on this, Madam Speaker. Just how did you reply to the question?”

“About how our citizens would respond to Geneva taking control of our military? I told them to take a look at the celebrations going on outside in the Freedom Concourse,” she said. “It would appear that the citizenry approves of less interference from Geneva, not more.”

“And their response?”

“They said that things change, situations change … and that the people can be led. That, after all, is the whole purpose of government.”

“I would say that government is supposed to express the will of the people, and to secure and protect that people’s rights. ‘Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,’ remember?”

“I would suggest, Mr. President, that you are a few centuries out of date. Those words were destroyed when the Chinese dropped Wormwood into the Atlantic Ocean.”

Koenig sighed. Sometimes he did feel out of date. “Shall we agree to disagree, Madam Speaker? Once again?”

“My apologies, sir. I didn’t intend that to sound impertinent.”

“Not at all.” He hesitated. “I’m curious, though. What were these … Europeans, you say? What did they want from you? Why did they approach you?”

“I think they genuinely wanted to know how we Americans would react to the invoking of the Military Rights Act. They approached me because I am the Speaker of the House … which means, technically at least, that I speak for the American people.” Her image gave a wan smile. “After this past election, I doubt that that will be so for much longer.”

Koenig nodded. Valcourt represented an uneasy alliance within the House—Unionists, Progressives, and a half dozen smaller parties, including the Reclamationists, the New Order Socialists, and the Popular Neodemocrats—and as such she’d been the face and the voice of the loyal opposition throughout most of his first term as president.

The term loyal opposition had just taken on a new, stronger meaning for Koenig. Valcourt had come to him with the warning, rather than seeking political advantage for herself or her party through some kind of alliance with Geneva. He was impressed. He’d not known Julie Valcourt was capable of passing up a political opportunity.

“I don’t know about that, Madam Speaker,” he told her. “There’s nothing like a threat from outside to pull a people together, and let them know they’re all working for the same goal.”

“We’ll have to see about that, Mr. President. For now, though … I must ask you. What are you going to do about this … this power grab? Will you risk a civil war?”

“I don’t know, Madam Speaker. Like I said, I only heard about it a few hours ago.”

“A delicate situation, sir.”

“Delicate doesn’t tell the half of it. If I give in, I set a precedent, and it’ll be all but impossible to reverse it. If I refuse, even if we don’t end up in a civil war, Earth will end up divided and scattered, unable to agree on a common front against the Sh’daar.”

“‘Who speaks for Earth?’” Valcourt quoted.

“You mentioned the Europeans. Do you think there’s a faction within the Confederation? A split we could use?”

“I’m not sure. I think Brazil has sided with the EU. Russia may be undecided. Ukraine is with the Europeans. I think North India and the EAS are sitting on the fence, waiting to see how it all shakes out.”

“Pretty much business as usual,” Koenig said. “China and the Theocracy will be watching closely too, but I suspect they’ll be siding with us.”

Neither China nor the Islamist Theocracy were members of the Confederation … the gulfs left by several world wars continued to exclude them from a world government.

Which, of course, meant that the Confederation wasn’t truly a world government, did not, in fact, represent a united Earth.

“I’m terrified, Mr. President, that this is going to end in world war. Humankind may not survive. If it does, it will not be able to resist the Sh’daar when they finally come.”

“On that, Madam Speaker, you and I are in complete agreement,” Koenig told her. “I just wish I could see a third alternative …”

TC/USNA CVS America

USNA Naval Base

Quito Synchorbital

1315 hours, TFT

“Here they come, Captain,” Connie Fletcher told him. “They’re making the most of it, aren’t they?”

“You think that display is just to impress us?” Gray replied.

“Maybe they just want to impress themselves,” Admiral Steiger observed. “Kind of like team spirit, y’know?”

The Confederation flotilla was decelerating into synchronous orbit, inbound from Mars after a two-hour passage. Those warships, Gray knew, had been assembled from all across the Sol System, and several had arrived over the past few days from the nearer extrasolar colonies—Chiron, Hel, New Earth, Bifrost Orbital, Santo Iago, and Thoth.

In the van were four star carriers—the British Illustrious, the North Indian Kali, the European Union’s Klemens von Metternich, and the EAS Simon Bolivar—light carriers measuring from 600 to 850 meters from their mushroom caps to the ends of their drive stems.

In a loose swarm of vessels moving astern and on the flanks were fifty-one additional Confederation warships, from fleet gunboats and light bombardment vessels to Admiral Delattre’s flagship, the massive railgun cruiser Napoleon. With tightly controlled bursts from their plasma maneuvering thrusters, the Confederation fleet began edging toward the open gantries of the synchorbital military docking complex.

“Fifty-five warships,” Gray observed. “That’s a hell of a lot of team spirit. They outnumber us, that’s for sure.”

The America battlegroup currently numbered just twenty-four vessels, though eight more USNA warships were docked at the Quito Synchorbital, undergoing repairs or refits. The Confederation fleet was trying deliberately to overawe the North-American squadron, of that Gray was certain. He wondered if Steiger was going to roll over and play dead on this one. Steiger had commanded a number of vessels before his appointment as CO CBG-40, but it had been a long time since he’d seen combat. Word was he’d been a lieutenant commander in the CAG office on board America during Crown Arrow twenty years ago. He might be pretty rusty.

But then, it had been twenty years since Gray had seen combat, and he was rusty as well. The Sh’daar Truce had been two decades of quiet … no raids, no planetary assaults, and even potential human enemies—the Islamists and the Chinese Hegemony, for instance—had been keeping a non-confrontational profile.

Training sims helped maintain basic skills, but they were no substitute for the real thing.

The big question about Steiger was how aggressive he might be. Where Gray had been wearing a Starhawk at Alphekka and Omega Cent, Steiger had been driving a console in PriFly—not at all the same thing.

Gray frowned at the thought as soon as it arose and pushed it aside. Steiger was the CO, and that meant he required the loyalty and the full support of every officer in the battlegroup. His normally laid-back attitude didn’t mean he wasn’t a fighter; look at Koenig, the CO of CBG-18. The man certainly wasn’t a coward, not with something like twenty-five years in the service.

But would the man be able to stand up to what amounted to a naked Confederation power play?

Gray didn’t know. He wasn’t sure he would be able to refuse direct orders from Geneva, not when doing so might well result in civil war.

What he did know was that the parade of Confederation warships sidling up to the docking gantries out there was nothing less than a cold-blooded threat.

Chapter Six

10 November 2424

Intermundi

Civilian Sector Green 7,

Quito Synchorbital

1915 hours, TFT

Lieutenant Donald Gregory leaned back in his seat, taking another deep inhale of firedust from the golden sphere in his left hand. The nanometer-sized particles were absorbed directly through his sinus cavities and into his bloodstream, triggering a release of dopamine in his brain and a sharp, rippling wave of pleasure surging through his body. He gasped, then went rigid for a moment as the wave peaked, then ebbed. “Oh, yeah …”

His right hand was clasped tight around the bare waist of Lieutenant Jodi Vaughn, who giggled as he started to come down from the hit. “Good stuff, huh?”

“Babe, right now I’m flying! Wrapped up in metaspace and ’cubing at max!”

They were in the Intermundi, a club located just outside the synchorbital naval base catering mostly to military personnel. Gregory had had the duty tonight, but Teddy Nichols had been willing to swap with him, allowing him to keep his date with Jodi. Located within a huge, rotating wheel, the club featured numerous small rooms heavily draped and cushioned, providing privacy and comfort, and with hidden arrays of netlink connections to cater to every pleasure need.

Firesmoke was not addictive … not physically, at least, though Gregory had heard of pilots who’d developed emotional dependencies and needed partial memory wipes to shake them. Smoke worked through cerebral implants, which meant you could fine-tune the effect and clear the neural pathways afterward. The registered forms, served in joints like the Intermundi, were completely legal, though shipboard regulation frowned on using the stuff. They came down hard on you if you let it knock you off the duty roster.

But it felt good … BETS, as the slang put it, Better Than Sex. And you could hit it again and again and …

“You want some more?” he asked her.

She accepted the sphere, held the sweet spot up to her face, and breathed in, her eyes closed. Firesmoke actually consisted of artificially manufactured receptor-key molecules tucked away inside C₆₄ buckyballs … carbon spheres so tiny they formed a nearly invisible mist. They were absorbed straight through the mucus lining of the sinus cavities, hitched a ride on blood vessels leading into the brain, and then unfolded inside the pleasure centers for a quick, hard jolt of pure ecstasy.

Gregory watched Vaughn inhale the nanodust, watched the bright red flush spread down her throat and shoulders and across her breasts. They’d been sex partners now for more than four months, ever since just after she’d joined the squadron. What had started as a casual recreational fling had been … changing lately, growing into something deeper.

He still wasn’t sure how he felt about that.

Gregory liked Jodi Vaughn, liked her a lot. In a service that tended to attract aristocratic hotshots and fast burners, she was an attractive brunette from the Chicago megalopolis with neither money nor political connections. Rumor had it she’d started off as a Prim, an inhabitant of the half-submerged badlands of the Periphery in what once had been the city of Baltimore.

Rising sea levels had flooded the city in the late twenty-first century; Wormwood Fall in 2132 had sent a tidal wave up the Chesapeake that had largely destroyed Baltimore’s remains, along with Washington, New York, Miami, and other low-lying East Coast metropoli.

Over the next few decades, the old United States had abandoned the drowned and wrecked cities, vast coastal swamplands, for the most part, that became known as the Periphery. People continued to live there, and more had arrived from the more civilized reaches of the interior … criminals, scavengers, religious zealots escaping the laws of the White Covenant, and antitech Prims, primitives who didn’t care for the ways that modern technology was transforming the very definition of the word human.

Most people didn’t care for the Prims. To be antitechnology alone meant you weren’t going to fit in with most people. It meant you were different. An outsider.

And maybe that was why the Prim Jodi Vaughn had accepted Gregory when she’d been assigned to be his wingman. He was an Osirian colonial, perhaps the ultimate outsider, at least as far as the North Americans were concerned. She’d become his friend, and, before long, his lover. The two shared a lot in common. They’d not gone out of their way to flaunt their relationship, but some of the others in the squadron knew. Nichols, for instance. And probably that bastard Kemper as well.

With considerable affection, he watched her take another hit from the sphere.

“Full thrust engaged!” she said, then handed the sphere back, gasping a little.

“How you feeling, Wing?”

“Like I could spit in a Slan’s eye.”

“The Slan don’t have eyes.” He frowned. “At least we don’t think they do.”

“Okay … a Nungie’s eye, then.”

“Nope. They have sensor clusters that process light—well, red and orange light, anyway, and short infrared—but they’re not really eyes. Squishy-looking tentacles and spongy tissue, more like.”

“Okay! Okay!” She laughed. “What are those three-legged octopus things?”

He had to pull down a list of known alien species inside his head and scan through an array of photographs. There it was.

“Jivad Rallam? Okay. They have eyes a lot like ours, agreed. Just more of them.”

“Fine. I could spit in its eyes. All of them!”

“Outstanding!”

Gregory stood up, stretching. The nanodust had left him feeling a bit light-headed and weak, almost trembling. He stepped to the entrance of their privacy area and looked up at the swimming sphere, internally lit with shifting, colored lights and hanging 20 meters above his head. Nude couples, threesomes, and a few larger groups cavorted within the shimmering globe of water.

The Intermundi Pleasure Club was an enormous structure, 100 meters across, rotating to provide about a half G of spin gravity at the outer deck, less on the elevated levels and walkways closer to the center. Outside the labyrinth of smaller privacy areas, the club’s interior opened up into a vast cavern. Transparencies in the floor looked out on the slow-wheeling stars of space punctuated occasionally by a blast of light from Earth or sun; multiple decks, verandas, and soaring arches gave a multilevel fairyland effect to the architecture, and at the exact center of the space a 10-meter bubble of water hung motionless as the club rotated around it. Gregory and Vaughn had chosen an open deck well above the main floor; spin gravity here was only about a quarter G, more than the moon but less than the surface of Mars, and the water was an easy climb overhead.

“Want to go for a swim?”

“No, I want something to eat. I’m hungry!”

“Whatcha want?”

“I’m feeling carnivorous. Surprise me.”

“One surprise, coming up.” He palmed a contact on the entrance to their cube, scrolled through the menu that opened in his mind, and selected Steak Imperial for two. What arrived in the receiver a moment later, hissing and moist, had never been within 36,000 kilometers of the Brazilian Empire, but the program that had assembled the component atoms and heated them to palatability had been designed by world-class chefs—probably AI chefs—and could not be distinguished from tissue that once had been alive and roaming the pampas south of the Amazon Sea.

“How do you think it’s going to end?” she asked him later, as they ate.

“What?”

“I was just thinking … so many alien species out there, and most of them seem to be on board with the Sh’daar and out to get us. We can’t face them all.”

Gregory shrugged. “Yeah, well, they seem pretty disjointed, don’t they? The Turusch attack us here … the H’rulka attack there … then the Nungies show up someplace else with their little Kobold buddies. They’re all as different from one another as any of them are from humans. Coordination, planning, even basic communication must be a real bear for them.”

The thought was not original with Gregory, but had been circulating through the squadrons as a series of morale downloads from the Personnel Department. It was propaganda … but it was propaganda based on fact and that actually made sense.

The Turusch were things like partially armored slugs that worked in tightly bound pairs and communicated by heterodyning meaning into two streams of blended, humming tones. The H’rulka were gas bags a couple of hundred meters across; they had parasites living in their tentacle forests that were larger than individual humans. The Nungiirtok were 3 meters tall and very vaguely humanoid … except that what was inside that power armor they wore was not even remotely human. The Jivad were like land-dwelling octopi that swarmed along on three tightly coiled tentacles, and used both speech and color changes in their skin patterns to communicate. The Slan used sonar as their primary sense, rather than a single weak, light-sensing organ, and apparently could focus multiple sound beams so tightly that they could “see” as well as a human; they couldn’t perceive color, of course, but according to the xenosoph people they could tell what you’d had for breakfast and watch your heart beating and your blood flowing when they “looked” at you. Communication for them appeared to be in ultrasound frequencies, patterns of rapid-fire clicks at wavelengths well beyond the limits of human hearing.

“That shouldn’t matter that much, should it?” Vaughn said. “I mean … those translators the Agletsch wear seem to work pretty well. Communications wouldn’t be that much of a problem for them.”

“No, it is a problem,” Gregory replied, “and a big one. Alien biology means an alien way of looking at the universe. Like the dolphins, y’know?”

Centuries ago, attempts to communicate with the dolphins and whales of Earth’s seas had demonstrated that differences in biology dictated how a species might communicate—dolphins, for instance, simply could not form the sounds required for human speech. And different modes of speech shaped how their brains worked, how they thought of themselves and the world around them. There were, Gregory knew, AIs residing within implants in dolphin brains now designed to bridge the linguistic barriers between the species, but those translations had only proven that dolphin brains were as alien to humans as the group minds of the abyssal electrovores inhabiting the under-ice ocean of Enceladus.

“Anyway,” Gregory went on, “the theory is that the different va-Sh’daar species have trouble cooperating militarily because of the biological differences among them. They’re so different from one another that the damned war has dragged on for fifty-seven years, now, and they still

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