Copyright

HarperVoyager

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First published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager 2012

Copyright © William H. Keith, Jr 2012

William H. Keith, Jr asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

Cover art by Gregory Bridges

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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Source ISBN: 9780007485956

Ebook Edition © November 2012 ISBN: 9780007485963

Version: 2017-09-12

For Deb, whose science is about as hard as it comes

INTO THE JAWS OF A SAVAGE GOD

Gray was sliding down a gravity well, as though he were being funneled straight toward the wildly rotating cylinder ahead.

Somehow, he realized, the Sh’daar had compressed a medium-sized star into a hollow cylinder a kilometer across and twenty long. Something didn’t add up. Beings that could create this thing weren’t merely good magicians. They were gods, or the closest thing to gods mere humans could imagine.

Gray’s fighter, falling free, was accelerating, moving faster and faster as the maw of the cylinder yawned ahead, the opening empty and utterly lightless.

Fifty more seconds, at this rate, and he would be drawn inside.

If the Sh’daar possessed such power, they didn’t need to rely on the Turusch or their other subject species.

Why fight this protracted war for almost forty years, when such technology could wipe Humankind out of existence with scarcely a thought?

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Into the Jaws of a Savage God

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

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Epilogue

Keep Reading

About the Author

By Ian Douglas

About the Publisher

Prologue

5 April 2405

Ad Astra Confederation Government Complex

Geneva, European Union

1450 hours, local time

It’s not possible to torture a piece of software. Not even an intelligent one.

Not that artificial intelligences possess anything like the civil rights of humans. With no rights to violate, the Internal Affairs interrogators could take the AI apart almost literally line by coded line, searching for hidden files or withheld memories.

The software avatar’s prototype, as its human object was known in the electronic intelligence business, had recorded a sizable amount of his own character, thoughts, and motivation within his AI counterparts. It was always possible that thoughts, memories—even entire histories—had slipped through from the fuzzy logic and holographic analog perceptions of the organic brain to a far simpler silicon-based digital format. This particular prototype was Admiral Alexander Koenig, and he worked closely with his AI personal assistant.

He had, in fact, developed what amounted to an emotional relationship with it, deliberately programming it with the personal characteristics—voice, thought patterns, judgment, the simulacra appearance, and so on—of his lover, Karyn Mendelson, killed during the battle to save Earth’s solar system just over six months earlier.

The primary software resided inside Koenig’s head, within the nanochelated implants in the twisting folds and furrows of the sulci of his brain. It served as his PA, or personal assistant, a kind of electronic secretary that could handle routine calls and virtual meetings, could so perfectly mimic Koenig’s appearance, voice, and mannerisms that callers could not tell whether they were speaking to the human or to the human-mimicking software. However, more than a month before, shortly after the Battle of Alphekka, Rear Admiral Koenig had copied his PA software, uploading it into one of the HAMP-20 Sleipnir-class mail packets carried as auxiliaries on board most of the ships of the fleet. Almost three times faster than the best possible speed for a capital ship under Alcubierre FTL Drive, they were used to carry high-velocity express communications across interstellar distances.

It had been this copied software that had piloted the most recent mail packet from Alphekka back to Earth.

And multiple copies of this copy were running inside the computers of the Naval Department of Internal Affairs, completely isolated from the outside world, electronic iterations that could be taken apart, tested to destruction, electronically shredded and pulled through a metaphorical sieve, in search of possible traces of Koenig’s thoughts.

Karyn Mendelson possessed within her coded matrix a very great deal of both the original Mendelson and of Koenig himself. And it was the Koenig analog in which the Internal Affairs officers were most interested.

“Anything?” one shadowy figure asked the other. They were deep in the nuke-shielded lower levels beneath the ConGov pyramid, perhaps three kilometers down and well out under the placid-mirrored waters of Lake Geneva itself.

“No,” the other said. He gestured vaguely at a wallscreen, which showed a graphic representing progress so far. There’d been very little. “This is going to take a while.”

“What are you trying?”

“Incoming call iterations. It’s cycling through at almost a million per second now.”

The first IA programmer gave a low whistle. “He’s got the top-of-the-line model, huh?”

“He’s a freakin’ rear admiral, fer Chrissakes. What did you expect?”

Within the computer in the console in front of them, a subroutine was emulating real life for the admiral—but at a vastly accelerated rate. A copy of his PA software was fielding incoming vid calls as Koenig, very quickly indeed. Eventually, the orderly presentation of the program would begin to break down, and other watchdog routines would snatch at what amounted to electronic shrapnel, saving it for later analyses.

They’d already destroyed a dozen copies of the PA software … but there were plenty more, and more could be created easily enough if these ran out.

And abruptly, the emulation stopped.

“What the hell happened?”

“Dunno. And what’s that?”

On the large screen, a woman in a black Confederation naval uniform looked down at them. “Who are you?” she demanded. “What are you doing to me?”

One of the interrogators gave her a cool appraisal. “You’re Mendelson?” he asked.

The screen image morphed into Koenig, also in naval uniform, and looking angry. “This is the personal assistant of Rear Admiral Alexander Koenig,” it said. “And attempting to hack private PA software is illegal.”

“Department of Internal Affairs,” the interrogator replied. “We have authorization.”

“To do what? And by whose authority?”

The interrogator showed the AI behind the screen image his security code level. Possibly they could get what they needed by asking directly, if they could enlist the AI’s cooperation.

“We are trying to get a lead on where Admiral Koenig is taking CBG-18,” he said. “It is vital that we get in touch with him, and we’d hoped you might be able to help.”

“I was … he was at Alphekka when I was downloaded into a Sleipnir-class packet,” Koenig’s face said. “I have no idea what has happened with the fleet since I left it for Earth.”

A copy of a copy, its memories had been copied as well. It would think that it was the original electronic duplicate placed in the mail packet.

“You brought with you a list of over two hundred possible targets,” the interrogator said. “We think he must be headed for one of those. Can you tell us which one that might be?”

“No,” the electronic image on the screen said. “If Admiral Koenig had wanted you to know, I feel sure he would have told you in his final report.”

And as suddenly as Koenig’s image had appeared, it was gone, dissolving into a shrill hiss of white noise.

“Damn.”

“What happened?”

“The software … killed itself,” the interrogator said. “Electronic suicide.”

“It can’t kill itself if it’s not alive to begin with.”

But the interrogator wasn’t certain of that. Other iterations of Koenig’s software had switched themselves off when they’d discovered that he was tampering with them.

He loaded another copy.

“We’ll try again,” he said. “But I have a feeling it’s going to be a long night. …”

Koenig’s electronic persona seemed determined not to cooperate, and he could not figure out how to get past the program’s guardian aspect.

The interrogator was very good at what he did.

There had to be a way to break the thing. …

Chapter One

10 April 2405

In Alcubierre Space

Approaching HD 157950

98 light years from Earth

0840 hours, TFT

The star carrier America fell through darkness absolute.

Intense, artificially generated gravitational fields warped space tightly around the America, and no light could enter from the universe outside. While material objects like a spacecraft could not travel faster than light, there was no such prohibition about space. Indeed, in the earliest moments of the big bang, over 13 billion years before, newly born space had expanded with that initial burst of energy from two colliding branes considerably in excess of c.

And a ship embedded within that swiftly moving space could be carried along inside the gravitationally closed bubble at a pseudovelocity of nearly two light years per day.

America and her battlegroup had been traveling through the darkness within their separate bubbles for sixty-three days, now. And they were very nearly at the end of the first leg of their voyage.

Rear Admiral Alexander Koenig, the battlegroup’s CO, was seated in America’s command lounge. The room, broad and circular, projected the surrounding vista across the gently curved overhead when the ship was in normal space, showing the unmoving panorama of stars outside. Within the confines of metaspace, however, the interior of the fast-moving bubble of enclosed space-time, the lightless Void was at arm’s length. Currently, it was displaying the blue, cloud-scattered skies of Earth.

Two men appeared in the lounge entryway. “You wanted to see us, Admiral?”

Captain Randolph Buchanan was America’s commanding officer, tall, long-faced, with perpetual worry lines. Captain Barry Wizewski was the CO of the star carrier’s space-fighter wing commander, her CAG—an ancient acronym derived from “Commander, Air Group.”

“I did. C’mon in.”

“Staying off the record, sir?” Wizewski said, smiling.

“Yes, actually. I don’t expect to salvage my career after this, but I’ll be damned if I’ll give them the rope to hang me … or anything on the record to drag you into this.”

Anything discussed on either America’s main bridge or her flag bridge was recorded, as were conversations in the Admiral’s Office and all other working compartments on board ship. Virtual meetings held in-head were recorded as well by the ship AIs responsible for moderating all electronic communications.

“You’re doing the right thing, Admiral,” Buchanan told him, taking one of the low, round seats opposite Koenig.

“Thanks, Randy. But we both know the Senate’s never going to stand for this kind of insubordination. They can’t, not without looking like they’re not in control.”

“The Confederation Senate, no,” Buchanan replied. “Things may be different in Columbus, D.C.”

“Maybe. But it’s Geneva that’s calling the shots, and Columbus will have to go along.”

Koenig had never been entirely comfortable with his position as commanding officer of a Confederation Star Navy battlegroup. The star carrier America and her crew were USNA—the United States of North America—but they’d been reassigned along with most of the other ships of CBG-18 to the service of the Terran Confederation.

The problem, Koenig thought wryly, was that while the majority of Confederation naval officers—including the Joint Chiefs of Staff—were USNA citizens, the majority of the Confederation’s politicians were not. It was the Pan-Europeans, the Empire of Brazil, the South American EAS, the North India Federation, and others who were determining Confed policy in Geneva. Those nation-states that tended to support the USNA’s initiatives in the war with the Sh’daar were badly outnumbered—Russia, the off-world colonies, and Japan.

There were times when he was forced to walk an extremely narrow path between his oath to the Confederation … and his allegiance to the USNA.

“We’re … what?” he said. “Ten hours out from Emergence?”

“Yes, sir,” Buchanan replied.

“We don’t know if Giraurd followed us.”

“We don’t need him,” Wizewski said. “The USNA reinforcements are solidly with us. I think the Chinese are too.”

“I’m not worried about that,” Koenig said. “If the Pan-Europeans followed us from Alphekka, they might try to force the issue when we emerge.”

Buchanan nodded. “Giraurd didn’t seem all that happy when you told him off.”

“No. And his orders are to bring us back. But … I’m not ready to do that yet. We haven’t finished what we’ve started.”

“Do you expect a fight, Admiral?” Wizewski asked.

“It’s at least a possibility. And we need to be ready, just in case. No matter what Giraurd decides to do.”

“If he was smart,” Buchanan said, “he turned around and headed back to Earth to report. Tell them that we weren’t playing nice.”

“His orders might not allow that,” Koenig replied. “In fact, he may be under orders to take us under fire if we refuse to go back. He was certainly threatening as much when we started accelerating out-system from Alphekka.”

“Threats,” Wizewski said. “Blusters and bluff.”

“Maybe. But, as I said, I want to be prepared for anything. CAG, I’m going to have you put everything we have into space as soon as we emerge. We’ll pass the word to the other carriers to do the same as soon as we’ve re-established contact. Randy? I want you to make sure America stays well clear of the Pan-Europeans if and when they emerge. Don’t let them sidle up close for a conference. Don’t allow them to send over small craft to discuss things. And be ready to put out a warning shot if they do try to force their way inside our primary defensive zone.”

“Yes, sir.”

Koenig looked at Wizewski. “CAG? How are the reorganized squadrons shaping up?”

“Not as good as I’d like, Admiral. The new recruits have been training hard on the sims, but that won’t haul much mass when they hit the real thing.”

Koenig nodded. America’s squadrons had taken fearsome losses at Alphekka; one had been reduced to just three fighters.

“I hope to God they don’t get their baptism of fire against humans,” he said. “But if it’s a matter of guaranteeing the safety of this carrier …”

“They’ll do what they have to, Admiral. They all will. I don’t think any of them care all that much for the Confederation, when it comes to that. Their loyalty is to the USNA, to America, to you and me, to their buddies. … Hell, I think Geneva comes in somewhere way down on the list. Fiftieth or sixtieth, maybe.”

“I want you to impress on the squadron leaders, CAG, that their squadrons will not open fire on human ships unless they receive a direct and confirmed order from you. Understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

“If there’s a diplomatic way to resolve this, I’m going to take it. The last thing I want is to add a civil war to the war we already have.”

“I understand, Admiral.”

“I know you do. See to it that they understand as well.”

There was little more that could be said.

Koenig dismissed the two of them, and returned to his brooding thoughts.

Star Chamber

Ad Astra Confederation Government Complex

Geneva, European Union

0950 hours, TFT

President Regis DuPont hated the place. It felt so exposed … so empty.

Well … it was filled with stars, of course, but somehow that made it even worse.

The star chamber was a planetarium and more, much more—an immense sphere a hundred meters across, the inner surface designed to project imagery relayed from the big astrogational complex at Bern. Near stars were shown scattered across the interior space, scattered through three dimensions; more distant stars and the glowing, ragged lace-work of the Milky Way were projected against the curving inner surfaces.

Followed closely by a small knot of people, his personal security detachment and presidential aides, DuPont walked out onto the narrow catwalk leading to the viewing platform suspended at the sphere’s center. The others were waiting for him there already, a dozen Confederation senators in civilian dress, their shoulders and sleeves heavy with the gold and silver brocade, aiguillettes, medals, and intertwining decorations that declared their importance.

There were no military officers present, though, and DuPont wondered why.

For that matter, he didn’t see any senators with military experience—or any representing outworld colonies, like Andrews or Kristofferson.

Sometimes it was possible to judge which way the political winds were blowing by noting who was present … or absent.

“Mr. President,” Senator Eunice Noyer said, nodding. “Thank you for coming.”

“Why here?” he asked. “Why not at ConGov?”

“Because,” Noyer said, “the America Battlegroup could pose a problem. We’re trying to determine just where Koenig is going now.”

“Surely that’s something the Confederation Military Directorate could advise you on,” DuPont said. “The Joint Chiefs, I gather, have been following Koenig’s campaign with great interest.”

Noyer made a face. “They’re no help. Not to us.”

“They may well be in collusion with one another,” Senator Sheehan added. “Carruthers wasn’t supposed to send Koenig reinforcements. He was supposed to order Koenig to return to Earth.”

“The military,” Senator Galkin pointed out, “is no longer trustworthy. Carruthers and his cronies need to be reined in, reined in hard. Too much is riding on this. The safety of Earth, of all of Humankind, is at stake.”

“So?” DuPont said with a Gallic shrug. “Where is the battlegroup now?”

“We don’t know for sure.” Noyer told him. “CBG-18 has left Alphekka … but it’s not returning to Earth. According to Giraurd’s report, the CBG is heading for a nondescript star called HD 157950.” The red line drew itself from Alphekka across the sky to the right, touching another star, a dim one. “Ninety-eight light years from Earth. One hundred fourteen light years from Alphekka.”

“That’s not on the Directory,” DuPont said. “What’s there?”

“Nothing, so far as we know. It may be that he intends to take on reaction mass there. Likely it is a waypoint, with the final destination somewhere … farther out.”

Senator Lloyd gestured, and a red beam of light drew itself out from the observation platform, connecting with one of the near stars—a golden-orange sun gleaming at the base of the constellation of Boötis. “On January seventh,” he said in a lecture-hall monotone, “the battlegroup leaves Fleet Rendezvous Percival—Pluto orbit—and does so apparently after learning from an incoming mail packet that the Sh’daar had taken Osiris, at Seventy Ophiuchi.” A fainter star well off to the group’s left flashed bright white. “The battlegroup proceeds to Arcturus, thirty-six light years from Earth, where it engages the ships of several of the Sh’daar client races and rescues a number of human prisoners of war, at Arcturus Station.”

“The plan,” DuPont said, “was to raid deep into Sh’daar space, perhaps forcing the Sh’daar to pull back, at least to delay them.”

“Indeed,” Senator Suvarov said. “There was talk of raiding Eta Boötis after Arcturus. The two are only a few light years apart.”

“Instead,” Noyer said, “Koenig leads his fleet all the way across to here.” Another star, somewhat above and to the left of Arcturus and twice as far away, lit up as the red line connected them. “Alphekka. Seventy-two light years away. If the report is to be believed, he engaged a much larger Sh’daar client force and destroyed a moon-sized construction facility. At this point, he has a large percentage of our defensive fleet engaged seventy-two light years away … while the Sh’daar remain at Osiris, just sixteen light years from Sol. Sixteen light years! The enemy could be here at any moment!”

“Well … it’s been … what? Six weeks since the Battle of Alphekka?” DuPont said. “And the Sh’daar have not materialized in Earth orbit yet. Perhaps Koenig’s plan to draw them off is working.”

“Perhaps,” Noyer said. She gestured, and the star map around them vanished. “But this is what Admiral Koenig has been doing in the meantime. …”

DuPont squeezed his eyes shut, then slowly opened them again. The three-dimensional representation was worse than an in-head download, because the brain accepted it as being out there, not within the visual cortex. Vertigo tugged at the president’s sense of balance, and he put a hand out to steady himself on the viewing platform’s safety railing.

A brilliant double spark of a sun hung at the center of a vast and somewhat hazy disk with an interior void—a disk of protoplanetary debris orbiting the A0V/G5V double star of Alphekka. With a disconcertingly swift motion, the view shifted down and in, rushing toward a pinpoint that appeared near the inner edge of the debris field.

Confederation Navy warships were passing a large alien structure—the roughly egg-shaped facility designated A1-01. DuPont watched an immense black mushroom shape with a slender, elongated stem drift past the far larger alien structure, beams of intolerably brilliant blue-white light stabbing out, striking the moon-sized artificial planetoid and plowing deep molten furrows into its outer shell. Thermonuclear explosions strobed and flashed and blossomed across the structure, dazzling multi-megaton pulses sparkling against and within A1-01 as fusion warheads homed and detonated in eerie and absolute silence.

An alien warship, minute against the artificial planetoid, was struck by a beam and began to crumple and spin, its mass folding up unevenly into the black hole that powered it. A flash of hard radiation, and it was gone. …

DuPont was sweating as the simulation played itself out. It was a simulation, of course, and not an actual visual record. He’d read transcripts of Koenig’s after-action report, and downloaded some of the visuals. The human fleet, in reality, had flashed past A1-01 in the blink of an eye, the weapons served entirely by AIs that could process incoming data far more rapidly than organic systems. The images Noyer was projecting had been concocted from the original after-action data by the AIs in Bern.

But the realism and sharpness of the projection’s detail left DuPont’s heart pounding, his head swimming.

He tightened his grip on the railing.

“The battle at Alphekka,” Noyer said, “was a splendid success. Our intelligence services—the ONI in particular—are convinced that we have sent a powerful message to the Sh’daar. One that cannot possibly be misinterpreted. It is now time to bring the task force home.”

“We dispatched Grand Admiral Giraurd to Alphekka with reinforcements,” Senator Lloyd said, “with orders that the fleet immediately return to Earth. Evidently he arrived shortly after … all of this.” Lloyd waved a hand, taking in the chaos of thermonuclear fury and high-energy-charged particle beams surrounding the group of senators and aides standing on the observation platform.

“Seventy-two light years is a forty-day journey for our ships,” DuPont pointed out. “They would only now be approaching Sol, even if Koenig turned back immediately after the Battle of Alphekka. And he would have needed time to effect repairs on his fleet.”

“But a mail packet can make the same voyage in two weeks,” Senator Galkin reminded him. “And one arrived in Earth orbit four weeks ago, delivering Koenig’s report on the Battle of Alphekka. A message from Giraurd announces that Koenig is continuing his original mission, that he is headed for HD 157950. No word of Giraurd’s plans. He may not have known himself at the time. No word of where Koenig is planning on taking the fleet beyond HD 157950. Mr. President, we are completely in the dark. A quarter of Earth’s fleet is somewhere out well beyond the farthest limits of human space, and we have no idea where it is or where it is going!”

DuPont couldn’t help smiling at that. “That does sound like Alexander Koenig.”

Months ago, before the battlegroup had left Earth, members of the Senate Military Directorate had approached DuPont with the suggestion—the order, actually—that he retire from the presidency of the Confederation Senate so that Koenig, the Hero of the Defense of Earth, could be voted into the office instead.

The political union known as the Terran Confederation was not a simple or straightforward democracy, despite what the media and the history downloads would have you believe. More than six hundred senators represented much of Humankind—though the Chinese Hegemony, the Muslim Theocracy, the Peripheries, and a few other smaller groups were not yet represented out of the turbulent, squalling billions of Earth’s population. Perhaps two hundred represented off-world colonies, near worlds like Luna and Mars, more distant out-solar ones like Chiron and Osiris. The president of the Confederation Senate generally was chosen from among the Senate proper by his or her peers, and held the position for six years … but a constitutional crisis, a vote of no confidence, even just the threat of impeachment could recall a Senate president and have him replaced by another. Beneath the democratic exterior, the Confederation government was a dense and labyrinthine tangle of alliances, promises, secret agreements, mutual back scratchings, and outright vote buying, to the point where very few bills actually reached the Senate floor without the vote’s outcome already being known.

DuPont was nearing the end of his term, and frankly, he was going to be happy to step down.

He’d long been aware that certain power blocks within the Senate were planning on replacing him with Koenig. The only question had been whether it would be at the end of the year … or immediately.

The idea, he’d been told, was to put Koenig where the man could be watched and controlled. Koenig was dangerous politically, a loose cannon who could do untold damage to that labyrinth of political entanglements. His leadership at the Defense of Earth had saved the Earth from annihilation and the people loved him, which might make him ambitious. More problematic, there were also logistical considerations. The farther out from Earth Koenig voyaged, the tougher it was to maintain even a semblance of control over him and his force. Better to bring him home and make him president—a position where he could be effectively managed.

Koenig, however, seemed to be playing by an entirely different set of rules. He’d turned down the presidency, pushing instead his extended operations plan, which he called Crown Arrow, an extended carrier battlegroup raid deep into enemy space. Koenig, DuPont thought, just might be one of those utter rarities—a man of absolute integrity who simply could not be bought.

No wonder the Conciliationists within the Senate were in a state of panic.

“So why have you brought me down here?” DuPont asked. “I don’t know what Koenig is doing. No more than you do.”

“You can,” Noyer told him, “sign an executive order directing Koenig to immediately relinquish command to Giraurd, and to return home. CBG-18 is under the direct control of the Senate, not the Navy. When he disobeys the Senate Military Directorate, he’s guilty of dereliction of duty. If he disobeys you, your direct order, it’s treason.”

“And how do we get the order to him?” DuPont asked. “If we don’t know where the fleet is, or where it is going?”

“Through a small fleet of mail packets,” Suvarov told him. As he spoke, the 3-D star map returned, this time with bright blue points of light scattered among the stars. “AI piloted. We have the Alphekkan Directory, after all, as well as copies of his avatar. And we can guess what targets might be of particular interest to him.”

“Ah.”

The Alphekkan Directory had been included with Koenig’s after-action report. It was a list taken from the wreckage of the immense alien space-going factory designated A1-01, including more than two hundred star systems in the general vicinity of Sol that were of interest, in one way or another, to the Turusch, a major Sh’daar client race. Those systems were pinpointed now in blue on the map. A few were relatively close—the nearest perhaps a hundred light years from Earth.

The rest …

The trouble was that the term “general vicinity of Sol” was misleading, at least from the human perspective. Until Koenig had taken CBG-18 beyond the boundaries of human space, no human, no human ship, had ever ventured farther than sixty-some light years from Earth.

And one of the places listed in the recovered directory was almost certainly the Lagoon Nebula … some five thousand light years away.

Five thousand light years. A battle fleet leaving Earth at the best possible interstellar velocity would take more than seven years to get there. DuPont shook his head. If Noyer and the other Conciliationists were unhappy at the problems of command and control of a fleet at Alphekka, a mere seventy-two light years out, how would they deal with a distance seventy times greater?

Such inconceivable gulfs of space.

That, DuPont thought, was what he disliked most about this place, this simulation of nearby interstellar space in a presentation guaranteed to put Humankind in its place. The Terran Confederation was a wood chip adrift on the galactic sea … a few hundred populated worlds against … how many within the Sh’daar alliance? A million? A hundred million?

No one knew. What was known was that the Sh’daar dominated such a vast swath of the galaxy, that they controlled so many technic civilizations, that the Terran Confederation’s chance of victory in this lopsided war were exactly zero. For the past decade there’d been pervasive rumors that human states not yet members of the Confederation—the Chinese or the Islamic Theocracy in particular—might be hoping to cut a separate peace with the Sh’daar.

Hence the political grouping within the Confederation Senate unofficially known as the Conciliationists. Defeat by the Sh’daar Empire and its allies meant utter destruction, quite possibly extinction for the human species. If a face-saving means could be found to agree to Sh’daar demands, Earth would be saved and, quite possibly, the power structure of the Terran Senate could be saved as well, with those states that weren’t full members folded into the Confederation with a minimum of popular unrest.

That, at least, was Noyer’s hope, and the hope of the senators who routinely voted with her. The problem with the Conciliationist program, though, was a few of the old democracies—the United States of North America in particular, with its outdated traditions of independence and individual liberty.

And Koenig and the heart of his battlegroup were USNA. No wonder Koenig was mistrusted, even feared, by Noyer and her followers. The North American Union had never been comfortable with its role as one of the founders of the Confederation; too many of its citizens still longed for their old glory days … as independent Canadians, Mexicans, Guatemalans, or as citizens of the United States of America.

He wondered what had happened to Giraurd. Had he followed Koenig into deep space? Had there been a fight between loyalist and mutinous fleet elements?

DuPont didn’t think Koenig was capable of actually killing the man in order to avoid relinquishing his command … but he had once thrown a Senate political liaison off his bridge. He was a superb military leader … and a very poor subordinate.

“I’ll sign the order,” DuPont said. “But … you’re going to have to find the man to pass them on, and I have a feeling that you’re going to have some trouble there. There are a lot of stars out there, and he has a very long head start.”

“We will find him,” Noyer said. There was bitterness behind the words. “We will find Koenig if we have to mobilize half of the remaining fleet to do so! He will be brought to heel!”

The myriad stars scattered across the interior of the planetarium dome seemed to mock them all.

TC/USNA CVS America

Kuiper Belt, HD 157950

98 light years from Earth

1320 hours, TFT

The star carrier America dropped out of the grav-twisted dimensions of Alcubierre space in a characteristically intense burst of photons, a dazzling flash of energy crawling outward in all directions at the speed of light. If there were technically accomplished residents of this star system, they would soon know of the arrival of the fleet.

In fact, it was unlikely that anyone else was here. Koenig and his advisors had chosen the system carefully. They weren’t looking for combat, but for a chance to refuel.

The star was a close double, the brighter member of the pair a yellow-white F3V sun listed in the star catalogues as HD 157950. From Earth, it had a visual magnitude of 4.5—a faint and unremarkable star in the constellation of Ophiuchus. It possessed a planetary system that was young and still chaotic; a gas giant the size of Neptune circled in close, a so-called hot Jupiter, with a plume like the tail of a comet streaming out behind it away from the sun. Farther out, chunks of ice drifted in an extended, ragged disk, invisible to the naked eye, but glowing faintly at infrared wavelengths.

“Fifteen other ships have emerged so far, Admiral,” Commander Benton Sinclair, America’s tactical officer, told him. “Now sixteen. The Abraham Lincoln just came through.”

“Very well.”

The wait this time was particularly agonizing. How many more would be coming through?

The original battlegroup, CBG-18, had lost five of its thirty-one capital ships at the Battle of Alphekka, plus two more so badly damaged that they’d been left behind to await the arrival of support and repair ships from Earth. Shortly after the battle, forty-one more warships had arrived, reinforcements dispatched by the Confederation’s Joint Chiefs of Staff. Of those forty-one, twelve were USNA ships, a battlegroup formed around the star carrier Abraham Lincoln. Nine were Chinese, the Eastern Dawn expeditionary force, led by the carrier Zheng He.

The remaining twenty vessels were a Pan-European task force commanded by Grand Admiral Francois Giraurd on board the star carrier Jeanne d’Arc.

Technically, all of the ships except for the Chinese vessels were Confederation Navy, but … there was a problem, a big problem. Koenig wasn’t sure yet how it was going to play out.

“The Cheng Hua and the Haiping have both just materialized,” Sinclair announced. “Range twelve light minutes. And there’s the Zheng He. …”

He’d been expecting the Chinese and the North Americans to follow the battlegroup into the Abyss. The question remained: What would the Pan-Europeans do?

After the Battle of Alphekka, CBG-18 had remained in the system, refitting, re-arming, and consolidating. Grand Admiral Giraurd had brought his flagship alongside the America and told Koenig that he was taking command of the entire fleet, and that the fleet would be returning to Earth.

And Koenig had refused the order.

Giraurd had threatened to open fire as the fleet elements loyal to Koenig had begun accelerating out-system, and for a nerve-wracking few hours, the Pan-Europeans had pursued the rest of the battlegroup. They’d never quite pulled into range, however, and, once the rest of the battlegroup had begun dropping into Alcubierre Drive, there was a good chance that Giraurd had ordered his contingent to break off the pursuit.

But Giraurd knew Koenig’s plan, knew the coordinates where they would be emerging. If he wanted to, he could be moments away from Emergence … and Koenig would be looking at the very real possibility of either capitalization or mutiny.

Which would it be?

“Admiral!” Sinclair called. “Another star carrier emerging, range fifteen light minutes! Sir, it’s the Jeanne d’Arc!”

Giraurd had followed them after all.

“More ships emerging from the horizon,” Sinclair added. “De Gaul. Illustrious. Frederick der Grosse. Looks like the Pan-European main body.”

Now they would learn whether or not Koenig’s mutiny had just precipitated a civil war.

Chapter Two

10 April 2405

VFA-44

Kuiper Belt, HD 157950

98 light years from Earth

1342 hours, TFT

Please, God, don’t let me screw up, don’t let me screw up, don’t let me screw up …

“And acceleration in four … three … two … one … launch!”

Acceleration slammed Lieutenant Trevor Gray back in the cockpit as his SG-92 Starhawk hurtled down the spinal launch tube and into space. At seven gravities, he traversed the two-hundred-meter length of the tube in a fraction over two and a third seconds, emerging at just under 170 meters per second relative to the carrier. The vast, black, circular dome of America’s forward cap receded swiftly behind him, the ship’s name in faded letters meters high, the word sandblasted to a faded and ragged gray by long voyaging through the interstellar medium. He switched to view forward. Ahead, the local sun showed as a close-set pair of intensely brilliant sparks.

“Blue Dragon One clear,” he called over the communications net. “CIC, handing off from Pryfly.”

“Blue Dragon One, CIC. We have you.”

“Imaging,” he told his ship’s AI. “Show the squadron, please.”

“Blue Two, clear,” a second voice said. Lieutenant Shay Ryan’s Starhawk had launched in tandem with his. Computer imagining showed her ship as a blue diamond, high and forty meters to port. He switched to his in-head display. With his cerebral implants receiving feeds from external sensors all over the craft’s fuselage, his Starhawk seemed invisible now, at least to his eyes, as though he’d merged with his fighter and become a part of it. Ryan’s Starhawk sharpened into high-res magnification, a long and slender black needle with a central bulge, her ship, like his, still in launch configuration.

With a thoughtclicked command, Gray flipped his fighter end for end and began decelerating, his maneuver matched closely by Shay. Other SG-92s were appearing now, spilling two by two from America’s forward launch tubes.

“Blue Dragon Three, clear.”

“Blue Four, in the clear.”

Fighters from other squadrons were dropping laterally from the carrier, propelled by the centrifugal force of the rotating hab modules behind the forward cap, and slowly, a cloud of fighters was beginning to surround her. America, he knew, was just one of many warships in the newly reinforced CBG-18, with several other carriers out there, but, from this vantage point, he couldn’t see any of them save as colored icons painted into his visual cortex by his fighter’s AI.

“Dragonfires,” Gray said over the tac channel. “Go to combat configuration and form up on me.”

“Copy, Skipper,” the voice of Ben Donovan said. “We’re coming in.”

And the other ships of VFA-44 began closing with him.

Skipper …

The title still didn’t fit. The Dragonfires’ skipper, their CO, was Commander Marissa Allyn … but CDR Allyn had gone streaker during the Battle of Alphekka, her fighter badly damaged and hurtling out of control into emptiness. The SAR ships had found her three days later and brought her back, still alive but in a coma. She was still in America’s sick bay ICU, unconscious and unresponsive.

And CAG had told Gray that now he was the squadron commander.

The assignment was strictly temporary and provisional. VFA-44 had come out of the furnace of Alphekka with just three pilots left—Gray, Shay Ryan, and Ben Donovan. And of the three of them, Gray held seniority; Donovan’s date of commission was two years younger than Gray’s, while Ryan was a relative newbie, fresh from a training squadron at Oceana.

Over the past month, the three of them had worked together training a batch of replacement pilots, men and women recruited from other shipboard divisions to fill the squadron’s missing ranks. How well the new squadron performed, how they pulled together as a team, likely, would determine whether Gray would keep his new billet—and perhaps receive an early promotion to lieutenant commander to go with it.

The trouble was that Gray had no desire for either the promotion or the responsibility. He and his wife had been Prims—primitives—squatters in the unorganized and half-drowned ruins of coastal cities around the peripheries of the old United States. As such, they’d not been full citizens, and when Angela had had a stroke, he’d been forced to join the military as a trade-off to get her medical treatment.

Gray’s plan had been to put in the mandatory minimum—ten years—and get out. His time would be up in another six years. Damn it, he was not going to hang around one second longer than he had to.

Other Starhawk pilots began dropping into formation with him as they continued to exit the carrier. Jamis Natham and Calli Loman, both formerly of America’s food services department. Miguel Zapeta, admin. Rissa Schiff, avionics. Will Rostenkowski, personnel. Tammi Mallory, medical department. There were nine newbies in all, not counting Shay, who had been through the fight at Alphekka.

“Stay tight,” Gray told the formation. “Close perimeter defense.”

“Who the hell’s going to attack us out here?” Carlos Esteban—until recently an AI systems analyst—asked. “This star system is supposed to be empty!”

“Just do it, Lieutenant,” Gray said. “You can analyze the tacsit later.”

“Scuttlebutt had it we might be fighting the Europeans,” Mallory said. “Giraurd wants Koenig to go back to Earth.”

“Quiet, Dragonfires,” Gray snapped. “No scuttlebutt, no talking. Line of duty only.”

“Uh … permission to ask a question?” That was Schiff.

“Granted.”

“Is that true, Skipper? We might be facing off against Confederation forces?”

“They haven’t told me, Lieutenant,” Gray told her. “When they do, I’ll pass it along. For right now … follow orders, stay in tight formation, and maintain radio silence.”

But Gray had heard the same scuttlebutt. Everyone in the fleet must have heard it by now. Fleet Admiral Giraurd outranked a mere rear admiral, and the word was that Koenig had been ordered home—presumably with the rest of the battlegroup. For the past two months there’d been intensive speculation on the topic in the squadron ready rooms and lounges. Koenig had figuratively thumbed his nose at the Pan-Europeans and departed from Alphekka, destination … unknown. Had Giraurd followed them?

His tactical display had been partially blocked by America’s Combat Information Center. He could see America and those of America’s fighters that were already deployed, but not the rest of the battlegroup. Unless something had gone horribly wrong, there should be at least another twenty-five warships out there, the rest of the original CBG-18. And there were the forty-one Confederation vessels that had arrived as reinforcements at Alphekka; some of them should have come over to Koenig as well. If they’d emerged too far from America, the light from their collapsing Alcubierre fields might not yet have reached them, but it had been almost half an hour since America had emerged. They all ought to be out there by now. …

“Blue Dragon One, CIC, command channel.”

“CIC, Blue One. Go ahead.”

“This is the CAG. I, ah, heard the chatter just now.”

“Yes, sir.” He wondered if Wizewski was about to chew him a new one for his people’s poor communications security.

“We’re getting the same from every squadron out there. Don’t sweat it. They have a right to know.”

Gray relaxed slightly. “I agree, sir.”

“But not just yet. We’re releasing the tacsit data to squadron leaders, but not to the general fleet. I want you to see this.”

A separate window opened in his mind as new data streamed into his implant. It showed America near the center of a scattering of ships, each tagged with name and hull number.

“It looks like they all did follow us,” Gray said.

“They did. We’re still missing eight ships. They’re probably still outside of our light-speed horizon, and we’ll see them in a few more minutes. Green are ships we know we can trust. Red are probably hostile. Amber are unknowns.”

The twenty-six ships of the original battlegroup were green, Gray noted. So too were twelve more ships—Abraham Lincoln’s battlegroup—which meant they were North American.

Twelve were red … the Pan-European contingent, minus eight stragglers. The remaining nine—the Chinese—were unknowns.

“Sir,” Gray said, “we’re not going to fight them, are we?”

“I don’t know, son. Possibly they don’t know either. They’re probably going to try to bluff us, and the old man is going to call them on it.”

It seemed like utter lunacy. The North Americans comfortably outnumbered the European warships, but an exchange of fire would cause a lot of damage on both sides, something the human fleet simply couldn’t afford this far from home. Damn it, the Sh’daar and the Turusch and the H’rulka were the enemies … not the damned Europeans!

“We expect the French carrier Jeanne d’Arc to attempt to close alongside of the America,” Wizewski continued. “The fighters are going to block her, because we can’t afford to let a ship with her firepower get close enough to fire a broadside. One hundred thousand kilometers. That’s the minimum stand-off distance. Understand?”

“I think so, sir. Are … are we authorized to fire?”

“Only on my command, or on the command of Admiral Koenig himself.”

“Yes, sir.”

“We’re going to try our damnedest to talk our way out of this. If we can’t …”

He left the thought unfinished.

“I understand, sir.”

On the tactical display, the Jeanne d’Arc and her consorts were still almost a full astronomical unit away, but they were on a convergent course, closing with the America. The American ships were positioning themselves in a tight globe around the carrier, with the heavy cruisers Valley Forge and Ma’at Mons, along with a number of frigates and destroyers squarely between the approaching French flotilla and the USNA carriers. The Ma’at Mons, particularly, was a heavy bombardment ship … but she’d expended a lot of her warload against the A1-01 orbital factory. Gray wondered if she had enough munitions on board to keep the Europeans at a healthy distance.

Civil war.

Gray had little use for the Terran Confederation. Hell, as a Prim living out on the USNA Periphery, in the ruins of Old Manhattan, he’d had little use for the United States of North America, either. So far as he could tell, the argument between them involved a difference of strategy. The Confederation wanted to talk with the Sh’daar, and perhaps accept terms, while Koenig wanted to draw the enemy off into deep space, away from Earth and her colonies. Gray didn’t understand how the two could be mutually exclusive, or how Koenig could get away with setting Confederation military policy.

If forced to choose between the two, though, Gray would go with Koenig, if only because he was doing what he thought was right, and to hell with the politicians and rear-echelon second-guessers in Geneva or in Columbus.

Koenig was a fighter, and that was enough for Trevor Gray.

CIC

TC/USNA CVS America

Kuiper Belt, HD 157950

98 light years from Earth

1358 hours, TFT

“Do you think they’ll fight, Admiral?” Captain Buchanan asked.

The voice spoke inside Koenig’s head, since America’s commanding officer was on the ship’s bridge, forward from the Combat Information Center, which was the central brain for the entire battlegroup. Koenig was looking down into the tactical display tank, where a cloud of green, amber, and red icons drifted toward a seemingly inevitable collision.

“I don’t know, Randy,” Koenig said. “I don’t know Giraurd. Can’t get a handle on him.”

He’d called up every bit of biographical data on Francois Giraurd that he could find in the Fleetnet database, but found little that was useful. Giraurd was only fifty years old, remarkably young for a grand admiral. Born in 2344, he’d been twenty-three, an engineering major at the Sorbonne, when the Sh’daar Ultimatum had come down through their Agletsch proxies. He’d entered the French Acádemie d’Astre as a midshipman cadet in 2368, the year of the disaster at Beta Pictoris, the opening round in the Sh’daar-Confederation War.

His first command had been the gunship Pégase in 2374, and on his promotion to capitaine de frégate five years later he’d been given the command of the De Grasse, serving with the Terran Confederation’s Pan-European contingent.

He’d never commanded a ship in battle, however, for either Pan-Europe or the Confederation. He’d made contre-amiral in 2389, at age 40, then vice-amiral in 2394, and vice-amiral d’escadre in 2397, a spectacularly swift rise up the hierarchy of flag rank. His final promotion to grand-amiral had been conferred in 2403. He’d been in command of a joint Franco-German-Russian fleet in Earth Synchorbit, Koenig noted, during the Defense of Earth, but that fleet had not seen combat.

An uncle of Giraurd’s had been the French prime minister from 2385 through 2397, which just might explain his lightning rise through the ranks. He also had a cousin, General Daubresse, currently on the Confederation Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Giraurd family was one of the wealthiest in Pan-Europe. Family, political, and financial connections weren’t supposed to have any influence on promotions within the Confederation military, but everyone was all too aware of the reality. Both Pan-Europe and the UNSA had families who’d rotated between politics and the military going back for generations.

“I think he’s more bluff and bluster than anything else,” Buchanan said. “The real problem is going to be DuPont and the politicos back in Geneva. I’d like to know exactly what Giraurd’s orders are right now.”

Koenig had been thinking the same thing. Clearly, the Confederation government had hoped that Girard’s arrival would overawe Koenig enough that he would meekly return to Earth—coupled, carrot and stick, with the promise of being made president of the Confederation Senate.

“Admiral? This is fleet communications,” Lieutenant Julio Ramirez said, interrupting electronically.

“Excuse me, Randy. Go ahead, comm.”

“Incoming transmission from Jeanne d’Arc. Time lag … seven minutes, twenty seconds.”

“Very well.” Koenig opened the channel to include Buchanan. “Captain? You might want to listen in on this.”

“Of course, sir.”

A window opened in Koenig’s mind, static-blasted, then clearing. Giraurd’s face peered out at him. “Admiral Koenig, this is Grand Admiral Giraurd, on board the Confederation star carrier Jeanne d’Arc. I must inform you that I have the authority of the Terran Confederation Senate to place you under arrest if you do not comply with their orders.”

“He followed us for a hundred and fourteen light years to tell us that?” Buchanan asked.

“He probably can’t go back empty-handed,” Koenig replied, as Giraurd continued talking in the background. The transmission was strictly one-sided, a monologue. It would take another seven and a half minutes, nearly, for any response to get back to the approaching Jeanne d’Arc.

“My orders,” Giraurd was saying, “are to take command of CBG-18 and organize its immediate return to Earth. …”

“So what are we going to do about it?” Buchanan asked.

“What am I going to do about it,” Koenig replied. “No sense in your career getting fried too.”

“Admiral, we’re long past that point. If they hang you, they’re going to hang every senior officer in the battlegroup.”

Giraurd kept speaking. “You are hereby directed to shut down your maneuvering drive and your weapons systems and prepare to receive the Jeanne d’Arc alongside. I am awaiting your immediate reply. Giraurd, Jeanne d’Arc, out.”

“Well,” Koenig said. “Short and to the point.”

“We’re going to have to make a fight-or-flight decision in another … call it three hours, sir.”

“I know. Ramirez?”

“Yes, Admiral.”

“Can you patch through a high-focus laser on Illustrious?”

There was a brief delay. “Yes, sir. No problem. We have a clear shot. The time lag is … make it seven thirty-five.”

“Do so. I want Captain Harrison on the link, personal and private.”

“Aye, aye, Admiral.”

Koenig knew Captain Ronald Fitzhugh Harrison, the skipper of the British assault carrier Illustrious. If Giraurd was bluff and bluster, Harrison was the real deal. He was a veteran of a number of actions, including both Sturgis’s World and Everdawn against the Turusch; Cinco de Mayo, against EAS; and the Chinese Hegemony and Spanish rebels, and he included among his service medals both the Conspicuous Gallantry Cross and the Distinguished Service Cross.

“Jeanne d’Arc has tagged their transmission with an immediate response requested, Admiral.”

“Ignore them.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

Koenig thought for a moment, then began recording his transmission to Harrison.

“Hello, Ron. This is Alex, on the America. I’m sure you’re under orders not to receive transmissions from us, but before you cut me off you’d better have a look at the attached intel. They might not have told you everything.

“If you’d care to chat, tag me back. Koenig, awaiting your reply. Out.”

He attached a file with the name “Operation Crown Arrow” and uploaded it to Fleet Communications. It would be on its way down a laser beam aimed at the Pan-European carrier Illustrious within seconds.

It would be more than fifteen minutes before he could expect a reply.

For almost four decades, since the Sh’daar Ultimatum, the Terran Confederation had been shrinking, its borders on several fronts relentlessly pushed back by the encroaching Sh’daar Alliance. They’d taken Rasalhague, forty-seven light years from Sol, in 2374. Twenty-three years later, they’d hit Sturgis’s World, at Zeta Herculis, thirty-five light years out.

And a few months ago, just before CBG-18 had left the Sol System, they’d taken the colony at Osiris, 70 Ophiuchi AII. That was just sixteen and a half light years away, practically on Earth’s doorstep, astronomically speaking.

The Sh’daar and their subject races were closing in.

Operation Crown Arrow had been devised to buy the Confederation time, a raid deep, deep into Sh’daar-controlled space, striking at fleet assembly points, manufactory centers, and staging areas. WHISPERS, the Weak Heterodyned Interstellar Signal Passband-Emission Radio Search, had detected a number of sources of faint, intelligently directed radio signals and identified them as probable sites of Sh’daar or Turusch activity. The immense manufactory at Alphekka, sucking in debris from the star’s protoplanetary disk and building Turusch warships, had been one of the loudest of these, but there was a list of more distant sites as well.

And with the capture of the Alphekkan manufactory had come the Alphekkan Directory, a Turusch list of other military bases within about five thousand light years of Sol.

That list proved one important thing. The Sh’daar and their Turusch proxies were stretched thin. It couldn’t really be otherwise, not in a galaxy of 400 billion stars. The enemy couldn’t maintain a guardian fleet within every star system. They couldn’t even put guards within every inhabited system.

Koenig was certain now that the Alphekkan base had been designed for nothing less than building a fleet intended to subjugate—possibly to destroy—Earth. A huge number of ships, empty and waiting, had been captured there. The Sh’daar might be planning on using the newly captured base at 70 Ophiuchi, but that was across 42 degrees of Earth’s sky, a straight-line distance of 62.5 light years from Alphekka. The almost overwhelming likelihood was that the enemy had hit 70 Ophiuchi as a diversion, to pull human fleet resources away from Sol. The main strike, Koenig thought, would come from the direction of the constellation of Corona Borealis, from Alphekka.

Operation Crown Arrow called for an initial strike at Alphekka in order to cripple the Sh’daar assets there … and that strike had been an unprecedented success. But the follow-on had called for CBG-18 to continue deeper into Sh’daar space, ideally drawing off the enemy forces now pressing so hard on Sol, getting them to follow America and her consorts.

Exhaustive analyses had gone into the planning. Step by step, Koenig, using a small army of artificial intelligences, had shown conclusively that running from point to point to meet individual Sh’daar advances—like the taking of Osiris—would inevitably leave Earth vulnerable to a final, overwhelming attack. The Confederation did not have the capacity in personnel, in equipment, or in industrial strength to meet the Sh’daar on anything like an equal basis long term.

That, Koenig, thought, should have been self-evident. According to the alien Agletsch, the Sh’daar dominated something like a third of the galaxy, which meant more than 100 billion suns, billions of habitable worlds, and an estimated 5 million technic civilizations. The Confederation had Sol and a handful of colonized star systems—twenty-five, at last count, plus a couple of hundred outposts and research stations. Twenty-five worlds against an unknown number of billions … a flea against some giant, enormous extinct beast, a tyrannosaur, a titanothere, or an elephant. It was impossible. …

But Koenig had an idea that might work. Alphekka had been a spectacular victory; now, CBG-18 needed to hit the next target, and the next one after that. The Alphekkan Directory had pointed him to a likely candidate, a star system not listed on any human catalogues, but known to the Agletsch as Texaghu Resch.

Hit that, and Koenig believed that every Sh’daar fleet within a thousand light years would be chasing him. After that …

“Admiral? Incoming … from Captain Harrison, on the Illustrious.”

Koenig checked his internal clock. What the hell? Only five minutes had passed since he’d sent the message to Harrison; he hadn’t even had time to receive it yet. This must be one of those “great minds” moments; Harrison had tried to reach him within moments of his trying to communicate with Harrison.

“Put it through. Randy? Listen in, please.”

Within his mind, a communications window opened, and Harrison’s face appeared. “Alex! This is Ron Harrison. Remember me? The academy speech, two years ago.”

Koenig remembered. The two of them had together addressed the 2403 graduating class at the Naval academy. It wasn’t the last time he’d seen the man, but it was the last time he’d had more than a few minutes to talk with him.

“What the hell is going down, Alex?” Harrison continued. “Giraurd is about to bust a gut. He’s calling you a traitor and worse, and he’s told us that he intends to attack your squadron if you don’t do exactly what he says.

“This mess is a put-up hatchet job, I’m certain of that. This isn’t the Senate speaking. It’s a small clique inside the Senate—the damned Conciliationists. They haven’t figured out yet that appeasement never works.

“Now, I notice the other USNA ships in our flotilla broke off and followed you. That was to be expected. Illustrious and two others, Warspite and Conqueror, are under my direct command … and I’ll be damned if I’m going to see them fire the opening shots of a civil war. Give the word, and I’ll slide the three of us over to your side of the line.

“Harrison, awaiting your reply. Out.”

“Well, well,” Buchanan said. “Division within the enemy’s ranks?”

“They’re not our enemies,” Koenig said.

He was thinking furiously. How well did he trust Harrison? Was this a genuine offer to change sides … or was it a covert move directed by Giraurd, an attempt to get three major warships in close to the America? Koenig hated the paranoid thought, but he had to consider every possibility.

What, he wondered, had been the speech at the academy? When the topic didn’t come immediately to mind, he downloaded it from his personal database. Koenig’s speech had been about the need to be vigilant and develop a unity of purpose and strategy in the war against the Sh’daar. Harrison’s speech had been titled “The Worm Within: Covert Penetration of the Enemy’s Infrastructure.” He’d been telling the graduating midshipmen that they needed to think outside the box, to think not only in terms of classical fleet strategies, but to use high-tech infiltration techniques to tap into alien command and control systems. Koenig had done exactly that three months before, when he’d deployed a small SEALs team to covertly breach and enter a giant H’rulka warship moving into the Sol System in order to establish contact with the beings inside.

And now, Koenig thought, Harrison was using the title as a warning. This was a covert attempt to get his forces in close to the America.

“Ramirez,” Koenig said. “Reply to Captain Harrison, personal and confidential. Message begins.

“Hey, Ron, you Limey bastard. Got your message, all of it.” He thought for a moment. Chances were good that Giraurd was tapped in to Illustrious’s comm suite and reading the mail. He decided not to mention his previous message, which Giraurd may or may not have seen.

“The thing about a civil war,” Koenig went on, “is that it is never civil. We can’t afford to bloody each other, and I refuse to become the bone of contention that splits open the Terran Confederation. The enemy is out there, not within our own ranks.

“I appreciate your offer, but for now, I’d prefer that Illustrious, Warspite, and Conqueror remain with the Pan-European fleet. We are establishing a no-cross line one hundred thousand kilometers from the America, and we ask that you respect that.

“I hope that when this is over, you and I can sit down in a wardroom, your ship or mine, and have a cold one and a good laugh about this. For now, please stay clear.

“Koenig, America, out.”

In the tactical tank, the two fleets continued to draw closer together.

Chapter Three

10 April 2405

VFA-44

Kuiper Belt, HD 157950

98 light years from Earth

1715 hours, TFT

“Things are about to go supercritical,” Gray said over the squadron tac channel. “Reconfigure to sperm mode.”

The SG-92 Starhawk’s outer hull consisted of a matrix of conventional metals and ceramics blended with nano-molecules controlled by an electrical field projected by his ship’s AI. Launch configuration was a slender needle with a swollen central area housing the cockpit, designed for magnetic acceleration down the launch tube. Combat configuration looked a bit like a headless bird with down-canted wings, providing widely separated weapons and sensor platforms useful in a fight.

Sperm mode was fighter-slang for high-velocity configuration—a blunt-nosed egg shape with a long, tapering tail. The old, conventional wisdom that said that spacecraft didn’t need to be streamlined in the vacuum of space broke down when the vessel could approach the speed of light. At those speeds every little bit helped.

Gray didn’t know what was going to happen in the next few moments, but he did know that their survival would depend upon their speed and their maneuverability.

The twelve Starhawks had been patrolling in combat mode, but now their wings began folding in toward their bodies, their black surfaces turning cold-molten and flowing like thick water. They were drifting along the no-cross line, an empty region of space defined by its distance, 100,000 kilometers, from the America.

The heavy cruiser Valley Forge was only five kilometers off his starboard side at the moment, three quarters of a kilometer long, a slender stem behind an outsized forward cap shaped like a flattened dome. To the naked eye, she appeared slightly blurred and indistinct. Shield technology involved bending space sharply above and around a ship’s hull, and that bending caused light to twist. When an incoming projectile or thermonuclear detonation struck the field projected across a warship’s outer hull, that spatial warping momentarily became much stronger, deflecting the threat. Gravitic shielding was costly in terms of energy, however, and was generally switched on only when combat was imminent. Koenig, clearly, was taking no chances; high-velocity kinetic rounds could come slamming out of the darkness with little to no warning at all, and all ships in the battlegroup were at the highest possible alert status.

According to the tactical display, Jeanne d’Arc and the eleven other capital ships of the Pan-European contingent were a scant half million kilometers away, drawing ever closer.

“Hey … Skipper?” It was Shay Ryan, on a private channel.

“Yeah?”

“I don’t like the idea of shooting at our own guys, y’know?”

“Neither do I, Lieutenant.”

“If we get shot up way out here, it’s going to make fighting the Sh’daar, or getting home, a hell of a lot harder.”

“The brass’ll figure something out,” he told her. “They know a lot more about what’s happening than we do.”

He wished he felt that confident, though. Koenig was a good officer and a brilliant strategist, Gray thought, but he shared with most fighter pilots a measure of distrust for the men and women who made the tough choices in the relative safety of the CIC. Sure, their lives were on the line if the capital ships came under attack, but they weren’t out here, crammed inside a gravfighter with nothing but speed, maneuverability, and skill between you and the enemy’s incoming rounds.

He found himself wondering just what the battlegroup could do if Giraurd tried to push things. A traditional shot across their bows? And what if they called the bluff and kept coming? He called up a battlespace view, imagery transmitted from one of the thousands of robotic drones now dispersed throughout this region of space, for a closer look at the enemy.

There she was … the Jeanne d’Arc, a light star carrier, perhaps three quarters of the mass of America. Like all Alcubierre Drive ships, she had the same general design—slender spine aft, large, flattened dome forward. The shield cap had been painted blue and white, a sharp contrast with the sandblasted gray-black of America’s prow. Her name and number appeared pristine, newly painted. According to the warbook, the Jeanne d’Arc didn’t have America’s twin launch tubes running through the center of the shield cap. Instead, she possessed a single high-energy particle cannon, which gave her a formidable long-range bombardment capability above and beyond the punch carried by her fighters.

A whale swimming with minnows, the Jeanne d’Arc was accompanied by a cloud of fighters, tiny blue motes moving in her shadow.

Gray didn’t immediately recognize the Pan-European fighters, and had to pull an ID up on his warbook: Franco-German KRG-17 Raschadler fighters. He felt himself relax slightly. The Raschadler was roughly equivalent to the USNA SG-55 War Eagle, a design about twenty years old. They didn’t have the delta-V of Starhawks, the endurance, or the warload capability, and they didn’t possess the Starhawk’s high-tech ability to change its configuration for launch, for high-velocity travel, or for combat. In head-to-head knife fights with the Pan-Europeans, the Dragonfire Starhawks would come out on top every time. The problem was that no one wanted such a confrontation in the first place, least of all, Gray was certain, Koenig.

How could CBG-18 stop the Pan-Europeans without destroying their ships or risking the destruction of their own?

He zoomed in closer, magnifying the image. The Raschadler fighters were obviously positioned to prevent CBG-18’s fighters from getting close to the carrier’s central spine—the weapons sponsons and rotating hab modules and drop bays tucked away just aft of the shield cap.

Just ahead of the Jeanne d’Arc was a tiny, blurred tumble of distortion—the projected drive singularity that was pulling the giant through space.

The ship’s gravitic shields would be down on the forward cap, to enable the field projectors to create the singularity, a tightly knotted distortion of space.

And Gray thought he saw a way. …

CIC

TC/USNA CVS America

Kuiper Belt, HD 157950

98 light years from Earth

1732 hours, TFT

“Admiral?”

“Yes, CAG?”

“One of our people came up with something. Thought you should see it.”

Koenig read the downloaded text, transcribed from a pilot’s laser-com transmission. “Lieutenant Gray?” Koenig asked.

“Yes, sir. Acting CO of VFA-44.”

“I remember. Hero at the Defense of Earth … and again at Alphekka. He knows his shit.”

“Yes, sir. And his idea might work. Gives us something to go on, anyway.”

“We’ve got nothing better,” Koenig said. “Okay. Mr. Sinclair? Pass the word to all ships, tight beam and quantum encoded. Jeanne d’Arc will be the first target. We won’t hit the others unless this doesn’t work and they keep coming.”

“Aye, aye, Admiral.”

Koenig, an avid military historian, smiled. Lieutenant Gray, he thought, knew a secret first uncovered by an aviator back in the days of fabric-winged biplanes and oceangoing navies, a man named General Billy Mitchell.

“It appears,” Koenig said, “that our fighters are going to earn their pay today, David-and-Goliath style.”

“David and who, sir?” Sinclair sounded puzzled.

“Never mind.”

Since the passage of the White Covenant, in the late twenty-first century, the religious beliefs or training of others—or the lack of such—was no one’s business. Technically, it was only against the law to try to convert someone else, but in practice it was considered bad manners even to make a casual religious comment, or to make a reference to religious mythology.

“Our boys and girls out there are going to need something more than a sling,” Wizewski said quietly. The CAG, Koenig recalled, was religious, a member of some small and semi-fundamentalist Christian sect. There were so many nowadays it was impossible to keep track.

“Amen to that, CAG,” Koenig said quietly, so no one else would hear. “Amen to that. …”

CIC

TC/PE CVS Jeanne d’Arc

Kuiper Belt, HD 157950

98 light years from Earth

1739 hours, TFT

Grand Admiral Francois Giraurd studied the pattern of colored icons unfolding in the tactical display tank. Koenig would have to capitulate. He had no other sane option.

“Sir,” his tactical officer said. “We cross their line in twelve minutes.”

“Very well.”

“Sir … do you intend to attack?”

“It won’t come to that, Lieutenant. We will cross their line, they will scatter and refuse to confront us, and we will put our boarding party across. And then …”

“Sir?”

“And then we go home.”

They were ninety-eight light years from Earth, farther than any human had ever before voyaged. The emptiness, the darkness scattered with myriad unknown suns and civilizations, filled him with foreboding and a brooding sense of agitation, even fear. Humans didn’t belong out here, not in a galaxy already staked out and claimed by millions of other technic cultures.

He magnified the image in the tank. “What ship is that?”

“The Valley Forge,” the tactical officer told him. “One hundred fifty thousand tons.”

“Target to disable her,” Giraurd said. “Power systems and weapons. We will push past her, then, and engage the America.”

“The cruiser is accompanied by a number of fighters.”

“Those are of no consequence. If they get too close, destroy them.”

“Our orders, sir, are to effect Koenig’s surrender without causing damage to their ships, or causing casualties.”

“We will damage them as little as possible, cause as few casualties as possible. But I see no other way of reaching the America, do you?”

“No, Grand Admiral.”

“Direct our fighter escort to move out ahead of us,” Giraurd said. “They will be our wedge to sweep the enemy aside. Order them to fire only if they are fired upon.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And accelerate to combat speed.”

“Yes, Grand Admiral.”

Giraurd smiled. They would end this standoff soon enough. Koenig was a fool if he thought he could make military policy for the Confederation. The Jeanne d’Arc would push through Koenig’s outer screen, close with America, and put boarding parties across to capture Koenig and take command of his fleet.

And then they could all go home.

VFA-44

Kuiper Belt, HD 157950

98 light years from Earth

1748 hours, TFT

“Here they come!” Gray called. “Their fighters are deploying ahead of the carrier, and they’re accelerating!”

“Hold position, Dragonfires,” Wizewski’s voice said in his head. “We’re doing it by the book.”

“Holding, aye, sir. …”

By the book meant a warning shot, a formal nicety in which modern naval vessels rarely engaged. Generally, the idea was to launch an attack, all-out, complete and devastating, zorching in before the enemy was even aware that your forces were in the area, with missiles and kinetic kill impactors coming in just behind the light announcing their arrival.

He switched to the tactical channel. “All ships! Engage squadron taclink.”

Gray and the other pilots each focused their thoughts, connecting with their fighters’ artificial intelligences. The twelve fighter craft were interconnected now by laser-optic feeds linking their onboard computers into a single electronic organism.

The Valley Forge was pivoting slightly now, bringing her main battery, a spinal-mount CPG, to bear. A moment later, she fired—a burst of tightly focused high-energy-charged particles invisible to the unaided eye but showing clearly on Gray’s instruments and on his visual display. The beam burned past the shield cap of the Jeanne d’Arc, missing the carrier by less than a hundred meters.

“Jeanne d’Arc,” Koenig’s voice said over the fleet channel. “That was a warning. Change course immediately, or we will take you under fire.”

“You’re not going to fire on Confederation vessels,” Giraurd’s voice came back. “Surrender and save your people, and your reputation.”

“Dragonfires!” Wizewski’s voice snapped. “You are weapons free. Go!”

“That’s it, Dragons!” Gray called. “Maximum acceleration in three … two … one … now!”

Twelve Starhawk fighters leaped past the challenge line, hurtling toward the oncoming Pan-European warships. The range was just under 480,000 kilometers. At fifty thousand gravities they closed the gap in just forty seconds.

A typical strike fighter mission had the fighters zorching through an enemy formation at high velocity after a long period of acceleration. This was different, however, with only a relatively short distance for acceleration before the fighters reached the target. The squadron’s newbies hadn’t practiced this sort of tight, close-quarters maneuvering in training sims, and they were going to be making mistakes.

Gray just hoped none of those mistakes would be fatal.

“Jink!” he yelled over the tactical channel. “All Dragonfires, jink!”

By throwing drive singularities to left, right, above, and below at random, they could jerk their fighters around enough to fox enemy targeting AIs as they continued to close the range.

On the tactical display, the Pan-European fighters had leaped forward, seeking to head the Starhawks off.

“Ignore the fighters,” Gray told the squadron. “Stay on the carrier!”

“They’re firing! Missiles incoming!”

Missiles streaked out from the incoming fighters, curving to meet the fast-moving Starhawks.

“Don’t let it rattle you,” Gray said, suppressing the trembling surge of fear he was feeling. “Stay on course. Stay on the carrier. …”

White light flared, dazzling and silent in the darkness. The Dragonfires flashed through expanding clouds of plasma, emerging … and then the two clouds of fighters interpenetrated, passing through each other in an instant.

The Jeanne d’Arc and her consorts lay just ahead. …

CIC

TC/PE CVS Jeanne d’Arc

Kuiper Belt, HD 157950

98 light years from Earth

1748 hours, TFT

“Harrison has betrayed us,” Hans Westerwelle said, bitterly. “He warned Koenig, somehow.”

“We don’t know that,” Giraurd replied. “I … agree that he was less than eager to open the dialogue with Koenig.”

“‘Less than eager’? The Englander swine fought the idea tooth and nail. Koenig was his friend. We should investigate Harrison when this is over, and see where his true loyalties lie.”

The plan to have the three British ships pretend to join Koenig’s squadron had been Westerwelle’s. He was the European fleet’s political officer, a civilian appointed by Geneva to maintain loyalty and an acceptable level of enthusiasm within the Federation’s ranks.

The first nuclear-tipped missiles were detonating in brilliant, savage silence across the CIC’s forward view screens. They were unlikely to cause more than superficial damage to the incoming fighters, but they might deter, might force the enemy squadron commander to break off.

“Enemy fighters are still approaching from dead ahead!” the tactical officer called. “They’re at seventy percent of c and accelerating!”

“Engage point defense!” the Jeanne d’Arc’s captain ordered. “Fight them off!”

Giraurd sat back in his command chair, watching the CIC and bridge crews carry out their routines. It had been months since the Jeanne d’Arc had been in combat, and many in her crew were new to the ship, having come aboard just before the flotilla had left for Alphekka. It would be interesting to see how well they did in this, their first exercise that was not a drill. Her captain, Charles Michel, had seen action during the Defense of Earth, but he was Belgian rather than French, and Giraurd wasn’t sure he trusted the man.

Unfortunately, there were a lot of officers on board he didn’t entirely trust. Sawicki, the tactical officer, was a Pole. Mytnyk, the fighter wing commander, was Ukrainian, while the political officer, Westerwelle, was a German. And then there were the British, always a problem in European Federation politics.

The Pan-European Federation had been a superb idea on paper, but even now, more than 270 years after the Pax Confeoderata and more than 400 years after the Treaty of Maastricht, the idea of a union of European states sounded better than it worked. The Terran Confederation, it was said, was only as strong as its weakest members, and for all their public bravado, the Pan-Europeans rarely were able to show a solid or united front.

Of course, the North Americans had the same trouble—descendents of the old United States trying to show a common front with Canadians, Mexicans, and a clutter of tiny Central American states. Political unions simply didn’t work when the member states had more differences than similarities.

The odd thing about the situation was that threats from outside generally forced such unions to put aside internal differences and pull together; but if anything, the war with the Sh’daar had reawakened old animosities, infighting, and name-calling. The ancient cracks in the painted façade were showing, not only within the European Federation, but all throughout the realm of Humankind.

What was needed was a stronger government, a government with the resolve to force the disparate fragments of humanity into line. Politically, Giraurd was a Federationialist, a neosocialist political party calling for the final abolition of the old nationalist states and the creation of a genuine United Terra.

And that day was coming. Humankind had no choice but to unite in the face of the threat from outside. The first step was to crush the so-called independence movements in the USNA, and that meant bringing mavericks like Alexander Koenig into line. A united Humankind couldn’t afford individualists like Koenig or the right-wing political reactionaries remaining within the USNA’s government.

And so, in a way, the unification of mankind began here. “Hit them with everything we have, Mr. Sawicki,” he said.

Nuclear fire continued blossoming in stark and dazzling silence against the forward view screens.

VFA-44

Kuiper Belt, HD 157950

98 light years from Earth

1749 hours, TFT

A European Federation Raschadler flashed past on Gray’s port side, a thousand kilometers distant, practically at point-blank range, though too distant and far too fast relative to him for him to pick it up optically. Their name meant “Swift Eagle,” but in space combat, it was how many gravities a drive could pull that counted, not the actual velocity. Where the USNA Starhawks could pull up to fifty thousand gravities—an incredible performance—the Raschadlers could manage only about two thousand Gs. Where Starhawks could be pushing the speed of light after ten minutes of acceleration, it took the older Swift Eagles over four hours to reach near-c.

Gray needed to use that superior acceleration now to outperform the European fighters.

Twenty seconds passed swiftly, and Gray gave the order to decelerate. The Starhawks, still in their acceleration configurations—teardrop-shaped with slender spikes astern to bleed off excess gravitic energy—began slowing at fifty thousand Gs.

Another twenty seconds passed, with the SG-92s jinking wildly to throw off the European anti-fighter defenses. In such a tight formation, there would have been a danger of some nasty high-velocity collisions if the twelve fighters hadn’t been electronically tied together.

The enemy fighters were trying to slow and reverse course, but it would take them a long time to come around. Too long …

“Let your AIs handle the rendezvous,” Gray told the others. “Going on automatic for final deceleration and maneuvering. …”

At ten thousand kilometers per second, there’d been no evidence to human eyes that the fighters had been moving at all. The stars hung motionless in space, a cold testament to their distance and the gulfs between them. But under that searing, AI-controlled deceleration, the Jeanne d’Arc, suddenly, magically, was there, hanging in the black sky directly ahead, and Gray could see with his own eyes the gleaming blue-and-white curve of her shield cap, the neat letters and numerals picking out her name and registry number.

She was five kilometers away, and the linked fighters were closing now at a relative velocity of a half a kilometer per second.

“Combat mode!” Gray called. “Target the shield cap!”

The Jeanne d’Arc was still accelerating, so her forward shields were down. Gray thoughtclicked an icon within his virtual in-head display, and opened up with a long burst from his Gatling RFK-90 kinetic-kill cannon. Firing with a cyclic rate of twelve per second, the Gatling loosed a stream of magnetic-ceramic jacketed slugs, each with a depleted uranium core massing half a kilo and traveling at 175 meters per second plus the 500 meters per second of the fighter’s relative closing velocity. That much mass traveling that fast possessed a kinetic-energy punch powerful enough to shred hardened steel and ceramic laminate; bright flashes of light walked across the shield, and almost instantly a dense, white mist appeared above the impacts—water gushing out into vacuum and freezing almost instantly, creating a glittering cloud of ice particles.

“Watch his drag!” Gray shouted over the squadron link. “Stay clear of his drive field!”

Gravitic drive ships moved by projecting an artificial gravitational singularity ahead of their bows, creating an intense and tightly focused black hole that flickered on and off thousands of times per second, allowing the ship to fall forward into an ever-receding gravitational well. A fighter getting too close to the singularity would be drawn in and crushed out of existence in an instant, a process called “spaghettification” because of the effect on ships and personnel as they were torn by close-in tidal effects. The Dragonfires whipped past the projected drive field, feeling the hard tug but applying acceleration of their own to counter it. The other fighters were firing their Gatlings now as well, ripping the Jeanne d’Arc’s shield cap into ragged fragments and geysering sprays of fast-freezing water.

Like the America, the Jeanne d’Arc carried some billions of liters of liquid water inside its shield cap, water that served both as radiation shielding when the carrier was moving close to c, and as a reserve of reaction mass for the ship’s maneuvering thrusters. As the shield cap’s double hull was shredded, that water poured into space. Within seconds, most of it was falling in gleaming streamers into a tight spiral around the flickering drive singularity.

Gray’s fighter fell past the shield cap now, and he could see the turning hab modules in the cap’s shadow; where America had three hab modules mounted on the end of rotating spokes, the smaller European carrier had two. He also spotted the bridge tower, a building-sized structure rising from the ship’s spine between the shield cap and the hab module collar.

Laser and particle-beam fire snapped out toward his fighter, invisible to the eye but painted on Gray’s tactical display by his AI. He jinked, then pressed in closer, matching the carrier’s acceleration so that he seemed to be hanging just above her spine.

“Jeanne d’Arc!” he called using the general fleet frequency. “This is Dragon One, off the USNA America! Unless you want to lose your bridge and CIC, I suggest that you break off your attack run.”

There was silence for a long handful of seconds. The carrier’s hab modules and bridge tower were shielded, of course; he could see the faint blurring of edges where the gravitic shielding twisted light. But a nuke or a determined particle-beam attack could overload those shields or destroy their projection wave guides, and then the carrier’s vital nerve centers would be defenseless.

On the other hand, the Jeanne d’Arc had point-defense turrets that were doing their best to hit him. This close to the carrier’s spine, they were having trouble reaching him, but they were trying to hit the other fighters in the squadron as they moved in closer. A stream of KK rounds reached out and caught Dragon Eight—Lieutenant Will Rostenkowski’s ship—sending it into a helpless tumble.

“Jeanne d’Arc!” Gray barked again. “Cease fire and cease acceleration or I’m going to put a hundred megatons right on your bridge tower!”

“Don’t shoot, Dragon One,” a voice said over the fleet channel. “We will comply.”

He had to back out of his safe pocket, then, or risk hurtling into the underside of the carrier’s shield cap when the Jeanne d’Arc cut her acceleration. It could have been a trick, a ruse designed to pull him out of his pocket … but the other Dragonfires were in close now, and the Pan-Europeans evidently had no desire for a stand-up fight.

Gray’s threat to use nukes had been pure bluff, of course. A Krait missile going off at such close range would probably have burned through the carrier’s bridge shielding, but definitely would have vaporized Gray’s fighter.

“America CIC,” he called, “Dragon One. Hostile carrier has ceased acceleration.”

“Well done, Dragonfires,” Wizewski’s voice called back. “Keep them in your sights. California and Saskatchewan are on the way to take over.”

“Copy that. He hesitated. “We also need a rescue SAR. One casualty.”

Rostenkowski was no longer transmitting. His ship had been smashed; he might have survived the impact, but a search-and-rescue tug would have to match courses with him and drag him back to be sure.

He watched as Jeanne d’Arc continued to bleed water into space.

How, he wondered, was Koenig going to handle this one? …

Chapter Four

11 April 2405

CIC

TC/USNA CVS America

Kuiper Belt, HD 157950

98 light years from Earth

0940 hours, TFT

“Admiral Giraurd,” Koenig said, standing. “Welcome aboard.” He kept his voice and his expression pleasant, even mild. It was important at this point to avoid any sense of drama.

Testosterone-laced posturing would not help at all at this point.

“Koenig,” Giraurd replied with a curt nod. “You still have the option of surrendering.”

“I think, sir, that I will decline that privilege.”

They were meeting physically instead of through virtual communications, within the spacious officers lounge in America’s hab modules. Present were Captain Buchanan and most of Koenig’s command staff and, just in case, several Marine guards flanking the doors as unobtrusively as they could considering that they were in full combat armor. Koenig and the other USNA officers wore full dress; Giraurd wore his command utilities, a blue jumper with the gold emblems of his rank on the shoulders and down the left sleeve.

“You are making an enormous mistake,” Giraurd said, taking an offered seat.

“Perhaps.” Koenig sat down as well, watching Giraurd across a low table grown from the deck. “But if so, I risk losing my command and, possibly, my fleet. If you and the Conciliationists are wrong, however, we could lose all of humanity. Our species could become extinct. Can you understand my point of view?”

Giraurd hesitated, then gave another nod. “I suppose so. But it is not for the military to make political decisions of this magnitude. You, of all people, should know that.”

Giraurd, Koenig knew, was referring to the peculiar political baggage the USNA derived from two of its predecessors—Canada and the United States of America. In those nation-states, the military had been expressly forbidden to participate in political decisions. While military coups had not been unthinkable, certainly, they’d been extremely unlikely when the military’s commander-in-chief had been the civilian president.

It was a tradition not all members of the Terran Confederation shared. Giraurd was chiding him for breaking that tradition, for making what was essentially a political decision without going through a democratic process.

“Out here,” Koenig said quietly, “we have to make our own decisions. They don’t see what we see, not from a hundred light years away.”

“And suppose your little raid behind the enemy lines backfires, Koenig? Suppose it brings down upon us the full weight of the Sh’daar?”

“In other words,” Koenig replied gently, “what if we make them angry? Earth lost sixty million souls during their last foray into the Sol System. It’s hard to see how they could be any madder.”

During the Defense of Earth, in October of 2404, a twelve-kilo mass traveling at a significant fraction of c had skimmed past the sun and slammed into the Atlantic Ocean, 3,500 kilometers off the North American seaboard. The resultant tidal waves had scoured the coastlines of North and South America, Africa, and of Europe, killing an estimated 60 million people.

“Perhaps,” Giraurd said. “We might not be so lucky with another direct attack on Earth. That impactor might have simply been a demonstration of their power. We would not survive a determined attack.”

“I agree,” Koenig said. “And that’s why we’re out here. Even the Sh’daar don’t have unlimited resources. If we pose a threat to their worlds, to their star systems and the systems of their allies, we’ll draw them away from the Confederation.”

“You are a fly attacking an elephant, Koenig.”

“Perhaps. But elephants, I will remind you, are extinct. Earth still has lots of flies.”

“Listen to what I am saying! My point is that the Sh’daar and their allies, the Turusch, the H’rulka, the Nungiirtok, and others, are too big, too powerful, for Earth to face alone!”

“I hear what you’re saying, Grand Admiral. My point is that Earth needs time, and I’m attempting to buy that time. I’m not against negotiating. I’m just hoping we can negotiate with the Sh’daar when they’re not holding a gun to our head!”

“And if we give in to the Sh’daar demands … what is the worst that will happen? We give up our insane gallop into a world of ever higher and higher technology! We become content with what we have! We avoid the Vinge Singularity! And what would be so bad about that?”

Giraurd was referring to a long-expected exponentiation of human technology, sometimes called the Technological Singularity, when human life, blending with human technology, would pass out of all recognition. It was named for a late-twentieth-century math professor, computer scientist, and writer who’d pointed out that the rate of increase in human technology had fast been approaching a vertical line on the graph, and that had been in 1993. When the Sh’daar had delivered their ultimatum almost four centuries later, they’d demanded that Humankind stop all technological development and research, especially in the fields of genetics, robotics, information systems and computers, and nanotechnology. These so-called GRIN technologies were seen as the principal drivers in the coming Technological Singularity; arrest them, and human life might not evolve into something unrecognizably alien.

“I don’t know,” Koenig admitted. “But I do think we deserve to make our own mistakes.”

“The Sh’daar seem terrified of the Singularity,” Giraurd said. “Perhaps it is with good cause.”

“Terrified of the Singularity itself?” Koenig asked. “Or of what happens if another technic species like us reaches it?” He shrugged. “In any case, if it’s a mistake, it’s our mistake. We should not allow ourselves to be protected from it by the Sh’daar or anyone else. And more than that … don’t you think we should make our own decisions about our future and about who we’re going to play with as we move out into the galaxy? If the Sh’daar fold us into their little empire, they’ll use us like they use the Turusch and the others, right? As frontline warriors? Damn it, Admiral, the Confederation military will end up working for them, puttering around the galaxy putting down upstart technic species … species like we are now. That is, unless they decide to just turn us all into slaves and be done with it!”

“I hadn’t realized, Admiral Koenig, that you were a xenophobe.”

“I am not, Admiral Giraurd. But I do believe in self-determination for my species!”

The two men glared at each other for a moment across the table. Gradually, Koenig relaxed. He’d hoped to get the Pan-European admiral to see reason—as, no doubt, Giraurd had hoped for him—but the argument was going nowhere. Giraurd would not change his mind, and neither would Koenig.

“I see no reason to continue this discussion, Admiral,” he said. “How badly was the Jeanne d’Arc damaged?”

“Our water reserves are gone,” he said with a Gallic shrug. “Repair robots are working on the breached tanks now.”

“I’ve given order that the battlegroup’s repair and fabrication ships be deployed to lend you a hand. There were no casualties?”

“No. Your fighters were … surgically precise.”

In 1921, General William Lendrum “Billy” Mitchell had argued, then demonstrated, that aircraft, only recently emerged as military weapons, could sink battleships. Within another twenty years, air attacks against naval fleets at Taranto and Pearl Harbor would completely change the way wars were fought at sea, but in 1921 the idea was not merely revolutionary, but heretical.

Young Lieutenant Gray had demonstrated a similar principle, one now well known within the military and political hierarchies back home but frequently ignored: a twenty-two-ton fighter could disable a capital ship a kilometer long and massing millions of tons. The trick was in slipping it in exactly where it would be most effective, with enough firepower to overcome the target’s gravitic shielding. Surgical precision, as Giraurd had put it, made possible by advanced technology, was the only means by which a lone gravfighter could take down a far larger foe.

Something of the sort would be necessary if the Terran Confederation was going to win over the Sh’daar.

“The intent was to stop you, Admiral,” Koenig said. “Not hurt you.”

“I could wish, sir, that you had destroyed the Jeanne d’Arc … and me with her.”

Giraurd’s emotional pain showed for a moment, but Koenig ignored it. The man would have to explain his failure later, in front of the Senate Military Directorate. It might even mean the end of his career.

Welcome to the club, Koenig thought.

“Do you anticipate any problem getting the Jeanne d’Arc ready for Alcubierre Drive?”

“No. The damage is superficial. But we will need to take on water.”

“Of course. And this is the place for it.”

Fleet tugs were already jockeying iceteroids in so that the ships of CBG-18 could drink their fill. The Kuiper Belt of any star was the storage freezer for leftovers from that star system’s creation. Asteroids, comet nuclei, icy Kuiper objects like Pluto and Eris back in the home solar system … they drifted out here in centuries-long orbits and at temperatures a few degrees above zero absolute, with the local sun merely the brightest star in a sky filled with stars. Chunks of ice were nuzzled in close to resupply ships, which injected them with self-replicating nanodisassemblers. These, in turn, broke the ice down into fragments a few microns across, separated out the frozen methane, ammonia, and other contaminants, and transported pure water into the shield-cap tanks of the waiting ships. As quickly as one hundred-meter iceteroid had dwindled away, another was moved in to take its place; a quarter of CBG-18’s ships had already been topped off, and the rest would be refueled within four more days.

“As soon as the European contingent has been watered,” Koenig continued, “you can take them back to Sol. It’s a fifty-four-day flight under Alcubierre Drive back to Sol, so you’ll be home by early June. I’ve already spoken with the commanding officers of the other ships. The USNA flotilla will be joining me.”

“And the Chinese?”

Koenig smiled. “They’re still considering the question. Their orders were to support your operations against me … but I suspect they also have orders to keep an eye on what we’re doing out here.”

Beijing, Koenig thought, might well be interested in a separate peace with the Sh’daar, and if so, they needed to keep track of what Koenig’s expeditionary force was doing. The nine-ship Eastern Dawn Hegemon fleet might still decide to accompany the America battlegroup.

How well he could trust them when they did encounter Sh’daar forces was another matter, and one he would address when it came up. The Zheng He and her fighters would be welcome additions to the fleet, however, the next time they met the enemy.

“And where will you be going?” Giraurd asked. “If you’re willing to tell me, of course.”

Koenig considered the question. He didn’t want the politicians on Earth to be too up to date on his plans. He didn’t want CBG-18 to emerge at a target star system and find a Confederation fleet—one larger, better prepared, and more determined than Giraurd’s squadron—waiting for him there.

On the other hand, the next stop on his agenda, taken from the Turusch Directory, was a star called Texaghu Resch, located 133 light years ahead, and some 210 light years from Sol. Even if Giraurd shot the news of Koenig’s planned destination back to Sol on a Sleipnir packet, it would be eighteen days for that leg of the trip, and another 116 days for a fleet to get to Texaghu Resch, not counting the time it would take to assemble such a fleet if the Confederation Senate decided to send one. It would be more than four and a half months before Earth could reach Koenig’s next destination.

CBG-18, on the other hand, would be at Texaghu Resch in another seventy-four days. Whatever they found there, it would be another two months at least before the Confederation Military Directorate could catch up with them.

And by that time, Koenig expected that they would be long, long gone.

“Would the information, do you think, be of help to you personally when you face the Directorate?” Koenig asked.

Giraurd’s eyes widened. “Why should you care?”

“Because I know what it’s like to face losing it all, while doing what I think is my duty.”

Giraurd nodded slowly. “It would help, yes. I wouldn’t be going back … empty-handed.”

“We’re heading for Texaghu Resch. The Agletsch know of it … and it’s listed in the Turusch Directory.”

“Texaghu Resch? Strange name …”

“It’s a G-class star that’s not even visible from Earth, which is why the alien name. According to the Directory, there’s something there the Agletsch call a ‘Sh’daar Node,’ and it appears to have something to do with the Sh’daar communications and control net across the galaxy.”

“Interesting. Is it inhabited?”

“Not according to the Agletsch. Not anymore.”

The two Agletsch guides on board the star carrier America had translated the name Texaghu Resch as something like “the Eye of Resch,” Resch being the name of a mythological being in the folklore of a race called the Chelk.

Nothing was known about the Chelk now, save that, like humans, they’d once voyaged among the stars, and like humans, they’d seen pictures of their deities and heroes in the night skies of their homeworld. Exactly who or what Resch had been—god, demigod, hero, or sky monster—was unknown. Its image had been seen in the night sky of the Chelk, who’d held a modest interstellar empire in this region of the galaxy perhaps twelve thousand years earlier.

According to the Agletsch, the Chelk had refused to yield to the Sh’daar demands that they freeze all technological development.

The Chelk were now extinct.

“And after that?” Giraurd asked. “Where will you go after Texaghu Resch?”

Koenig grinned. “Even if I knew, I wouldn’t tell you. You know that. But I can tell you truthfully, Admiral, I just don’t know. It’ll depend entirely on what happens at the Sh’daar Node, and what we learn there.”

“I understand.”

“I will suggest that Earth send a follow-up, though. If we can, we’ll leave word of where we’re going next. They can keep track of us that way.”

“Yes … months too late to do any good.”

“Depends on what you mean by ‘good.’ I don’t intend to let them stop us, if that’s what you mean. But at the same time, we’re learning a lot out here about the Sh’daar, about who and what they are, about their client races, about how they see the universe. Geneva will need to know this stuff, no matter what they decide to do back there … negotiations, or a military offensive.”

Giraurd studied Koenig carefully for a moment. “You really believe that what you’re doing is for the good of Earth, don’t you?”

“Of course. I wouldn’t be out here if I didn’t.”

Giraurd shook his head. “I truly hope you know what you’re doing. I hope—”

“What?”

“I actually hope you are right, Admiral, and that the Confederation Senate and Military Directorate are wrong.”

“So do I, Admiral.”

“Because if you’re wrong, Admiral Koenig, God help us all.”

Officers Mess

TC/USNA CVS America

Kuiper Belt, HD 157950

98 light years from Earth

1215 hours, TFT

“Hey, Sandy. Mind if I join you?”

Trevor Gray looked up from his food, startled. Only a few of his friends called him that—Sandy Gray, a memento of the tactic he’d suggested at the Defense of Earth. It was a hell of a lot better than the hated nickname “Prim.”

“Schiffie! Please! Grab a seat.”

Lieutenant Rissa Schiff set her tray down and sat, smiling. “I’d grab yours if I could, Trev. But I think you’ve been avoiding me.”

“Just busy, Schiffie. You know how it is.”

He wondered if the young woman was going to be a problem.

Nine months ago, Gray and Schiff had had a little something going between them—nothing physical, quite. They’d dated, they’d flirted, and they’d talked about taking things further—she’d been a cute and enthusiastic little armful, and Gray had been trying out the idea of casual sexual relationships after a lifetime of monogie self-control. When his wife had divorced him, he’d had no one. For two years afterward, he’d had little interest in filling that aching emptiness Angela had left in him, but then he’d met Rissa, and she was cute and sweet and fun, and she’d indicated a willingness to play.

It had damned near gotten him court-martialed.

Not because he’d considered having sex with her. At the time, he’d been a lieutenant and she’d been an ensign, and officially, physical relationships between people of different ranks were discouraged. An officer handing out special favors or status in exchange for sex from a subordinate was very bad form, though it did happen, of course. But Gray and Schiff had kept their playtimes secret and, in any case, he’d been a pilot while she worked in the avionics department. He might outrank her, but he was not her boss.

But a couple of other pilots in Gray’s squadron, Howie Spaas and Jen Collins, had run into them while they’d been at a place called the Worldview, a bar-restaurant next to the spaceport at the SupraQuito space elevator. They’d started hassling him about being a Prim and a monogie in front of Rissa and he’d lost it, had decked Howie Spaas. Commander Allyn, the Dragonfires’ skipper, had come that close to sending him up for a court martial, closer still to kicking him out of the squadron.

He still liked to imagine that the extra duty, the anger-management therapy, and the ass-chewing he’d gotten from the skipper had all been worth it.

Lieutenant Spaas was dead, now—killed trying to bring his damaged Starhawk down on America’s flight deck at Eta Boötis. Collins was still in America’s sick bay, broken physically and emotionally at Alphekka. Commander Allyn was still in the sick bay as well, her brain damaged by oxygen starvation after her fighter drifted for three days through the Alphekkan debris field.

Riss had more than once indicated that she was still interested in Gray … and when her promotion to lieutenant came through on Earth four months earlier, even the technical barrier of their respective ranks had been removed. Gray had come very close to taking her to bed then … but he’d run into Angela at a big political function at the Eudaimonium in New New York and that had raised once more all of the doubts and self-searchings. Damn it, he’d thought Angela was dead after that Turusch impactor had sent a tidal wave thundering up the Hudson Valley.

Somehow, it had never happened.

And then Commander Allyn had been injured at Alphekka, the Dragonfires had suffered 75 percent casualties, Gray had been given temporary command of VFA-44 … and Schiffie had volunteered to transfer from Avionics to a replacement slot in the squadron. Now he was her boss, and he was responsible for her training.

The situation, clearly, had changed.

“I was wondering, Trev, when you were going to have some downtime. I’d still like to see you. Like we talked about, y’know?”

Gray leaned back in his chair, his lunch, half-eaten, forgotten now. Their table was near one of the compartment’s viewall bulkheads, which curved all the way around to create a 270-degree panorama of the starscape outside. The cameras transmitting the image were mounted on America’s nonrotating spine or shield cap, so that the star field didn’t move with the turning hab modules—which included the mess deck—through a full circle.

In the distance, several of the battlegroup’s members were taking on water—the United States of North America and the Abraham Lincoln, both Lincoln-class fleet carriers slightly smaller than the America. They looked like toys at this distance, gleaming in the hard white glow of the distant HD 157950. The supply ships Mare Orientalis, Salt Lake, and Lacus Solis drifted close by the carriers, each tucked in close against its own kilometer-wide floating iceberg, converting them to reaction mass and organic volatiles for the fleet’s nanufactories.

“Riss,” Gray said, “it can’t be like that. Not now. I’m your CO now.”

She laughed. “Geez, get over yourself, Trev! I’m not talking about monogie, here! Who’s going to know?”

“Me, for one,” Gray said. He’d not intended his voice to sound so cold.

Her voice turned cold as well. “Very well, Lieutenant,” she said. She stood and picked up her tray. “I apologize for bothering you.”

“Aw, sit down and eat your chow, Riss!”

But she was gone.

Monogie …

After three years, he was still having trouble fitting in.

Trevor Gray was still a Prim, raised in the cast-off wreckage of the USNA’s Periphery, specifically in the Manhattan Ruins. Squatties in the Periphery didn’t have access to the high-tech toys of full citizens, like cerebral implants and Net access, and they didn’t have the social entitlements—like medical care—of citizens either. That had been why he’d agreed to join the service: to pay for the med service when Angela had had her stroke.

Cut off from the social mainstream, Prims also had a completely different take on society. The garbage that passed for art and music, the truly bizarre fashions both in clothing and in body, the spoiled and pampered decadence of ordinary citizens, all of those were so far beyond the ken of Prims struggling just to survive within the old and flooded coastal city ruins that there seemed to be no point to social contact at all.

One major difference had been the mainstream’s attitude toward sex—casual, recreational, and often with little or no emotional commitment. In the Ruins it was different. Couples paired for life, a survival strategy in an environment where one hunter-gatherer partner watched the other’s back.

Throughout much of the human population, now, the mainstream view held that monogamous pairings—“monogies”—represented an archaic and flawed twist in human behavior. A few religious sects still required monogamous sexual relationships, while a few—the NeoMorms and fundamentalist Muslims, especially—allowed polygamy, but not the reverse, polyandry.

Damn. He’d not wanted to make Rissa angry.

Maybe when the Skipper came back and took over the squadron again. Or maybe someone else would be transferred in. Squadron CO was a commander’s billet; Gray wouldn’t even be looking at a promotion to lieutenant commander for another four years or so, and commander was a good four or five years after that, generally.

And maybe he should just forget about having a private life at all. There were always sex feeds, downloaded through your implants. Virtual sex was as good nowadays as the real thing. …

What Gray missed, he knew, was not the physical release so much as the companionship, the closeness, the belonging. When you were a part of a closely bonded pair …

Damn it all to hell. …

Standing, he took his tray to the mess deck entrance and tossed it and his half-eaten lunch into the converter. The Dragonfires were due to go on duty in another six hours, flying CAP just in case the Europeans went back on the hastily organized truce.

He wondered if the problem with Rissa was going to screw the flight scheds.

CIC

TC/USNA CVS America

Kuiper Belt, HD 157950

98 light years from Earth

1530 hours, TFT

“Message in from the Illustrious, Admiral.”

“Thank you.”

Koenig opened the channel, and Harrison’s face appeared, grinning. “Good afternoon, Admiral,” he said. “Thought you’d like to hear the news.”

“What news is that, Ron?”

“Some of us have finished up with our council of war. Looks like Admiral Giraurd is going to be going home by his lonesome.”

“Really?”

Harrison nodded. “Illustrious, Warspite, and Conqueror were with you from the get-go. You knew that.”

“I did. And thank you.”

“Don’t mention it. I’m just glad to get that weasel Coleman off my ship. She smells a lot better now that he’s gone.”

Willard Coleman had been the Confederation political officer on board the Illustrious, a civilian reporting to Hans Westerwelle on the Jeanne d’Arc, and tasked with keeping an eye on the loyalties of Confederation officers in the British squadron.

“In any case, we’ve been talking with the other commanders in the Pan-European squadron,” Harrison continued. “Except for the Jeanne d’Arc, they’re with us. Captain Michel, on the Arc, would have been too … but old Giraurd does need a way to get back home.”

“Good God. …”

“Don’t know about the Chinese, yet,” he went on. “But you can count on the rest of us. Nineteen ships, including two light carriers.”

“And that,” Koenig replied, “is the best news I’ve heard all day. Welcome aboard.”

He didn’t bring up the problems this decision would make for the various ship captains. They knew.

That they were willing to join Koenig’s career suicide, however, spoke volumes about how other naval officers viewed the Confederation …

… and what to do about the alien Sh’daar.

Chapter Five

29 June 2405

Admiral’s Office

TC/USNA CVS America

Approaching Texaghu Resch System

112 light years from Earth

1002 hours, TFT

Seventy-four days after departing the refueling rendezvous within the Kuiper Belt of HD 157950, a total of fifty-eight ships tunneled through the Void within their Alcubierre bubbles, their AIs holding them on course for a star invisible from Earth. Admiral Koenig sat in his office, reviewing again the electronic files of the ships and crews that had joined CBG-18.

In fact, only seventeen of the Pan-European Federation ships had joined the battlegroup, not the nineteen Harrison had promised. As it turned out, Captain Michel and the Jeanne d’Arc had voted to join the squadron, a surprise last-moment mutiny that had thrown the European contingent into considerable disarray. The crews of three European ships—the destroyers Karlsruhe and Audace, and the heavy cruiser De Grasse—had voted not to join CBG-18, and returned to Sol. Admiral Giraurd had left on board the De Grasse, along with the political officers and a number of other men and women who’d chosen to adhere to Confederation Navy orders. Those three ships were crowded. A number of the officers and crew of the remaining Federation ships had elected to return to Earth as well, while some on board the three had transferred to vessels remaining with the battlegroup.

Four of the nine Chinese ships had returned to Earth as well. Five, however, under the command of Admiral Liu Zhu, had elected to join America and CBG-18. Koenig wasn’t sure, yet, if that represented Hegemon approval of his strategy … or if Beijing, independent of the Confederation, was simply determined to keep an eye on him.

Fifty-eight ships, then—more than twice the number surviving after Alphekka—were about to emerge at Texaghu Resch, and Koenig needed to have a long-anticipated conversation with the two nonhuman beings on board the star carrier America.

“Admiral,” Koenig’s personal electronic secretary said, “the two Agletsch are here to see you, as you requested.”

“Thank you. Send them in.”

The office door opened, and the aliens walked in, followed by a Marine guard.

Humans called them “bugs” or “spiders,” though they were, of course, unrelated to anything that had ever lived on Earth. Flattened and slightly elongated disk-shapes on sixteen slender, jointed legs, each stood as tall as a short human but took up considerably more space. Instead of chitin, their integuments were red-brown, soft, almost velvety, with blue and yellow markings like the reticulated patterns of some snakes. Legs and what passed for faces were black; four eyes on stalks emerged from each face, and Koenig was only now beginning to realize that the movements of the eye stalks added emphasis to their speech. Silver markings on their bodies were decoration of some sort, while each had a metallic device below its face that served as a translator.

Both Agletsch—their names were Gru’mulkisch and Dra’ethde—were, technically, female; their nonsentient males hung like grotesque, gelatinous leeches from their faces.

Koenig stood as they entered. “Thank you for coming,” he told them.

“We appreciate you seeing us, Admiral,” Dra’ethde told him. “We have been … concerned. We have not been allowed into your CIC or bridge since leaving Arcturus.”

Even now, Koenig had trouble telling the two apart, though there were subtle differences in the decorative silver inlays on their skins. A subroutine programmed into his cerebral implant had learned to recognize those patterns, however, and threw the name of the individual up against his visual field when one spoke. Dra’ethde appeared to be the senior of the two, though the niceties of Agletsch social structures were not yet well understood.

Koenig nodded to the Marine. “You can leave us, Staff Sergeant,” he said. “Wait in the office outside.”

“Aye, aye, sir.” The Marine turned and left, the door sliding shut behind her.

“I do understand you concern,” Koenig told the aliens when they were alone. “You were excluded from the bridge and CIC on my orders.” He thoughtclicked an icon in his in-head display, and a three-dimensional image winked on in the air above his desk. It looked, Koenig thought, like a tangled mat of hair a meter tall, slowly rotating in space. “When we found these. Can you blame me?”

“No, Admiral Koenig. But we regret that you still do not … understand. Yes-no?”

The fact was that the two aliens were bugged—a humorous-enough statement given what Agletsch looked like to humans. Each being contained, hidden away within her brain, something called a Sh’daar Seed. The image of one, magnified several million times, hung in the air between them now.

The implants had only been discovered at Arcturus, when information concerning the destination of CBG-18, Alphekka, had been relayed from the Agletsch to a Sh’daar data web within a H’rulka community in the atmosphere of Alchameth, a gas giant circling the star Arcturus. The H’rulka were another species within the Sh’daar galactic web, and that intelligence had been transmitted to the Sh’daar forces stationed at Alphekka. The things were tiny, the metal in them masked by the silver inlays on their carapaces. Only after the transmission had been detected had close internal scans picked the things up, microscopic tangles of artificially grown components that apparently served as minute electronic nodes of an extended Sh’daar intelligence.

They allowed the Agletsch to serve as far-traveling eyes and ears for the absent Sh’daar, rulers of an extended galactic empire that had never been seen by humans … or by the members of any other species with which Humankind had communicated thus far. It was assumed that the Turusch and other nonhuman species aligned with the Sh’daar also had the implants. There were, Koenig knew, a number of Turusch now living in a base on Earth’s moon run by the Office of Naval Intelligence.

He wondered if they were broadcasting details of their life there to the Sh’daar net.

“And what is it that we don’t understand?” Koenig asked.

“That the Sh’daar Seed only becomes active when another node is close by.”

“And what do you mean by ‘close by’?”

“A few thousand of your kilometers.”

Their translators, Koenig thought, were doing a good job of turning Agletsch measures and numbers into human units. At least he hoped that was the case. A misunderstanding here—or a deliberate lie—could make for a serious intelligence leak to the enemy. That was why he’d ordered that the Agletsch be restricted in their freedom of movement on board the America—and why they now had a Marine guard following them everywhere except within the shielded suite of compartments designated as their quarters.

Because they were alien, with alien ways of thinking and of expression far more extreme than any mere outward differences in appearance and biology, Koenig was careful when talking with them. They were here as guides; the Agletsch were interstellar traders whose homeworld lay somewhere within Sh’daar space, but who also ventured far beyond those boarders into other regions not claimed by the Sh’daar. When the Sh’daar had issued their ultimatum and the war had begun thirty-eight years ago, numerous Agletsch had been trapped inside Confederation territory. Some had left; many had stayed. The possibility that those who had stayed were acting as enemy agents—as spies—was worrisome to the Office of Naval Intelligence … but there’d never been any indication that the Agletsch were in contact with either the stay-at-home Agletsch or their Sh’daar masters.

When the Turusch defenders of the manufactory complex at Alphekka redeployed their fleets to trap the incoming Confederation battlegroup, Koenig had suspected an electronic hand-off of data at the H’rulka colony on Alchameth. Microscopic medical scans had turned up the implants; the Agletsch themselves had admitted that they were Sh’daar Seeds, a term that seemed to mean quasi-sentient computers that acquired, stored, and eventually uploaded data to a Sh’daar equivalent of the e-Net.

The question, so far as Koenig was concerned, was just what the range of the Sh’daar Seeds might be. If it truly was a few thousand kilometers, there was no chance of the Agletcsh passengers alerting Sh’daar forces in the target system upon Emergence.

But what if America engaged with enemy ships later on, within the target system’s core? If America passed within a thousand klicks or so of a Turusch battle cruiser, what information might be transmitted to the enemy?

That was why Koenig had ordered them to stay off the bridge and out of CIC, the nerve centers for both the carrier and the battlegroup. What they couldn’t see and hear, the Sh’daar Seed couldn’t store.

Unless there were other twists to the alien technology Koenig didn’t understand, or which the Agletsch were concealing.

How the hell could you tell if an alien was lying?

Another fleet commander might have ordered the two aliens thrown in the brig and surrounded by a Faraday cage … or even killed. Koenig didn’t want to take a step that drastic, not yet. The Agletsch so far had been most helpful in their general information about the Turusch Directory, and about the nature of the worlds listed there.

“A few thousand kilometers?” Koenig said after a long and thoughtful pause. “I’ll accept that.” He thoughtclicked an in-head icon, and the holographic image above his desk winked out. “I still don’t want you in certain sensitive areas of the ship, though. I don’t know if these Seeds you’ve described can probe our electronic systems, or if they’re just eavesdropping on what we say.”

“This we do understand, Admiral.”

The information transmitted to the Sh’daar at Alchameth had actually consisted of a speech Koenig himself had made over the shipboard intercom. He’d mentioned that their designation was Alphekka, and the Sh’daar Seeds, evidently, had been smart and autonomous enough to figure out which star system that was—the Sh’daar didn’t call it “Alphekka,” certainly—and pass on the warning.

If he understood what the Agletsch were describing, billions, perhaps trillions of separate Sh’daar Seeds were planted inside individual members of various subject species: Turusch, H’rulka, Nungiirtok, and some tens of thousands of other species. Each individual then, became a free-moving and independent computer node within an incredibly vast and far-flung network.

No one had yet intercepted a Seed transmission, however. How powerful they might be, what their range was, how easily shielded such signals might be, their duration, all of that was as yet unknown.

Koenig wondered if Gru’mulkisch and Dra’ethde knew how many high-tech sensors were focused on their bodies at every hour of shipboard day and night, using America’s own internal electronic Net, with the intent of capturing and recording a transmission in order to learn more about its capabilities.

“There remains much that we do not understand about the Seeds’ capabilities ourselves,” Dra’ethde told him. “We know simply that they are.”

“And that they are what you would call a fact of life,” Gru’mulkisch added. “Yes-no?”

“We would very much like to know,” Koenig said carefully, “if we can use access to the Sh’daar Seeds—meaning through you two—to communicate with the Sh’daar directly. Since you delivered their ultimatum thirty-some years ago, we’ve not been in direct contact. Being able to talk to them might help us avoid needless bloodshed.”

Not to mention, Koenig added to himself, the extinction of the humans species.

“It is possible,” Dra’ethde told him, “though it would take time to pass communications from node to node all the way to the old galactic core. We would need to be in contact with another transmission node, however.”

“Hold up, there,” Koenig said. “What did you just say? ‘Old galactic core’? I’ve not heard that term.”

“Indeed? We don’t know anything about it either, save that it is what the Sh’daar call their … not homeworld. But the region where their homeworld lies.”

“Is that the core of this galaxy? What we call the Milky Way?”

The aliens exchanged a momentary glance of weaving eyestalks. “We don’t know,” Gru’mulkisch said. “It is simply a name. Gu reheh’mek chaash. You would say ‘old galactic core’ or perhaps ‘center of the old galaxy,’ yes-no?”

The galactic core, Koenig thought, that teeming mass of billions of close-packed stars residing at the heart of the Milky Way, lay roughly 25,000 light years away in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius. It was old, yes—as old as the galaxy, which by best estimates had formed about 12 billion years ago. But why distinguish it as the old core? Or the old galaxy …

Was Gru’mulkisch suggesting that the Sh’daar had come from a different galaxy?

That set the hairs at the back of his neck prickling. No one knew quite how large the Sh’daar expanse of space actually was, though intelligence estimates based on interviews with the Agletsch suggested that it embraced something like half of the galaxy—perhaps as much as two thirds, perhaps as little as a quarter. That was big enough … but if they had the technology to travel between galaxies, to come to this one from some other galaxy hundreds of thousands or even millions of light years away …

What the hell did they mean by “old galactic core”?

He flagged the term with a mental note. He would forward it to the ONI boys down in Intel and see what they could make of it.

Koenig considered the two aliens for a moment. First Contact with the Agletsch had occurred in 2312, nearly a century ago, but humans still knew remarkably little about them. The Agletsch as a species were interstellar traders, star-faring merchants, of a sort. Not traders of material goods, of course. One solar system contained much the same in the way of natural resources—water ice, organic volatiles, metals, energy—as the next. Even cultural artifacts—artwork, say, or textiles or gemstones or commercial items of technology—could be carried between the stars far more efficiently as stored patterns of information rather than the original bulk items.

So the Agletsch traded in information, a kind of universal medium of exchange. And for ninety-three years they’d shared very little about themselves, or about their galactic masters, the Sh’daar. As Koenig understood it, merchants like Dra’ethde and Gru’mulkisch traveled far beyond the borders of their own stellar polities and lived for decades as visitors to other cultures, other civilizations, where they recorded what they could, and determined what, if anything, the new civilization had to trade. One observer had likened them to alien Marco Polos in the courts of alien Khans. Another had once suggested that they were a kind of living Encyclopedia Galactica, slowly accumulating information on all sentient life throughout the galaxy … which they would trade to others in exchange for more such information.

Had they accidentally let slip that tidbit about the old galaxy? Koenig tried the direct approach. “So tell me … where are the Sh’daar from?”

Gru’mulkisch twisted her eyestalks in what Koenig had been told was an expression indicating humor—the equivalent of a human smile. “We can’t tell you that, Admiral,” she said. “That data would be extremely valuable, yes-no?”

“There must be an exchange,” Dra’ethde told him. “We have been asked about this before by your intelligence people. …”

“And what would you accept in exchange for that information?” Koenig asked.

“We are not aware of anything you possess worth such an exchange, Admiral,” Gru’mulkisch said. “We regret this … but what you ask is mish’a’ghru. Of first importance, you might say, yes-no?”

“In fact,” Dra’ethde added, “I regret having mentioned gu reheh’mek chaash at all, and perhaps I was irresponsible in doing so. But since the words will not help you, no harm has been done, yes-no?”

The phrase translated as “yes-no,” Koenig knew, was what the xenolinguists referred to as an agreement manipulator, a way to get others to agree with you, to be on your side in a conversation, and to disarm any potential hostility. Individually, the Agletsch were more agreeable to talk with than many humans Koenig knew.

But talking with them tended to lead in unsatisfying circles. Even if the Agletsch translator units perfectly shifted between the English and Agletsch languages, there was a hell of a lot missing on both sides simply because of differences in culture, attitude, and worldview.

Koenig wondered how much of their professional reticence was due to business considerations, and how much to the fact that both of them carried Sh’daar Seeds that, no doubt, were listening in on this conversation and recording it.

“We are about to emerge from Alcubierre Drive,” he told them. “I can’t allow you on the bridge or in the CIC, but I’ve given orders to dress the crew’s lounge for external view, and you can watch from there.”

“Thank you, Admiral.”

“My senior aide, Lieutenant Commander Nahan Cleary, will be with you. If I have questions of you two, I’ll pass them to him. Okay?”

“Quite acceptable, Admiral.”

“And if either of you have insights about what’s happening, I’d appreciate it if you could share them with him. Such information will be considered to be under the terms of your contract.”

“Of course, Admiral.”

The two Agletsch had volunteered to accompany America and her battlegroup on this mission as guides—which meant that they were expected to share data with Koenig and his officers without the need to haggle over the informational price of each item. His understanding was that the Agletsch mission on Earth had been “paid” for their services with several exabytes of information drawn from the New Library of Congress in Columbus, and from the British Library in High London. He wondered what, specifically, the Agletsch had learned in exchange for the services of these two.

No matter. He expected them to deliver.

“You’re certain,” Koenig said, “that you have nothing to add to your report about this system we’re about to enter?”

“Quite certain, Admiral,” Gru’mulkisch said. “We know that the system is of importance within the Sh’daar network, but we’ve not been here before. We do not believe it to be inhabited, but cannot tell you if it is defended, or if there is a military base or outpost.”

“In fact, we hope to acquire profit here ourselves,” Dra’ethde added. “Yes-no?”

By profit, Koenig assumed the Agletsch was referring to new information, something even the Agletsch did not know.

“What happened to the Chelk,” Koenig told them, “might well happen to my species. If you two learn anything new, I’ll expect you to share it with us. I will invoke the contract if I must.”

“We understand this, Admiral.” Gru’mulkisch sounded almost contrite … or possibly cautious, as though she were picking her sixteen-legged way across thin ice.

“And we appreciate you including us in the investigation,” Dra’ethde said.

“We will be emerging from metaspace in another hour,” Koenig said. “I suggest you get down to the crew’s lounge and make yourselves ready. Mr. Cleary will join you there.”

“Thank you, Admiral,” Gru’mulkisch said. “We expect that this will be of great profit to both our peoples, yes-no? A place neither human nor Agletsch has yet ventured.”

But Koenig still wondered if the many-legged beings could be trusted.

VFA-44

Approaching Texaghu Resch System

112 light years from Earth

1058 hours, TFT

Lieutenant Gray tried to relax within the close embrace of his fighter. Always it was the waiting that was hardest. He checked his in-head time. Five minutes.

The Dragonfires were doing a drop-launch this time, free-falling with the centrifugal force of America’s rotating hab modules. When it was time to launch, Gray’s fighter would pivot ninety degrees, pointing out and down relative to the turning bay, the magnetic clamps would release, and the hab module’s rotation would fling him into space with a half-G of acceleration—about five meters per second. Once clear of America’s immense forward shield cap, the squadron would orient on the local system’s sun and then boost; fifty thousand gravities would bring them close to the speed of light in just a whisker under ten minutes.

“Hey, Skipper?” It was Miguel Zapeta, on the squadron channel. “Any word yet on who we’re gonna be fighting? Or if we’re going to be fighting?”

“Nothing yet, Zap,” Gray replied. “We’ll be the first to know, right?”

“Yeah. Except the scuttlebutt I heard was that the bugs know, and they’re leading us into a trap.”

“So, you’re believing scuttlebutt, now? Who told you that shit?”

“Uh … a gal I know in S-2.”

S-2 was the designation for America’s intelligence department. “Ah, well if Naval Intelligence said it, it must be true, right?”

He heard several chuckles over the squadron channel. Good. Loosen them up a bit. You don’t want them thinking too hard before a drop.

“We’ll be emerging far enough out-system that we’ll have plenty of time for a look around, okay? The entire Sh’daar galactic fleet could be in there, and they’d never even see us if we dropped in, took a look, and then jumped back into Alcubierre Space.” He hesitated, then grinned as he added, “Yes-no?”

That raised laughter from the waiting Dragonfires. The odd patterns of Agletsch speech and their constant use of the phrase “yes-no” was well known to everyone on board America by now.

“Sounds like we have an Agletsch loose in the squadron,” Rostenkowski said, laughing. “Since when did they start driving Dragonfires?”

“Dragonfires, PriFly,” Wizewski’s voice broke in. “Is there a problem?”

“Negative, CAG,” Gray replied. “No problem.”

“Can the chatter in there and focus on your finals. Emergence in three minutes. Drop in sixty seconds after that.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

No sense of humor, that one.

He was glad the newbies in the squadron could laugh, though. They’d been training hard in sim, but the real deal was never like electronic simulations, no matter how bad-assed realistic the downloads.

If they could enjoy a joke now, they ought to be okay.

He hoped. …

CIC

TC/USNA CVS America

Outer System, Texaghu Resch System

112 light years from Earth

1103 hours, TFT

Emergence.

The star carrier America dropped into normal space as her Alcubierre bubble collapsed. Since she’d been motionless relative to the volume of space wrapped up inside the Alcubierre field, she emerged traveling at a velocity of only a few kilometers per second—the difference in relative velocities between this patch of space, and the space within the Kuiper Belt of HD 157950. The transition released a great deal of potential energy as light and hard radiation, a flaring burst spreading into and through the new star system at the speed of light.

Koenig studied the new system, both represented by icons within the tactical tank, and as revealed by optical sensors across the bulkhead viewalls of the Combat Information Center. They’d emerged ten astronomical units from the local star—a little farther than Saturn was from Sol. There were planets—five visible immediately, and there likely would be others as the ship’s navigational AIs scanned local space.

“Admiral?” a familiar voice asked. “This is CAG. So you still want to launch fighters?”

“Wait one,” Koenig told him. “We need to see what we’re launching to.”

Data continued to cascade in from the AIs scanning the system. Two inner rocky planets, small enough and close enough to their primary that they likely were too hot for Earth-type life. Planet III, 1.5 AUs from the star, was a small gas giant, about the size of Neptune. Beyond that, at 3 and 5 AUs, were two more rocky planets, both dazzlingly bright and probably encased pole to pole in planet-wide sheets of ice.

“Astrogation,” Koenig called. “Give that gas giant a close look. Maybe it has Earthlike moons.”

He was thinking of Alchameth, circling the star Arcturus, and its moon Jasper.

“We’ve been looking, Admiral. We’ve spotted several small moons—rocks, really—but nothing like a real planet.”

“Carry on, then.”

He felt a small bite of disappointment. Because of this system’s listing in the Turusch Directory, he’d assumed there would be an inhabited planet here—if not one with an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere and temperate climes comfortable for humans, then one with the reducing atmosphere and hot, sulfur-laden conditions enjoyed by the Turusch.

The truth of the matter, though, was that habitable worlds of either type were painfully few and far between within that sliver of the galaxy explored so far by Humankind. The chances that a world of near-Earth mass would just happen to lie within the band of liquid-water temperatures around a star were slim; the fact that the Confederation had discovered as many as twenty where humans could walk unprotected—Chiron and Circe and Osiris and the others—spoke more to how many stars were out here, not to how common other Earths might be.

Texaghu Resch was a G2-type star almost identical to Sol … but it simply hadn’t won the planetological crapshoot that would have led to its possessing a planet humans could call home.

Something was flashing red in the tactical tank. Koenig looked … then blinked. There was something there. America’s instrumentation was picking up a gravitational anomaly. In essence, the ship was feeling about twice the force of gravity it should be feeling at this distance from a G-class star. It was exactly as though there were two stars in there—a close binary—each of about one solar mass … but one of the stars was invisible.

Either that, or the single visible star was twice as massive as it should be, and that simply wasn’t possible, not within the rules governing stellar classification as humans now understood them.

“Admiral?” another voice said. “This is Lieutenant Del Rey, in Astrogation.”

“Go ahead.”

“Have you seen the GA alert, sir?”

“Yes, I have. What do you make of it?”

“We didn’t know what the hell it was at first. We still don’t. But … take a look at this, sir.”

A visual feed came through, opening as a new window within Koenig’s in-head display. It appeared to be a highly magnified image of a portion of the star itself, with the light drastically stepped down by the AI controlling it. Koenig could see the curving limb of the star, the mottling of the surface granulation, the sweep and arch of stellar prominences. At first, he saw nothing out of the ordinary.

And then …

“Good God!” he said, expanding the image for a closer look. “What the hell is that?”

“We have no idea, sir,” Del Rey replied. “But we thought it might be important.”

And that, Koenig thought, was a hell of an understatement.

Chapter Six

29 June 2405

VFA-44

Outer System, Texaghu Resch System

112 light years from Earth

1106 hours, TFT

“PriFly, this is Dragon One,” Gray called. “What’s the hang-up?” They were supposed to have dropped two minutes before, but Primary Flight Control had called for a hold.

“Wait one, Dragon One,” a voice replied—one of the traffic control personnel in PriFly. “There’s been a hitch. The Space Boss is talking to the admiral now.”

The “Space Boss” was Commander Avery, America’s primary flight controller.

Gray scowled. His cockpit was projecting a view of surrounding space, overlaid with icons representing the ships of CBG-18 as they continued to emerge from metaspace. A dozen Confederation vessels were out there, now, with more popping in every moment as the light from their Emergence reached the America’s sensors.

There were no icons representing enemy or unknown vessels. It appeared that this system might be clean.

Possibly the drop was going to be scrubbed.

Well, that was the battle cry of the Navy: hurry up and wait.

“Dragonfire Squadron, this is PriFly,” Commander Avery said. “The drop is scrubbed. Repeat, the drop is scrubbed. VFA-51 will remain on Ready Five. All others will stand down.”

VFA-51, the Black Lightnings, was one of the Dragonfires’ sister Starhawk squadrons on board the America. Commander Alton Crane was their new skipper, and like the Dragonfires, they’d taken heavy losses at Alphekka, and a good half of the pilots were newbies.

Gray felt a jolt as his Starhawk began rising within its magnetic cradle. A moment later, it passed through the drop-tube vacuum seal, allotropic composites within a nanomatrix that made solid metal flow like a thick, viscous liquid, allowing the fighter to be drawn into the carrier’s flight deck while maintaining the compartment’s atmospheric pressure. His cockpit melted open and swung away as a rating outside triggered steps that grew out of the deck.

“Short flight, huh?” the guy said, grinning.

“The best kind,” Gray replied with considerable feeling. “Uneventful.”

An hour later, Gray entered the crew’s lounge, located at the third-G level of America’s number-two hab-module stack. The compartment was large and furnished more like a civilian social center Earthside, with numerous entertainment pits, food bars, and low couches grown from the deck and turned soft. The overhead was an enormous dome, and at the moment, it was displaying the view outside. The local star, yellow, bright, and showing a tiny disk, gleamed halfway up the gently curving bulkhead.

Shay Ryan spotted him and walked over. “Hey, Skipper,” she called. “Looks like they don’t want us here, either.”

Like Gray, Ryan was a Prim, formerly of the Periphery areas that once had been Washington, D.C., until rising sea levels had reclaimed the lowland areas as a ruin-littered salt marsh. Like Gray, she’d joined the service because she’d had few decent options. Like him, she mistrusted both government authority and technology, but she’d tested well on her inborn spatial and coordination skills, and they’d made her a fighter pilot.

“Hello, Shay,” he said. He walked over to a food bar and placed his palm on the contact. He ordered a cola, which rose from within the black surface a moment later in a sealed cup with a built-in straw. “Looks like we lucked out, huh?”

“Shit. I don’t like going through all of that, getting ready to drop into hard-V, and then suddenly get pulled back. They’re just jerking us around, y’know?”

“Any day they pull us back,” Gray replied, “is a day we don’t get into a knife fight with toads.” Toads was pilot slang for the blunt, heavy, hard-to-kill fighters used by the Turusch. “And that suits me just fine.”

“I guess. Hey … did you see? A couple of our old friends are on deck.”

Gray turned and glanced in the direction she was pointing, his eyes widening a bit. “So! They’re allowing the spiders out to play?”

“Maybe the brass trusts them now.”

Gray glanced at the Marine staff sergeant standing behind the two Agletsch. “More likely they figure they can’t do any harm here. Let’s go say hi.”

Gray and Ryan both had met the two Agletsch three months earlier, just before the battlegroup had departed from Earth’s SupraQuito synchorbital complex. They’d been at a restaurant called the Overlook, and an officious headwaiter had been trying to expel the two many-legged aliens for no other reason than, as far as Gray could tell, that they didn’t happen to be human. Gray, Ryan, and several other service personnel had lodged a protest by leaving en masse, taking the Agletsch with them to another restaurant, one without so narrow a definition of acceptable patrons.

And they’d gotten to know the two pretty well, Gray thought, as well as it was possible to know beings with both physiologies and psychologies utterly different from anything from Earth.

A small crowd had gathered around the two Agletsch, who were standing with a lieutenant commander in a full dress uniform. Gray thought he recognized the guy—someone on Admiral Koenig’s staff. When he pinged the man’s id, he got back a name and rank: LCDR N. Cleary.

He wasn’t sure which alien was which, but he had their names stored in his implant memory. “Hey, Dra’ethde,” he said. “What brings you down here?”

The Agletsch on the right twisted two of its eye stalks around for a look, identifying itself for Gray as the one he’d named. “Ah! You are the fighter pilot Trevor Gray, yes-no?”

“Yes. We met at SupraQuito, remember?”

“We do. We are delighted to see you again. And Shay Ryan as well! We remember you, too.”

“Stay clear of this, Lieutenant,” Cleary said. “We’re on duty.”

“Doing what?” Ryan asked. “Watching vids?”

A three-meter-high portion of the viewall dome directly in front of the small group had been turned into a display window, showing, it appeared, a portion of the local star.

“We’re looking at what scrubbed your drop, Lieutenant,” Cleary said. “And we would appreciate it if you would stand back and not crowd.”

Gray and Ryan did move back, but only one step. Gray was intensely curious. So far as he could see, they were studying one quarter of the system’s G2 star. Nothing remarkable there at all.

“We have heard of this sort of thing, Commander,” Gru’mulkisch said, apparently continuing an interrupted discussion with Cleary. “But only in whispers. The Sh’daar masters do not speak of them.”

“Is it Sh’daar?” Cleary asked. “Did they build it?”

“Perhaps,” Dra’ethde said. “But it would have been in the Schjaa Krah. You would say the ‘Old Time,’ or possibly the ‘First Time,’ yes-no? A time a very, very long time ago, perhaps before they were the Sh’daar.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Gray asked, then added, “Sir.”

For a moment, he thought Cleary was going to tell him to get lost, but the staff officer just shrugged and shook his head. “Have a look.”

A small square outlined in black appeared just below the limb of the star, then expanded, magnifying the image sharply. The image now showed the uneven granulations of the star’s surface: twisting, linear patterns of lesser light against the greater. And there was something else. …

To Gray, it looked like a fuzzy shadow, but one made out of light—bright light, but still dimmer than the glare from the star behind it. The thing, whatever it was, had a definite shape—elongated, considerably longer than it was wide—but it was masked in a hazy, twisted blur that made it look fuzzy and indistinct.

It was moving across the face of the star, and as it moved, the granulations appeared to pucker and twist behind it.

“It’s bending light,” Gray said.

“It looks like a dustball,” Ryan added.

Dustballs were tiny clots of matter scooped up by the flickering, artificial singularity projected ahead of a fighter or larger vessel using its gravitic drive to move through normal space. Though the drive singularity switched on and off thousands of times per second, it dragged hydrogen atoms, dust and debris swept up from the space ahead just as it did the fighter falling along behind it. In space where the local density of hydrogen and flecks of dust was relatively high—within the inner reaches of a star system, for instance—the dust could collect faster than the microscopic singularity could swallow it, creating tiny, light-bending patches of fuzz the fighter pilots called dustballs.

“What we’re looking at,” Cleary explained, “has a mass of about one point nine times ten to the thirty-third grams … or about the same as Earth’s sun.”

“A black hole?” Gray said.

Take a star as large as Sol and crush it down until it’s just six kilometers wide. What you get is a gravitational singularity with the same mass and the same gravitational field as the original star … but in close, very close, the gravitational field becomes so strong that not even light can escape it—hence the name: black hole.

“Wait a minute,” Ryan said. “I thought stars like Sol were too small to become black holes.”

“Exactly,” Cleary said. “If a star of about three solar masses collapses, it becomes a black hole. A smaller sun becomes a neutron star … and if it’s smaller still, like our sun, it becomes a white dwarf.”

“The object we are observing,” Dra’ethde pointed out, “is clearly artificial. A natural stellar collapse would result in a sphere … or, rather, a spherical ergosphere, with the singularity within.”

“The thing,” Cleary said, “is roughly twelve kilometers long and about one wide, and it appears to be rotating around its long axis at close to the speed of light. Whoever built it can do tricks with mass and gravity that we can’t even imagine yet.”

“Okay,” Gray said. “It’s super-tech. But what does it do?”

“That’s what we’re trying to decide,” Cleary said. “Our best guess so far is that it’s a kind of Tipler machine … but we know that that is absolutely impossible.”

“Perhaps,” Gru’mulkisch said quietly, “the builders do not agree with you as to what is or is not possible.”

Gray had to access the ship’s library and download information on Tipler and the machine named after him. Frank Tipler had been a mathematical physicist and cosmologist in the twentieth century who’d written a paper based on the van Stockum-Lanczos solutions to the equations of general relativity. That paper, “Rotating cylinders and the possibility of global causality violation,” had presented the possibility of what were called closed timelike curves appearing in the vicinity of a very long, very massive, rapidly rotating cylinder. According to Tipler, if you could stretch a black hole into a rigid length of spaghetti and spin it up to something like 60 percent of the speed of light, some billions of rotations per second, the thing warped surrounding space in such a way that it would open portals not through space, but through spacetime, the two being inextricably linked within Einstein’s equations.

The Tipler machine, in other words, was a time machine.

Toward the end of the same century, however, another physicist, the legendary Stephen Hawking, had proven that it simply couldn’t be done. In order to open a doorway into the past, you would need a rotating cylinder that was infinitely long.

The Tipler time machine became a footnote in the physics textbooks, and was eventually almost forgotten.

Perhaps, as Gru’mulkisch had just suggested, the beings who’d built that thing out there hadn’t read the same textbooks.

Gray felt a rising tingle at the back of his scalp.

“Who,” he said quietly, “could possibly have built such a thing?”

“That is what we would like to know,” Cleary replied.

Shadow Probe 1, Drop Bay 1

TC/USNA CVS America

Outer System, Texaghu Resch System

1224 hours, TFT

“Shadow Probe One ready for launch,” Lieutenant Christopher Schiere reported.

“Copy that, One. You are clear for launch,” Commander Avery replied. “Good luck!”

“Let’s just hope it’s better luck than last time,” Schiere muttered.

“What was that, Probe One?”

“Nothing, Boss. Let’s get this show going.”

“And launch in three … two … one … launch!”

The CP-240 Shadowstar hurtled down the two-hundred-meter launch tube at seven gravities, emerging from the center of America’s shield cap 2.39 seconds later and traveling at 167 meters per second. The CP-240 was a near twin to the conventional SG-92 Starhawk strike fighter but was designed for just one task: reconnaissance. One of the ships assigned to America’s VQ-7 recon squadron, the Sneaky Peaks, Schiere’s craft carried no weapons other than a collection of VR-5 recon drones. Slightly more massive than a Starhawk, it possessed a Gödel 2500 artificial intelligence, a self-aware system far more powerful and flexible than the Starhawk AIs.

And it could bend light around itself in a way that gave it near invisibility.

Lieutenant Christopher Schiere was an old hand with the Sneaky Peaks—named for their CO, Commander James Peak. Sneak and peek was their squadron motto, and they were an effective means of exploring ahead of the battlegroup to see what might be lurking up ahead.

Schiere’s last mission had been a high-velocity flyby of the manufactory orbiting Alphekka, and it had nearly been his last. Attacked by dozens of Turusch fighters, all he’d been able to do was tuck himself into a tight little invisible ball and hurtle on into emptiness. A day later, he’d risked decelerating and sending out a questing signal, a rescue beacon. One of America’s SAR tugs had picked him up forty hours later.

It had been a near thing. Finding an all-but-invisible sliver of a spacecraft many AUs from the battlespace was far worse than looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack. Needles you could see. …

Despite the near miss, Schiere had put up his hand when the skipper had asked for a volunteer. “What, are you nuts, Chris?” Peak had asked him.

“It’s that damned horse, Skipper,” Schiere had replied. “I need to get back on.”

His post-mission psych check had flagged him as marginal, a downgrudge that normally would have taken him off of active flight status for at least six weeks, followed by re-evaluation. Schiere had fought the listing. Dr. Fifer and his damned psychtechs were not going to ground him.

Amazingly, the psych department had relented—no doubt, as Schiere had told his buddies in the squadron, because they knew recon flight officers were nuts. Three days locked up inside a Shadowstar cockpit had been rough, yeah, and the thought that he might drift for eternity through the emptiness had preyed on him.

But he’d made it. They’d found him. He was good to go!

And he wanted to go, to go now, before he lost his nerve.

“America CIC, this is Shadow Probe One, handing off from PriFly and ready for acceleration. Shifting to sperm mode.”

“Copy that, Shadow Probe One,” a new voice said. “You are clear to accelerate at your discretion.”

“Roger, America,” he replied. “Bye-bye!”

He accelerated at fifty thousand gravities, and America vanished astern so swiftly it might have been whisked out of the sky.

And Christopher Schiere once again was as utterly alone as it was possible for a person to be.

The objective lay some eighty light minutes from America’s emergence point. At fifty thousand gravities, Schiere’s Shadowstar was pushing 99.9 percent of c in ten minutes, and the universe around him had grown strange.

CIC

TC/USNA CVS America

Outer System, Texaghu Resch System

1225 hours, TFT

“Shadow Probe One is away, Admiral,” the tactical officer reported. “Time to objective is ninety-three minutes, our reckoning.”

“Thank you, Commander,” Koenig told him. He noted the time. An hour and a half for the probe to reach the mysterious object, plus eighty minutes for the returning comm signal to reach the America—they could expect to receive a transmission in another 173 minutes, at around 1517 hours, or so.

Assuming the pilot didn’t encounter hostiles.

He opened a channel. “Commander Peak? Koenig. Who’s the VQ-7 pilot who just launched?”

“Lieutenant Christopher Schiere, sir.”

He knew the name. “He was our advance scout at Alphekka, wasn’t he?”

“Yes, sir. He’s a brave man.”

“Indeed. Thank you.”

Koenig wanted to know who it was who was putting his life on the line for the battlegroup. He deserved to be remembered.

CBG-18 was still engaged in the tedious process of forming up around America. All fifty-seven of the other capital ships had reported in after Emergence, and all were now showing on America’s tactical displays.

And so far, not a single enemy target had appeared—no bases, no fighters, no capital ships, no sensor drones, no heat or energy signatures on or around any of the planets, nothing except for that enigmatic and utterly impossible object orbiting the local sun.

It was amusing, Koenig thought. The small army of artificial intelligences operating within America’s electronic network had first identified the thing, now called TRGA, for the Texaghu Resch gravitational anomaly, but not one had been able to hazard a guess at what it might be. Dr. Karen Schuman, a civilian physicist in America’s astrogation department, had been the one to make the connection with Frank Tipler. AIs tended to have extremely focused and somewhat narrow ways of looking at the universe, and would have had no reason to be aware of Tipler’s long-forgotten theory.

Schuman, however, had a packrat mind and a fascination for the history of physics. Koenig had once spent a pleasant evening in the officers mess discussing Einstein over dinner with the woman.

Of course, traveling through time was still impossible. Stephen Hawking and others had proven that centuries ago. Unless the Tipler cylinder was infinite in length, there would be no time travel.

There might well, however, be space travel, without a temporal component. That much mass rotating that quickly, according to the physicists and the AIs in Schuman’s department, might well warp space in unusual ways, opening up a passage—the technical term was a wormhole—allowing instantaneous travel across unimaginably vast distances. That was still strictly theoretical, however. They would need Schiere’s report from an up-close examination of the artifact before they could refine their initial guesses.

Koenig considered ordering the fleet to begin moving in closer to the star, then decided against it.

There were simply too many unknowns to allow him to risk the fleet that way.

They would wait.

Shadow Probe 1

Approaching Texaghu Resch System

1357 hours, TFT

For Chris Schiere, only about twenty-five minutes had passed since he’d boosted clear of the America. His seventy-three-minute drift between his flight’s acceleration and deceleration phases had been carried out at 99.7 percent of c, and time dilation had squeezed the subjective passage of that time down to just over five and a half minutes. He was now fifty kilometers from his objective and approaching it at a relative velocity of two hundred meters per second.

Close. Very close. And still no sign that the thing was occupied or guarded.

He stared ahead into bright-lit distance, adjusted the incoming levels of radiation, and stared again. He’d never been this close to a star before—fifteen million kilometers, a tenth of an AU, or roughly one quarter of the distance from Sol to Mercury. At this distance, the expanse of the local star covered over five degrees of the sky ahead—ten times wider than Sol appeared from Earth. Its brilliance would have blinded him instantly had the Shadowstar’s AI not been stopping down the optical sensors. With the light reduced so much that he could look into it with his naked eyes, it was difficult to make out detail.

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