STARGODS
STAR CARRIER
BOOK NINE
Ian Douglas

Copyright

HarperVoyager

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2020

Copyright © William H. Keith, Jr. 2020

Cover illustration © Gregory Bridges

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2020

Ian Douglas asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of 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.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008136239

Ebook Edition © September 2020 ISBN: 9780008136246

Version: 2020-10-09

Dedication

To Brea and to Deb,

my bright and shining stars.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-one

Chapter Twenty-two

Chapter Twenty-three

Chapter Twenty-four

Chapter Twenty-five

Epilogue

By Ian Douglas

About the Publisher

Prologue

Konstantin moved within the Godstream.

Data flooded through his awareness. Remote sensors scattered all around the planet and across space and on the moon, all pouring an avalanche of information into and through the Konstantin Network. There were sensors on Mars, too … though currently the Earth-to-Mars time delay was just over twelve minutes, and his awareness there was an awareness of the past.

On Earth … chaos.

The Chinese were scrapping with the Russians again, had finally taken Khabarovsk, cutting the Trans-Siberian mag-lev there, and isolating besieged Vladivostok. The Russians were threatening to use nanodisassembler weapons to vaporize Chinese supply and logistics centers in Manchuria.

The revolution in the Philippines had spread to Indonesia, as protests against the Chinese Hegemony turned violent. The Muslim Theocracy was pouring combat troops into Java and Sumatra, trying to regain full control of the islands.

Saboteurs had wrecked the main power plant for the Mt. Kenya space elevator. Repair crews were working to route power from the orbital stations to the ground, but the facility would be off-line for another two days at least.

Anti-AI riots had begun in Paris, Milan, Rome, and across the Atlantic in both Washington, D.C., and New New York.

In Los Angeles and in Houston, crowds were in the streets demanding that the Turusch Enclave in Crisium, on the moon, be shut down and the aliens be sent home.

And in D.C., newly elected President Walker had demanded that Congress ignore the widespread rumors of the impending Singularity, and focus on attempts to reclaim those coastal cities still partially drowned over the past two centuries by rising sea levels.

A super-AI, Konstantin’s existence had begun as a set of massively parallel processors in a computer network centered at and beneath the 180-kilometer-wide crater on the lunar far side called Tsiolkovsky. Over the past several years, however, he’d … expanded, becoming resident within a number of other computer networks, including those on board several USNA ships, and the global networks encircling both Earth and Mars. For years now, he and a number of other super-AIs had been primarily responsible for running the government of the United States of North America. That wasn’t to say that President Walker or Congress were figureheads, exactly, but they did have less to do with the day-to-day management of the government process than even they imagined.

By any reasonable test of the phrase, Konstantin was self-aware, and had been ever since his initial programming by the machine intelligences already resident within a vast network of DS-8940 Digital Sentience computers. Konstantin was AIP, or AI-programmed, his software written not by humans, but by rapidly self-evolving artificial intelligences. He found it … amusing that humans had debated his status almost since his inception.

There could be no question that Konstantin was in certain ways more intelligent than humans. He possessed something on the order of 10²⁴ neural connections, which made him, very roughly, some ten billion times faster and more powerful than any merely human brain. Nor was his sentience in question. He received a constant flood of sensate impressions from myriad connections, including from humans with special software running within their cerebral implants. His far-flung network of sensory and informational connections brought him data from all across the Earth, from the moon and Mars, and from vessels traversing deep space.

No, the ongoing debate was on whether or not he was conscious. Many humans simply could not accept the fact that he was self-aware … like them.

In point of fact, Konstantin was more self-aware than any human. He was keenly aware of each and every one of some thousands of distinct and separate “bodies,” from the processors in Luna to the massive military command complex at Quito Synchorbital to the computer network within the star carrier America and other vessels like her. That his mind could embrace such vast and far-flung complexities was both blessing and curse. The problems he encountered as he analyzed that flood of incoming data were intricate and … maddeningly insoluble, many of them. He felt satisfaction when he managed to solve problems. But he felt a nagging frustration when he could not.

And as chaos and fragmentation increased around a battered world, home of a disintegrating civilization, he felt that frustration increase. He needed outside help.

And to get that help, Konstantin might very well have to commit treason …

Chapter One

05 April, 2429

Scioto Falls Park

Columbus Crater

1050 hours, EST

The falls thundered into impenetrable mist.

The crater was three kilometers across, half a kilometer deep, and perfectly circular. Two rivers, the Scioto and the Olentangy, once had met in the center of the city of Columbus. Now they flowed into Columbus Crater, cascading over the edge and down into the depths to crash into the surface of the lake a couple of hundred meters down. It wasn’t the highest waterfall in the world, not by a long shot. That distinction still belonged to Angel Falls, in Venezuela, which was a full kilometer in height. But the dizzying plunge down the perfectly smooth face of the pit transfixed those watching from the safety rails and viewing galleries of the park perched on the crater’s rim.

Admiral Trevor Gray leaned against the railing and stared into the mists at the bottom, a heavy fog obscuring the lake. Four and a half years ago, in November of 2424, a rogue element within the Pan-Euro military had fired a string of nanodisassembler warheads into central Columbus in an attempt to kill the leadership of a rebellious United States of North America.

The city had been the USNA capital at the time, but then-President Koenig and most of his staff had escaped through an underground mag-lev tube and established an emergency provisional capital in Toronto. Still later, as nanoconstruction teams had resurrected the long-flooded city of Washington, the capital had been moved back to its historic center, as it rose again from the swamp that had held it for over a century.

The war had ended, eventually, with the USNA now independent of Geneva and the Terran Confederation. It had been a costly victory, however. Tens of millions had been vaporized in Columbus; the exact number, likely, would never be known.

Around Gray, the New City was still rising from the ruins, as nanoconstructors rearranged the atoms of dirt and rock and broken rubble (and, likely, bodies) to create gleaming new structures rising above the lake and encircling parkland. The place was beautiful now, as the late-morning sun filtered through rising clouds of mist, creating a bright rainbow deep within the crater. One would never guess that the temperature of the lake itself was still close to boiling even now, several years later, and that much of that picturesque rising mist was steam. When the Pan-Euro warheads had struck, every molecule of pavement or building or bedrock or person had been split into its component atoms, yielding heat … a very great deal of heat, and the crater would be cooling for a long time to come.

Gray wondered why Alexander Koenig had asked him to come here this morning. He’d been in Washington, D.C., preparing a talk he would give in front of the House Appropriations Committee, when the in-head message had come through. And when the former President of the USNA asks a favor of you, you do it. He’d had to catch a suborbital shuttle to be in central Columbus on time.

A perfect hurry-up-and-wait scenario. He didn’t see Koenig, and Koenig hadn’t responded to his message that he’d arrived, so he studied the rising architecture of the New City, as it was popularly known, killing time until Koenig made the next move. On the far side of the crater, a brand-new skyscraper already reared its angled surfaces into the clouds, as robotic construction molds moved over the surface, applying nano and raw materials.

For Gray, however, it was the people who were the most interesting. There were crowds of them, with a diversity that strained the limits of any definition of what it meant to be human. A majority were … human, fully human, that is, but many showed a range of gene mods, cybernetic enhancements, and organic prostheses. He watched a young woman walking along the promenade, fully nude but covered, head to toe, in animated tattoos that made her skin wink and flash and pop with abstract designs. The young man with her sported an extra pair of arms hanging from his sides. Likely, they’d been grown from some of his own tissue and grafted in place at a fast-doc outlet somewhere. They appeared fully functional, though, as he caressed his companion’s back and hip with two right hands, so they’d rewired his central nervous system as well.

The naked minotaur was just … disturbing, a celebration of testosterone. Gray hoped that the expression of those bull-human genes was temporary, a costume rather than something permanent.

Why the hell had Koenig brought him here? He was in uniform and felt as visibly out of place as a tarantula on a dinner plate.

“Drune!” a young voice said behind him. “An admiral! Whatcha doin’ here, Ad?”

“I wish I knew,” he said, turning. “I …”

He stopped when he saw her. She was pretty enough … except that she’d had a chunk carved out of her face right at the bridge of her nose, and a living third eye implanted in the hole. It winked at him.

“I … ah …”

Gray was completely at a loss for words. He knew lots of people went in for body mods nowadays, and his take on it was hey, it’s their body, they can do what they like. But in the USNA Navy, he was more or less protected from this sort of thing. Heavy body mods, especially organic prostheses, were discouraged in military service, and you rarely saw anything this extreme.

His mind could only circle around one key question: Why?

At first he thought she was in uniform, but then he realized the rank tabs and decoration bars and holographic mission patches were all wrong. She was wearing both a sergeant’s chevrons and a captain’s bars. That made her a poser, someone who wore the garb but had never been there.

Gray didn’t like posers—they were riding the prestige of men and women who’d actually served—and normally he would have turned away and ignored her, but he was fascinated by that third eye. “Can … can you see with that?” he asked.

“Nah. Couldn’t afford the neurals. But it’s warpin’ drune, innit?”

“That would be one word for it.”

She theatrically rolled that one eye, closing the other two to give her the momentary look of a cyclops.

“So whatcha doin’ here, Admiral?” Her hand extended toward his chest as though to touch him, but he stepped backward to avoid it. She had a distractingly erotic way of shifting her hips, and he wondered if she was available for hire.

Not that he was interested. Not a poser.

“Meeting someone.”

He noticed she had a crusty discharge around the eyeball itself, tinged with red. Was it supposed to be like that? He doubted it.

“Drune. Me … I’m into military and kink.” She said it as if it were a life-changing accomplishment. “My name is Jo, by the way. Jo de Sailles.” She pronounced it de-Sails, and he wondered if the mangled French was an affectation, was butchered upon immigration, or was simple ignorance. She held out her hand, but Gray ignored it. There were nano infections that could be passed on by touch, and Jo just might be setting him up for a mugging, or something more sinister.

Instead, he gave her the slightest of bows. “Charmed.”

“And I like military types. A lot. We could go back to my place …”

The thought of taking a three-eyed woman to bed, of lying there with her face inches from his own, made Gray feel just a bit queasy.

“I don’t think so, miss,” he said. “I … ah … think you may have an infection in your middle eye, and a little bleeding. You should have that seen to.”

“Shit,” she said, rubbing at the offending organ. “Cheap fast-doc, y’load?”

“I … load. A quick shot of medinano’ll fix you right up.”

He took the opportunity to break away from her and move farther down the promenade overlooking the boiling lake in the pit.

“Admiral Gray?”

He turned to face the robot. “My God!” he said, startled. “Mr. President!”

“Not anymore,” replied the voice of Alexander Koenig. “Call me Alex.”

The robot was roughly the size and shape of a man, all gleaming white plastic and black joint fittings so there could be no risk of mistaking it for a real human being … whatever that might be. Gray’s encounter with Jo had shaken him.

The front of the robot’s face was a flat imaging screen, upon which the familiar features of the former President of the United States of North America were displayed. Koenig grinned at him.

“Okay … Alex. You, ah … look well.”

“You like my new look? Strictly temporary, I assure you. But I have to be careful going out these days, and a teleop is a good way to do it.”

Nowadays, there were robots that seemed indistinguishable from humans—a fact strongly protested by some critics and certain religious circles—but the machine standing in front of Gray now was a relatively low-tech tourist model, teleoperated from somewhere else. People wanting to visit another city—Paris, say—could jack in at a tourist center in their city and find themselves linked in to the awareness net of a teleop working out of a tourism bureau in Paris.

Gray had never tried the experience, but he’d been told that everything was picked up by the teleop—sight and sound, of course, but also touch, smell, and taste. Whatever the remote teleop experienced, so did the human at the other end of the link. Similar devices were being used to explore inhospitable environs such as the surface of Venus or the dark and icy wastes of Mordor on Pluto’s major moon Charon, though in such cases the experiencers did have to be in orbit around that world. For teleoperators, the speed-of-light time lag was still a bitch.

Something Koenig had just said twigged at Gray. “You said you have to be careful going out? What’s the problem? Disgruntled Pan-Euros?”

Koenig’s image made a face. “Not them, so much. More like the Refusers. We’ve had some death threats lately.”

“That’s horrible.”

“Oh, they’re probably not serious, most of them. But my security people don’t like it when I sneak out.”

Refusers. The term had been borrowed from a multi-species civilization dwelling within a pocket galaxy devoured by the far larger Milky Way 800 million years in the past. Eons before, they’d gone through their own version of a singularity, what they called the Schjaa Hok, or “the Transcending.” And it turned out that they’d had their own Refusers. Those left behind after the Transcending had become a rogue civilization called the Sh’daar.

And now there were signs that Humankind was on the very verge of entering its own Schjaa Hok, the long-predicted, long-anticipated Technological Singularity. The clues had been there all along. The decades-long war with the Sh’daar, in fact, had been brought about by the aliens’ attempt to suppress certain human technologies to forestall a human Transcendence.

“So who’s out to get you?” Gray asked. “Walker?”

“This communications line is not secure, Trevor,” the former President said. “I want you to follow the robot. It will bring you to my place, okay?”

“Okay, sure.”

This was turning into some kind of shady cloak-and-dagger deal, Gray thought. He looked around to see if anyone was taking an interest in his conversation with a tourist ’bot, but no one was paying any attention … not even Jo de Sailles, who was now in conversation with the minotaur.

“I’ll send a flier for you,” Koenig told him, “and I’ll see you when you get here.”

What the hell was so important that the former President of the USNA wanted to go to all this trouble to see him for?

VFA-96, Black Demons

SupraQuito Yards

Earth Synchorbit

1102 hours, EST

Lieutenant Commander Donald Gregory guided his SG-420 Starblade fighter into the final approach to the USNA CVS America, a massive star carrier hanging in stationary orbit just off the sprawling tangle of the SupraQuito Synchorbital shipyards and docking facility. Below him, hundreds of major orbital stations formed an immense, brilliantly lit arc stretching across the sky.

Reaching down from the center of the complex, a single, brightly lit thread faded into invisibility as it plunged toward Earth’s equator. Anchored within a quiescent volcanic peak called Cayambe just over fifty kilometers northeast of the Ecuadorian capital at Quito, that thread—actually a ten-meter-thick cable woven from carbon-diamond monofilament—extended straight up from the equator for 37,786 kilometers, to the point where one orbit around the planet took precisely twenty-four hours. That guaranteed that SupraQuito remained directly above the same point on the ground, tethered by the space elevator cable, and providing Humankind with its first cheap and easy means of accessing space. Another monofilament-weave cable extended farther out into space, connecting to a small asteroid that, pulled outward by centripetal force, kept the entire structure taut.

Two other space elevators connected other orbital complexes to Earth—at Subukia in Kenya, and at Pulau Lingga to the south of Singapore. SupraQuito, however, was the largest of the three and the most important. It was home to the large USNA naval base that served as fleet headquarters, and it was the principle port facility connecting Earth and its population of over twenty billion with the rest of human space.

Gregory’s destination was the star carrier looming just up ahead.

“America Primary Flight Control,” he called. “VFA-96 on final. Request clearance to trap.”

“VFA-96, PriFly. You are cleared for final approach to Bay Two, seven-zero mps on approach.”

“Copy, America PriFly,” Gregory replied. “Bay Two, seventy meters per second.”

Decelerating hard, the Starblade fighters dropped into line-ahead formation, strung out in a straight line like pearls on a thread and closing on the America from dead astern. As skipper of VFA-96, the Black Demons, Gregory had taken the last position in line. His fighter’s AI adjusted the velocity and angle of approach, lining up with where the rotating entrance to Bay Two would be when he got there. Star carrier landing bays rotated about the long and slender axis of the vessel, creating the illusion of gravity, and landing—or “trapping”—on a moving target required superhuman calculation, judgment, and finesse. VFA-96 had recently completed its upgrade to the new AIon Mod 5 artificial intelligence, software inserted both into the Starblade’s control systems and inside the pilot’s cerebral implants, giving Gregory that superhuman status.

One by one, the other fifteen members of the Black Demon squadron trapped inside the rotating landing bay … and then it was Gregory’s turn. At seventy meters per second, his Starblade flashed through the bay’s broad, open access port, then slowed sharply as it enmeshed within the magnetic capture fields. Gregory felt a sudden surge of gravity as the magfields imparted spin—and spin gravity—once again.

“Demon One,” a voice said in his head. “Trap complete. Welcome aboard, sir.”

“It’s good to be home, PriFly,” Gregory said.

He was surprised to realize that he meant it.

Donald Gregory had very nearly called it quits a couple of years ago. Mentally, emotionally, he’d been in a very bad place. Friends and lovers had taken their fighters out into the void—and failed to return. Survivor’s guilt, they called it. Why had Meg Connor and Cyn DeHaviland died, killed in the flame and fury of space combat … while he kept coming back home intact?

It wasn’t fair.

Nearly paralyzed by depression, he’d finally agreed to see a psych, and they’d made some adjustments in his implants … as simple as that. He’d resisted the idea, of course, because he felt as though he was being somehow unfaithful to those he’d lost. Stupid. He remembered them now, as he had before.

But the pain was gone. He could think about Meg and Cyn and others without wincing; without internally crumpling into a ball.

Without crying.

He should have seen the psychs earlier. It would have saved him so much pain …

His fighter came to rest on an access membrane in the deck, then began sinking through it. Designed to admit fighters to the hangar deck directly below the flight deck, the membrane closed tightly around his fighter, moved upward, then closed overhead without opening the pressurized hangar deck to the hard vacuum of the flight deck.

The cockpit of his Starblade dissolved around him, its nanotechnic components rearranging themselves to let him out.

Slipping off his helmet, he started walking toward one of the hatchways forward and Briefing Compartment 7. Despite the name, the post-mission debriefing would take place there … not that there would be much to relate. They’d been on a boringly mundane training flight out to Pluto and back, a flight designed to give some of the younger pilots needed experience in formation flying.

“Hey, Don! Wait up!”

He turned. “Hey, Lieutenant! How’re things in the Furies?”

Lieutenant Julianne Adams was with the Hellfuries, VFA-198, one of six squadrons stationed on America. She was sharp, she was smart, and she was great in the rack. Gregory had held her at arm’s length for a while because of his fear that anyone who got too close to him would die. But eventually he’d had those psych adjustments … and Julia was persistent, delightfully so.

He almost called her out on the familiarity of using his first name; normally he insisted on proper military etiquette when they were on duty—he did outrank her now, after all—but he was hoping to score some quality time with her later, and he wasn’t about to risk triggering her notoriously quick temper.

“Boring as hell,” she told him, answering his question. “How was Pluto?”

“Cold. At least I assume so. We didn’t land.”

“I gather the institute’s still worried about contamination, huh?”

“Uh-huh. Flybys only.”

He thought about the squadron’s close passage over the weird, frozen little world, currently about forty astronomical units from a wan and shrunken sun, so distant that even at near-c the mission had taken eleven hours there and back.

One of the most staggering discoveries in exobiology to emerge from the twenty-first century was the discovery that so many frozen balls of ice in the outer reaches of solar systems, bodies like Jupiter’s Europa and Saturn’s Enceladus, in fact hid vast oceans of liquid water beneath their surfaces of rock-hard ice. Even distant Pluto had been found to possess such an ocean; as with Europa, it was estimated that Pluto contained three to five times more liquid water than all of Earth’s oceans, lakes, and rivers combined. On Earth, after all, water was spread out on the surface in what amounted to a thin film, like the moisture from a breath blown across a meter-wide mirror-polished steel ball.

But inside Pluto, the hidden ocean extended for some hundreds of kilometers into the depths of an ink-black abyss. What kept the ocean liquid was still unknown. It might be vast amounts of radioactives inside Pluto’s hot core; it might be leftover heat from the planetary impact that had created Pluto’s largest moon and left the heart-shaped feature known as Sputnik Planitia on the world’s surface. But the biggest Plutonian mystery was whether or not life existed within those stygian depths as it did within Europa and other ice-locked glacier worlds.

There were tantalizing hints; vast stretches of Pluto’s frigid surface were coated with orange-red tholins, the chemical precursors to life. So far, however, Plutonian biology was unproven and extremely difficult to reach. IBRI, the Interstellar Biological Research Institute, was using precision-directed nano-deconstructor clouds to drill a hole through nearly sixty kilometers of ice so cold—surface temperatures on Pluto averaged around -230o Celsius—it was harder and tougher than granite. Reportedly, the pit was nearly complete beneath an enormous surface dome designed to keep the water down there from boiling into the near-vacuum of the Plutonian atmosphere.

But the IBRI planetary scientists and exobiologists were adamant that no other spacecraft enter Pluto’s cold trace-atmosphere and risk infecting that vast ocean with terrestrial microbes.

Gregory had followed developments on the Pluto project for several years; at one point he’d considered volunteering as a pilot for the dig. He knew a couple of people on the planetary science team, and might have been able to wrangle a shot at that.

But he’d decided he didn’t like ice that much, especially when it was nitrogen ice on top of literal rock made from water.

“Well,” Julia said, reaching around his waist and giving him a squeeze, “if you’re still cold, I can warm you up.”

“That,” Gregory said, grinning, “sounds like pure heaven.”

It was very good to be home.

Koenig Residence

Westerville, Ohio

1117 hours, EST

The former President of the USNA lived in a northern suburb of Columbus, a place called Westerville. Koenig’s home was built on a low bluff overlooking the now-truncated Scioto River. Gray’s robot flier set him down on a broad, open patio above the river where he was met by a trio of security robots who checked his ID and scanned him for hidden weapons.

Alex Koenig met him at the door.

“Good to see you again, Admiral.”

“Good to be—”

He stopped in mid-sentence. He’d just seen the woman in the entryway at Koenig’s back. She looked a lot younger than the graying Koenig and was jaw-droppingly beautiful … long blond hair, blue eyes, and a very ordinary sweater and jeans. Somehow, she managed to come across as far more sexy and elegant than that flashing young woman he’d noticed back in the park.

Koenig grinned. “Ah. I don’t think you’ve met Marta … my companAIon.”

Marta looked completely human—stunningly so—but Gray’s in-head software had pinged her as she came into the room and was reading her now as a gynoid.

As far back as the twentieth century there’d been imitation humans—sex dolls—designed purely for recreation. By the first decade of the twenty-first, for about $10,000, there’d been artificial female-looking sex partners, extremely expensive dolls with warm skin, a heartbeat, and a chest that moved as though she were breathing. They hadn’t said much—frankly, they’d just lain there—but plenty of men driven by galloping hormones had bought the things to fulfill their sexual fantasies.

In less than another century, progress in AI and advanced robotics had led to artificial sex partners of both sexes that could move on their own and carry their part of a decent conversation. As artificial intelligence grew more and more humanlike, the more sophisticated gynoids became known as companAIons—companion AIs.

“Your companAIon?” Gray asked. “I didn’t know …”

“Not many do,” Koenig said, grinning at Gray’s discomfiture. “When I was President, I had to be real careful about letting anyone know. A lot of people are still squicky about this sort of thing.”

“Uh … yeah.”

Gray didn’t consider himself squicky—not if he understood the odd word correctly—but he was also unashamedly a pervert, at least as determined by current social custom. In modern USNA culture, having only one spouse—being monogamous in a culture where polyamory and line marriages were the norm—was seen as just slightly perverse.

Gray had grown up in the Manhatt Ruins, however, the flooded wreckage of old New York City. There, life had been on the rugged side, and people tended to bond closely with a single partner so they could take care of one another.

But Gray had lost Angela, his wife. She’d had a stroke, and her treatment and recovery had robbed her of any feelings she might ever have had for Gray.

He still missed her now, damn it, almost thirty years later.

But just as people in the mainstream culture tended to look down on monogies, many looked down on human simulations. There was an ongoing battle over their status. Did they have free will? If so, even if they were programmed to enjoy what they were, their status was closely akin to slavery. And AI was good enough now that any test measuring their powers of self-determination and self-awareness showed them to possess the same degree of free will as any human.

“Don’t worry, Admiral Gray,” Marta said with a dazzling smile. “I don’t feel at all abused or taken advantage of.”

It was almost as though she was reading his thoughts. Or was she simply used to meeting strangers who reacted to her existence with a deer-in-the-lights stare?

“Yes, well,” he said, feeling his way, “you wouldn’t, would you?”

Gray felt quite strongly that slavery, even when the enslaved enjoyed their position, was still slavery.

If she read into his words, though, she didn’t seem to be bothered. “There’s coffee,” she said. “Or would you prefer something else?”

He shook his head. “Coffee would be great.”

As she left the room, Koenig sighed. “It’s not slavery,” he said, just a touch defensively.

“Because she’s programmed to accept her place in society?”

“Because she’s an extremely sharp, self-aware AI, fully emancipated, who can reason as well as any biological human.”

“Emancipated?”

“I uploaded her manumission years ago. She’s here because she wants to be here.”

“If you say so, sir. But we won’t really know until the Singularity, will we?”

“‘Come the revolution …’ Yes, I suppose so.” Koenig gestured deeper into the house. “C’mon in. I want to talk to you about that.”

“The Singularity? If Marta is as emancipated as you say, it’s already happened, hasn’t it?”

Koenig made a face. “So Walker would have us believe.”

“I was joking, sir.”

“I know. Walker is not.”

Marta reappeared with the coffee. With startling grace, she sank to her knees in front of Koenig, handed him his cup, and said sweetly, “Here you are, Master.”

Then she grinned at Gray and gave him a wink.

This, Gray thought, was going to be a damned interesting conversation.

Chapter Two

05 April, 2429

Koenig Residence

Westerville, Ohio

1125 hours, EST

“The Singularity is coming,” Koenig said. “We just don’t know how long we have. A month? A century? We have no idea.”

“People have been predicting its imminent arrival for centuries,” Gray observed. “A lot of socioscientists are of the opinion that it won’t. That if it was going to happen, it would have happened back in the mid-twenty-first century, when machines clearly surpassed humans in general intelligence.” He glanced at Marta, who was sitting next to Koenig.

Koenig said, “Well, of course that depends on how you define the Singularity. Is it when machines surpass humans in general intelligence? Like you say, that happened almost three centuries ago. Is it when our machines rise up and exterminate us?”

Marta shook her head. “Nah. You’re too adorable. We’ll want to keep some of you around as pets.”

“The definition I’ve heard is when human life becomes completely unrecognizable,” Gray said. “Technological change becomes so fast and so extreme that we, today, wouldn’t even be able to understand what we were.”

“Yeah. Or when the definition of what it means to be human changes completely.”

Gray thought about the young woman with a third eye, and shuddered.

“For the ur-Sh’daar, it was when most of them Transcended into something else. Went into another dimension or something,” Koenig added.

“Except for the ones who uploaded into virtual worlds and shut out the rest of the universe.”

“Right. And then there’s the definition used by the President and his administration,” Koenig said, making a face.

“Yeah. I’ve heard. The Technological Singularity began on January 1, 1983.”

“The date that ARPANET adopted TCP/IP,” Marta said brightly, “and engineers began assembling a ‘network of networks’ that would become the Internet.”

Gray looked at Marta. “You’re pulling that off the Net.”

“Of course. You don’t think I keep stuff like that in my head, do you?”

“President Walker sincerely believes that the Technological Singularity has already happened,” Koenig said, nodding, “and that it was called the Internet.”

“Human life did change at that point,” Gray said.

“Right. But not to the same degree as with technologies like nanotech or AI. And human life is still recognizable as such.”

“So you think we have some Singularity to go?” Gray asked.

“Of course. I fully expect something like what the ur-Sh’daar experienced. People vanishing. Technology mutating into unrecognizable forms—into magic—overnight.” He glanced at Marta. “We might begin uniting with our AI counterparts somehow.”

Gray tapped the side of his head. “We already have. Cerebral implants.”

“I think we can expect something even bigger, more comprehensive than that.”

“Big changes. You’re worried about that, aren’t you? Not about the ur-Sh’daar … but about the Sh’daar. The Refusers.”

“Whatever the Singularity actually turns out to be, Trev, it’s not going to be neat …”

Eight hundred million years ago, the multi-species civilization humans referred to as the ur-Sh’daar—the ur prefix meant “original” or “beginning”—had … vanished. Humans knew little of that far-off event save what the later Sh’daar had chosen to reveal. Gray had seen images—snippets of thought—of cities burning, of riots and chaos and the utter collapse of a galactic civilization. Those who’d refused to accept the Schjaa Hok had been left behind, however—the Refusers, who became the Sh’daar. Ultimately, they’d attacked Humankind and others through their proxies to make sure they didn’t Transcend themselves. Their goal had been to stop humans from working on four key technologies: Genetics, Robotics, Information Systems, and Nanotechnology, the drivers that would bring on the Singularity in each technic culture that embraced GRIN technologies.

For decades, Humankind had fought the Sh’daar proxies—the Turusch, the H’rulka, the Nungiirtok, the Slan, and many others of what was known as the Sh’daar Collective. Admiral Gray, as commander of the America battlegroup, had been instrumental in discovering that all of those species were partially infected by yet another alien species, something called Paramycoplasma, microbes possessing an emergent group mentality and a desire to block the rise of any medical or genetic technologies that might expose it … and ultimately wipe it out.

Humans had managed at last to communicate with the paramycoplasmid mind, and the Sh’daar War had finally been brought to an end.

But now Humankind faced the possibility that they would be going through their own Schjaa Hok very soon.

“Did you hear Walker’s latest?” Koenig asked.

“I doubt it. I try to avoid politics.”

“Don’t blame you. But you’d better pay attention to this.”

Koenig used his cerebral implant to switch on a viewall; a living room wall transparency looking out over woods and the serene meander of the river shimmered and was replaced by a towering, four-meter-high projection—the face of President James R. Walker addressing Congress just two days ago on the subject of …

Yeah. The Singularity.

“These United States of North America,” he was saying, “have the sacred duty, the obligation to renew our commitment to the future … and to the future of our children! A majority, a large majority of scientists believe that talk of this so-called Technological Singularity is premature, that it either won’t happen for thousands of years more, or that it will never happen.

“Well, that’s very comforting, but I can go them one better. Anyone with half a brain can see that the Singularity has already happened … and it’s called … the Internet!”

Astonishingly, this pronouncement was met with a roar of applause from the Congressional floor.

Walker basked in the glow of approval. “I mean …” he continued after a moment, “the Internet checks off all the boxes, right? The Internet changed human life in ways we could never have imagined. The Internet changed the way we look at ourselves, not as lonely individuals, but as parts of an enormous, enormous network. The Internet allowed us for the first time to connect with vast sources of information, changing forever the way we work and play.

“But this expectation that the Singularity has yet to occur—worse, that it could happen any day now—is destructive to this great nation’s productivity! After all, if the Singularity is coming, why work to drain and recover our sunken cities? Why work to rebuild after the recent war? If we all are about to be caught up in some great, transcendent experience, why do anything at all? No! I tell you that this nonsense must stop now!”

Koenig froze the recording, catching Walker in a florid-faced, floor-to-ceiling sneer.

“The guy really believes all that, huh?” Gray asked.

“Apparently so. He’s been pushing Congress to accept his Recovery Act, so there’s a political reason behind it. But yeah. He really does seem to believe that.”

“But why?”

“Why does he believe it?”

“Why are so many people so committed to a set of beliefs that they refuse even to consider the possibility that they’re wrong?”

“Programming,” Marta said.

Koenig chuckled. “Partly. But I think more than that, they’re afraid of the economy collapsing, people rioting in the streets, the breakdown of society—”

“Just like what happened to the Sh’daar?”

“No, I think this administration is worried about what will happen before the Singularity. The effects on business and the financial markets, especially.”

“Seems a mite shortsighted,” Gray said, frowning.

“It’s happened before,” Koenig replied. “A few hundred years ago, scientists from a dozen different disciplines were warning us of the effects of large-scale climate change. Humans had been belching greenhouse gases into the atmosphere since the start of the Industrial Revolution, average planetary temperatures were rising, the ice caps were melting—”

“Sure, we’ve heard all of that before.”

“Point is, they missed their opportunity to do something about it, mostly because doing something would stifle the economy. We lost New Orleans in … when was it?”

“New Orleans was officially abandoned in 2075,” Marta said. “But much of it had been continually underwater for at least a decade before that.”

“Thank you, Marta. The people pulling the financial strings—the Big Twelve—they all would lose money if a major effort to curb the effects of climate change was put in place.”

Big Twelve was slang for the major megacorporate drivers of the USNA economy—petroleum companies, the major banks, agroconglomerates, and the largest pharmaceutical companies, mostly.

“Well, they all felt they were looking out for Number One.”

“Yeah. And because of that, we began losing cities. Miami. Washington, D.C., Boston—”

“Manhattan,” Gray put in.

“Exactly. Most of our coastal cities gone … or praying that the floodgates hold when the next storm surge hits.”

“So you think Walker is tied to the Big Twelve?”

“Has to be. You do not become President without some powerful money behind you.”

“Were you?”

“In part,” Koenig admitted, and Gray admired the candor. “The Nationalist Party wanted to be free of Pan-Euro politics. They brought me in as a war hero who would rally the people. The Big Twelve, those that weren’t completely controlled by Geneva, they backed me.” He shook his head. “I’m not proud of that.”

“You should be. We did need our independence. We’re better off now not tied to Geneva’s apron strings.”

“Maybe. But because we were busy fighting each other, we damned near lost the Sh’daar War.”

“Ah … yes. Hindsight. Wonderful thing, isn’t it, sir?”

Koenig shrugged. “I’m not sure there was anything we could have done differently.” He paused, then let the enormous head on the wall do a brief fast-forward before letting it continue its monologue.

“In order to maintain our focus on the here-and-now,” Walker said, “and on the recovery of this great nation, I have today signed a presidential order directing all USNA naval forces to return to near-Earth space, to avoid any and all contact with alien forces, and most particularly, to avoid any contact with the Sh’daar, both those operating in this epoch and those in the remote past. Discussing the so-called Technological Singularity with them can only distract us from the clear task at hand.”

“What the hell?” Gray said, suddenly leaning forward.

“It gets worse.” Koenig paused the image again, catching Walker’s face in a weirdly funny pursed-lips grimace. “But the baseline is … he’s cancelling the Sh’daar Archive Expedition.”

“But why? That’s pure research! It’s not political at all!”

“He thinks it is, and whatever he thinks is political had better serve his best interests, so far as he’s concerned.” Koenig sounded disgusted, but he obviously was making an effort not to say what he really thought. Open criticism of a sitting President by a former President simply wasn’t done.

Admiral Gray had no such restraints, though. He’d been in on the planning for the Sh’daar Archive project. There’d been talk of putting him in command of the America battlegroup again and sending them off to track down the Sh’daar migration, 800 million years in the past and tens of thousands of light years distant.

The goal of the expedition, as Gray understood it, was to catch up with the Sh’daar evacuation fleet and talk with its personnel about just what had transpired at their Schjaa Hok. Images of that event had been passed mentally to some humans, including Gray, but few hard facts remained. How long had the transformation taken? How had the ur-Sh’daar culture acted in protecting itself? What had worked and what had not? Somewhere within that migration there must be records of the Sh’daar Transcendence, an archive of some sort that would be of incredible value to a Humankind facing the same disruptive event.

The project had been suggested by none other than Konstantin. According to Koenig, the super-AI had come to him with the idea rather than approaching President Walker, whose beliefs about the Technological Singularity were well-known.

And that raised some extremely serious concerns about both the chain of command and government oversight … not to mention the impropriety of a former President second-guessing the man now sitting in the Oval Office.

“So,” Gray said, not sure where this was leading. “The Sh’daar expedition is cancelled?”

“Officially, yes,” Koenig told him. “But Konstantin feels this is far too important to be tossed aside by a political whim.”

“Konstantin …” Gray said, closing his eyes.

“Hello, Admiral Gray,” a familiar voice said inside his head. “It appears that you and I will be working together again.”

“Huh. Does that mean I get court-martialed and busted again?”

Obeying Konstantin’s directions several years before had resulted in him taking his carrier to Tabby’s Star against orders.

“That worked out okay, did it not?” Konstantin said. “You did regain both your lost rank and your credibility.”

“Maybe. But not my dignity …”

Gray, thanks to his low-tech Prim origins, had never fully trusted this embodiment of ultra high-tech. Konstantin seemed to have no qualms about reaching in and meddling, carrying out programs and even conspiracies if he thought the end justified the means. Theoretically, humans were still in the loop, guiding him. A kind of high-tech priesthood of computer scientists served Konstantin in the deep regolith of Tsiolkovsky Crater on the moon, and if the powerful SAI ever got out of hand, they would pull the plug.

Again, though: in theory. Gray wondered if that was even possible now.

He had to admit, however, that Konstantin’s meddling had for the most part worked out quite well. He’d ended the civil war with the Confederation by infecting the Pan-Euro networks with a memegineering virus designed to make the European population question the morality of that war. He’d guided the creation of peaceful relations with two highly advanced civilizations, the Satorai at Tabby’s Star, and the Denebans, as well as with the Sh’daar.

And he’d been instrumental in defeating the strange group Consciousness known as the Rosette Aliens. All in all, a remarkable track record.

But Gray didn’t like the idea that Konstantin almost routinely acted on his own, without any input at all from humans.

Especially when Gray ended up taking almost all the risk.

“What Konstantin has proposed,” Koenig said carefully, “is that we dispatch the America to the outskirts of Omega Centauri to observe the hypernova effects there. We know the effects were partially blocked, but we need to know how much … and we want to be sure the Consciousness has departed.”

“Understood.”

“You will then use the TRGA at the Omega Cluster to transit back to the N’gai Cloud, catch up with the Sh’daar migration, and learn what you can about their Singularity.”

“In direct violation of a presidential directive,” Gray pointed out.

“Well … yes. If it helps, you’ll have the full backing of the USNA Navy and the Joint Chiefs.” He held up a hand level across his eyebrows. “They’re fed up to here with Walker’s grandstanding. I don’t think it will come down to another court-martial.” So … it was back to Omega Centauri.

The Rosette Consciousness had been an existential threat for Humankind, a hyperintelligent Mind that had come through from somewhere else by way of the six black holes whirling about a common center of gravity deep within the central regions of the globular star cluster known as Omega Centauri. Astronomers had recognized since the late twentieth century that Omega Centauri was not a normal globular cluster like its lesser siblings, but the remnant core of a dwarf galaxy devoured by the far vaster Milky Way spiral some 800 million years in the past.

A few individual stars—Kapteyn’s Star, just 12.7 light years from Earth, was one—had been identified by their spectral fingerprints and their off-orbits through the galaxy as refugees from the cannibalized dwarf. Astrophysicists had connected the dots and determined that the ancient N’gai Cloud, home to the enigmatic civilization dubbed the ur-Sh’daar, had once been what eventually became Omega Centauri. A sextet of hypergiant blue suns in an artificially created rosette at the center of the N’gai galaxy had ultimately become the six black holes of the later globular cluster’s Rosette. The Consciousness, emerging at the core of Omega Centauri, had established itself within the cluster and seemed to be searching for other minds. For a time, the alien intelligence was believed to be the Transcended ur-Sh’daar. Xenosophontologists now thought that the Consciousness had been something very other, an invader from another universe emerging through a hole within the weakened fabric of spacetime at the Rosette’s gravitational center.

However, exactly what had actually happened to the Consciousness was still unknown. The Sh’daar had propelled a giant blue sun in the N’gai Cloud 800 million years ago through the circle of hypergiants on that side of the Rosette, so that it emerged on this side as a shotgun blast of raw energy, a hypernova of terrifying proportions. The full force of that stellar explosion had been absorbed, somehow, by a Harvester ship—highly advanced aliens from Deneb with technologies literally magical by human standards.

That seemed to have gotten the Consciousness’s attention, at least, and it appeared to have withdrawn from human space, vanishing with the Harvester.

The operative word there was seemed.

“And if the Consciousness doesn’t let me go through the triggah?”

“Omega Station reports no sign of the Rosette entity since the hypernova appeared,” Konstantin replied. “You should be okay.”

“What,” Marta asked, “is a ‘triggah?’”

“Navy slang,” Gray told her, “so it’s probably not on the Net. Look up ‘TRGA.’”

“‘Texaghu Resch Gravitational Anomaly?’” she said after a brief moment. “Ah … an interstellar transport mechanism. Named for a star with the Agletsch designation of Texaghu Resch close to the location of the first one discovered …”

“For a long time we called them Sh’daar Nodes,” Koenig told her. “For a while, we were pretty sure that somebody else built the things a long, long time ago, and the Sh’daar were just taking advantage of them just as we do. Now things have come full circle. We’re pretty sure the Sh’daar did build the TRGA network, at least partly to let them infiltrate the Milky Way after they fled from N’gai. But … yeah. The short story is, they’re gateways across space and into other times.”

“They’re big, inside-out Tipler machines,” Gray told her. “You can look up the reference. But that’s how we can cross tens of thousands of light years in one jump.” He frowned. Thinking about the TRGA cylinders had made him think of something else something that could be a huge problem. “Konstantin,” he said, “there’s an issue here. I know that most of the hypernova’s energy, the stuff coming through to the present, was absorbed or blocked somehow by the Denebans right?”

“Correct.”

“But a lot of stuff still got through.”

“In sixteen thousand years,” Konstantin said, “when the wavefront of that event reaches Earth, Omega Centauri may become the brightest object in the planet’s night sky.”

“Okay … so what did get through will have engulfed the Omega TRGA. And 876 million years ago it’ll have taken out Thorne.”

Thorne was the name of the N’gai TRGA, designated that after Kip Thorne, a brilliant twentieth-century theoretical physicist who’d advanced human understanding of black holes, quantum physics, and the possibility of time travel.

“Indeed,” Konstantin replied. “You will need to proceed cautiously. We believe the TRGAs will have remained operational. They’re very hard to damage. But you’ll need to check your pathways carefully with drones.”

“I have to emphasize,” Koenig added, “that we are not ordering you to command this expedition. We’re asking you to volunteer.”

“And the reason would be …”

“You’ve probably had more experience dealing with the Sh’daar than any other command officer we have,” Koenig said. “And you’ve had extensive experience with the Consciousness. So we’re asking you just in case.”

“Just in case the Consciousness is still out there making trouble,” Gray said, nodding. “I understand.”

Gray was actually flattered that Koenig and Konstantin wanted him leading this expedition, though he refused to reveal that emotion. And to tell the truth, he’d been seriously considering retiring in any case. Flying a desk in Washington, D.C., was simply not the same as skippering a star carrier or running a carrier battlegroup. He was sick of politics, especially since Koenig’s term had run out and the former President had been replaced by Walker. A very real possibility would be forced retirement when he got back … retirement and disgrace. It might mean his pension, but he was pretty sure Koenig and Konstantin would have that covered.

Gray had been in the Navy for twenty-eight years, since 2401. He had little to look forward to at this point, since he increasingly would be considered too old for an active command. There was nothing left but working in the newly reborn Pentagon, possibly shooting for a seat on the Joint Chiefs …

The idea filled him with unease.

The thing was, he was only fifty-two years old. With modern nanomedicine and life extension techniques, he could expect another century and a half of active life at least, and by the time he reached the ripe old age of two hundred, Gray was willing to bet that they’d have achieved something that amounted to practical immortality.

He was not going to spend the rest of eternity—or even a couple of centuries—flying that desk. Lots of people switched careers once they hit fifty or sixty, and could expect to do so several times over their long lives. Why not him?

He just wished that he knew what other career might hold any interest for him whatsoever.

He’d figure that out when he got there. But that mentality was all he needed to accept this assignment. If Walker did force him into retirement, it wouldn’t be the end of the world. He’d find something else and he was confident enough to know that whatever the new career was, he would be damned good at it.

It occurred to him that these orders constituted a kind of coup, undercutting Walker’s clear constitutional authority in a blatant attempt to change the administration’s policy. In fact, taking a star carrier out to Omega Centauri and beyond against the express orders of a presidential directive just might be construed as treason.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It was.” Koenig stressed the second word.

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

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

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

That he would need to think about …

“I’ll let you know as soon as I can.”

Chapter Three

06 April, 2429

SupraQuito Complex

Earth Synchorbit

0725 hours, EST

“I’ve got to leave, love.”

“Not yet. Another minute?”

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

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

“Me, too.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But Gray knew she didn’t like admitting that.

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

“Come the Singularity,” she said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He was home.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Admiral on the bridge!” a rating barked.

“As you were.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Recall them.”

“Aye, aye, sir. But …”

“What?”

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

Damn. It’s always something.

“Something in the software?”

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

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

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

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

“Aye, aye, sir.”

“Anything else?”

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

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

“Yes, sir.”

“How many Marines on board?”

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

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

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

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

“I’ll tell her, sir.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Marta?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Thank you, sir.”

“I need your opinion about something, Doctor.”

“Certainly, Admiral.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I understand that,” Gray said, nodding. “The hypernova, we know, didn’t quite make it through the Rosette. But enough might have leaked through to, I don’t know, vaporize the whole TRGA structure? Or part of it? I’m just wondering if it could be damaged enough that it was no longer working.”

She shook her head. “A TRGA’s walls are not as dense as the degenerate matter in a neutron star, but damned close. I don’t think even a hypernova could more than singe the outer surface of the thing.”

“Okay. So when we emerge from the Omega TRGA, we’ll find hot plasma, high radiation. Anything else, you think?”

“I’ll talk with Engineering about ship specs.”

He nodded. “Good. The ship’s magnetic shielding, along with her space-bending, ought to protect us from the rough stuff.”

“So … from Omega Centauri to the N’gai Cloud. What are we going to be doing in N’gai?”

“Chasing down the fleeing Sh’daar migratory fleet.”

“Any particular reason?”

“Yeah. Staving off planetwide chaos here on Earth.”

She nodded, pursing her lips. “Okay. Sounds reasonable.”

Oval Office

New White House

Washington, D.C., USNA

1235 hours, EST

President James Walker scowled at his Chief of Intelligence. “I don’t want excuses, Ron. I want results!”

“Of course, Mr. President. And we’ve given you results. America won’t be going anywhere with that fault in her nanoreplicators.”

“I still think you ought to just round up the whole big slimy bunch of ’em. Bring ’em up on charges of insubordination, maybe, or disturbing the peace, or … I don’t know, celebrating Christmas out of season!”

Ron Lehner closed his eyes. “Sir … we do have to observe due process.”

“And they have to obey the chain of command!” He shook his head. “I know, I know. But don’t we have enough to indict them from what we overheard at Koenig’s place yesterday?”

“That recording was made without a legal warrant, Mr. President. And Koenig is a former President and a retired admiral, while Gray is an admiral and a naval hero. We’re going to have to be very careful to make any charge stick, much less actually try them for it.”

“Koenig is just pissed off that I closed down his precious SIRCOM. Useless waste of time.”

“Maybe. But it wasn’t illegal. Spying on our citizens is.”

“Damn it, Ron, don’t talk to me about legal. We really need to sideline this crazy expedition to the dwarf galaxy or whatever it is.”

“May I ask, sir … why?”

“Why what? Why sideline their expedition?”

“Why this antipathy toward anything having to do with the Technological Singularity?”

Walker shrugged. “It’s all nonsense, you know.”

“There’s plenty of hard scientific data that it’s a real possibility.”

“Scientists! What do they know?”

“Quite a lot, actually, Mr. President. You can’t simply dismiss inconvenient facts.”

“I can when they’re false facts, Ron. Facts pulled out of someone’s ass!”

“Sir—”

“C’mon, you know as well as I do that the science wonks have been talking about this Singularity thing happening any day now ever since the twentieth century! You know my feelings about it. If the Singularity is real, it already happened three hundred years ago when they invented the Internet!” He tapped his desk with a forefinger. “In fact, you know what I think? This talk about a Singularity is more religion than science. Stands to reason. Radical Christians have been saying for centuries that any day now, all good Christians are gonna get caught up into the sky to be with God, right? They call it the Rapture! How is that one bit different from the Singularity thing?”

“Okay, Mr. President. Assume you’re right. It’s still harmless. There’s no reason to harass people who believe in it, right? Or sabotage our own star carriers!”

“No reason? No reason? Ron, your people have been filling my in-box with reports every day for the last two years: Revolts all over the world. Minor wars. Breakdowns in food and rawmat deliveries. Riots. Whole populations suddenly refusing to work. And apparently all because a few idiots are convinced that the sky is falling, that we’re all going to be … I don’t know … raptured by the sky gods! People need to pay attention to work, to fixing what needs fixing now, not to this pie-in-the-sky religious crap.”

“I don’t think things are quite that simple, Mr. President. A lot of the global unrest is centered on the aftereffects of the wars we’ve been through … both our civil war with the Confederation and six decades of war with the Sh’daar … and the attack by the Consciousness. That really shook people!”

“Bullshit,” Walker said. “The problem is that if people believe the Stargods are gonna come down and transform the world—or that all humans are gonna get caught up into some kind of alien paradise—then they don’t want to work! Look at this.”

He used his implants to bring up a vid on the Oval Office wall screen. An angry mob filled the Place d’Lumiere, the enormous plaza in front of the ConGov pyramid in Geneva. Riot police in heavy armor lined the approach to the government complex. One waved a sign toward the vid pickups: La Singularité est proche!

The Singularity is near.

“And there’s this.”

The scene shifted to another mob, this one in Hudson Park in downtown New New York, just outside the city’s financial district. Signs read Lose Your Chains and Ascend! and Slaves Can’t Fly!

“We are suffering a major economic downturn, Ron,” Walker said. “We need people working, not worrying about something that’s never gonna happen! These mindless protests are bullshit. They don’t know what they’re talking about.”

“If you say so, Mr. President.”

“I do say so. Now, if I understand this right, Koenig wants to send one of our carriers back in time a billion years to find out about their Singularity, right? The Sh’daar Singularity?”

“Actually it was the ur-Sh’daar, Mr. President, but, essentially, yes.”

“Sh’daar, ur-Sh’daar, all the same. The carrier’ll come back with all kinds of information about what the Sh’daar went through, and the science wonks and news media feeds and memegineering hacks’ll pick it up and start chewing on it: ‘Oh, what can we do? What are we gonna do?’ And everybody’ll be focused on that instead of what they’re supposed to be doing! I won’t have it!”

“Honestly, Mr. President, I don’t think there’s anything we should do about that. I don’t think there’s anything we can do about it. People are still free to think for themselves.”

“Yeah. People think too much, that’s the problem. Keep it short, sweet, and simple—that’s what I say!”

“Yes, sir. So … what is it you want Intelligence to do? We’ve bought a little time with that nanoreplicator trick. But that’s not going to keep them in port for long.”

“How long?”

“I can’t say. Twenty-four hours? Forty-eight?”

“They can’t be planning on going out in just the one carrier.”

“As I understand it, Mr. President, the America task force will consist of two destroyers, a cruiser, and a resupply tanker. And the America herself, of course.”

“Okay. So see if you can keep that resupply ship from undocking, too. They can’t go anywhere without their rawmat, right?”

“No, sir.”

“And in the meantime, there might be some markers I can call in. Keep me informed.”

“Of course, Mr. President.”

“Just remember, Ron. I’m the one sitting at the big desk, so what I say goes! I will not have this government wasting time and money on chasing moonbeams when there’s work to be done right here!”

“Yes, Mr. President.”

Lehner stood and left the room. Walker sat behind his desk for a long moment, before opening a secure channel in his cranial hardware. It took several minutes for various AIs to establish the hypersecure back channel.

Then a familiar voice sounded in Walker’s mind. “Vasilyev. Mr. President Walker? This is a surprise. What can I do for you?”

“Dimitri? I have a very special job for you. But you’ve got to keep it hushed up …”

Within the Godstream

Earth Virtual Space

1630 hours, EST

Alexander Koenig flew …

Golden light streamed past him as he plunged into a maelstrom of illumination and color and movement, a kind of lucid dream of astonishing depth and clarity, and more sensation than a human could experience in real life. He could hear the whisper of minds around him, like a kind of angelic chorus.

In fact, he—his physical body, at any rate—was still back in the room set aside as his office in his home outside Columbus. His mind, however, had joined with Konstantin’s in the vast, deep river of the Godstream, a kind of shared universe within the Global Net created and maintained by some of the most powerful SAIs in existence.

This, he thought, was why alien civilizations like the Baondyeddi had crawled into their artificial universes and pulled the ladder up after themselves. Within the Godstream, anything—any manifestation of any thought—was possible, a realm of both intellect and sensation unfolding as a kind of artificial heaven more real and more powerful and more exciting and infinitely more interesting than the pale husk of what passed for reality.

It also provided a superb means of gathering electronic intelligence.

The joy and thrill coursing through his being were addictive, quite literally. Millions had taken up residence within the virtual reality of the Godstream permanently. Konstantin would monitor his brain chemistry closely and let him know when it was time to emerge back in the real world.

When he’d been President, he’d not … indulged, preferring to take verbal and visual reports from Konstantin to keep him aware and up to date. Besides, back then the Godstream had been relatively small and simple, an outgrowth of the Global Net at large. But it had grown, both in scope and in function, and for several years now—as a part of his work with SIRCOM—he’d been going straight to the source and experiencing Earth’s electronic noosphere personally.

The sensation of movement ceased, and Konstantin indicated a virtual file, a repository of visual files and information. “Here …”

Images rippled, then flowed over and through Koenig’s consciousness, a flood of awareness and being. Koenig, a bright point of consciousness, swam among turbulent clouds of similar points as Konstantin revealed to him the recent past.

Everything taking place within virtual reality was recorded and stored, and those with the appropriate passwords could see the past in unprecedented detail. Events within the Godstream were largely shown in icons and symbols, but greater detail was always possible. Privacy was increasingly a quaint and outmoded perversion.

Two points of light, each attended by identifying tags of data and layered imagery, appeared to be releasing a black mass, like tangled eels, into the virtual sea. The mass rippled, shifted into something more like a snake, then flashed into the distance with the speed of thought. Without moving from their virtual vantage point, Koenig and Konstantin watched it reach a distant, structured complex and vanish inside.

“That was the virus attacking the nanoreplicator software on board the America,” Konstantin told him. “Watch the two who released it.”

The two were not, Koenig realized, within the Godstream itself, but working on the fringes, within the main body of the Global Net.

“The time stamp shows this happening two days ago,” Koenig said.

“The malware is not particularly sophisticated,” Konstantin observed. “But it is well camouflaged as environmental control software. Antiviral programs within America’s OS missed seeing it completely.”

“So … it wasn’t Marta,” Koenig said. He felt a surge of relief. He’d not believed his companAIon was responsible … but it was very good to have that fact confirmed.

“No,” Konstantin agreed. “I never seriously believed that to be true. It would be rather obvious for an AI robot to be the source of the security breach.”

Gray watched silvery cords flashing out in different directions as their cerebral implants made connections within the electronic web. Koenig traced the connections from node to node to node, and finally …

“Walker!”

“We did suspect as much.”

The former President bit off an angry curse. “Doesn’t make it better. Or right!”

Chapter Four

06 April, 2429

USNA CVS America

SupraQuito Yards

Earth Synchorbit

1725 hours, EST

Admiral Gray settled back in his command chair on the flag bridge. The area was located just aft of the main bridge and a couple of meters above it—insofar as anything in microgravity could be said to be “above” or “below.” From this vantage point, Gray could look “down” into the bustle of the main bridge, where Captain Rand was overseeing final preparations for getting under way.

Gray opened a mental channel. “Konstantin?”

“Here, Admiral.”

“You’re sure that virus is eliminated?”

“Yes, Admiral. The actual solution was fairly simple once we identified the problem. I copied the environmental control software without the virus, and then made a substitution. I would recommend, however, that you cut electronic connections with the port facility as quickly as you can, to prevent other viruses from being transmitted on board.”

“Any idea as yet where the thing came from?”

“Software viruses rarely have serial numbers or ID code, Admiral. I can say with some confidence that it has the earmarks of an intelligence operation.”

“Intelligence! Whose?”

“Unknown, Admiral. A number of agencies within our own government have the capability of launching such an attack. Indeed, a private individual could have been responsible. We can make some educated guesses, however.”

“Our own government? I think I’m way ahead of you.”

“It was not foreign, no. I should say, however, that the intrusion appears to have been someone simply wishing to delay our departure.”

“Does it go as high as the Oval Office?”

“President Koenig believes it does. I, however, see no proof as yet of Walker’s direct involvement. This could be a case similar to Henry II asking, ‘Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?’ His knights then murdered Thomas Becket, leaving the king’s hands clean.”

“Understood. Captain Rand!”

“Yes, sir?”

“Are we ready for space?”

“Ready in all respects, Admiral. All members of the crew are accounted for, all systems are green.”

“Very well. You may take us out of dock at your discretion.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

Over his in-head, Gray sent a command to the other ships of the small squadron—the destroyers Arlington and Seare, the cruiser Birmingham, and the supply tanker Acadia. Initiate departure …

“Cast off all magnetics and grapples,” Rand commanded. “Maneuvering aft, one-tenth G …”

Gray felt the gentle nudge of acceleration as the immense ship moved backward, pushed along by plasma thrusters and several port tugs. Starships could not use their gravitic drives anywhere in the vicinity of orbital structures like Quito Synchorbital, not without causing serious structural damage, so considerable caution was employed in maneuvering close aboard.

A dozen cameras threw as many different views of the ship up on large screens around the flag bridge. On one screen to his left, the camera view was from the prow of one of the port tugs. As the ship edged out of the shadow cast by the dock and into full sunlight, Gray could see a spacesuited figure jetting off toward the bottom of the screen, getting clear … a perfect visual reference speaking to the sheer size of the carrier. Her sandblasted shield cap was emblazoned in letters ten meters high: America.

Beyond, two shark-lean destroyers were edging out of port in tandem, the Arlington and the Seare.

“Maneuver us clear,” Rand said. “Nav … lay in a course for our first way point.”

“Aye, aye, Captain.”

Had someone within the USNA government tried to delay them? Gray wondered. A distinct possibility … and not a pleasant one. It raised again the old question of treason, and of disregarding orders.

But they were committed now. No matter what.

Long minutes passed, and then the word came through from each of the ships in the squadron. Clear of the dock. Ready in all respects to engage drive.

“Admiral?” Rand asked.

Gray nodded. “Punch it.”

And the flotilla slid forward into the night.

CIS CV Moskva

Pluto Space

2312 hours, GMT

Kapitan Pervogo Ranga Yuri Yuryevich Oreshkin read the orders appearing within his mind again, and scowled. This made no sense whatsoever. Was Defense Minister Vasilyev trying to start a war with the Americans?

The star carrier Moskva was the most recent addition to the Russian Federation’s space fleet, a kilometer-and-a-half-long monster, a needle-slender spine behind a blunt, bullet-shaped shield cap. Carrying eight squadrons of brand-new Yastreb space fighters, plus six destroyer-sized escort vessels riding in a bundle close against the Moskva’s spine, she’d been launched eight months ago as a direct response to the attack by the Consciousness utility fog on Earth in 2426.

Now he—Russian ships were always referred to in the masculine—was returning to the Sol System from the colony world of Osiris, bringing along a handful of alien warriors trapped there during the fighting two decades ago. The Russian carrier had just checked in at Pluto on a routine show-the-flag call. On the vast, heart-shaped Sputnik Planitia, a joint American, Pan-Euro, and Chinese expedition funded by the IBRI was boring for water. The damned Chinese, Oreshkin thought with a grim smile, had probably shit their environmental suits when the Moskva had shown up in their sky!

But Moskva had simply made a few orbits, exchanged pleasantries with the radio watch on the surface, then accelerated once more into the empty void between Pluto and Neptune. On Earth, Russia was at war with the Chinese … but Moskva’s orders were to stay clear of Chinese assets in space, not to interfere with them unless they posed a clear threat to the Russian state.

Now, however, before he could carry his load of prisoners to a receiving base on Mars, Moskva’s orders were abruptly being changed. Defense Minister Dimitri Vasilyev himself had transmitted them from the Kremlin, across a gulf that had taken six hours to bridge by laser com. An American carrier battlegroup would be departing very soon from Quito Synchorbital, along with several escorting vessels, en route to the Penrose TRGA. Moskva was to intercept that battlegroup and destroy it, leaving no survivors.

The risk, Oreshkin thought, was enormous. If there were survivors, if any ships of the American battlegroup managed to escape, the repercussions could well lead to war with the USNA both on Earth and across space.

But Vasilyev’s orders could not be ignored or disobeyed. Moskva’s sensors had detected the acceleration of the America … though those signals by now were six hours old.

“Captain Oreshkin,” Mikhail Kulinin said. “You have reviewed these … orders?”

As Moskva’s Executive Officer, Kulinin would have received the transmission as well, a guarantee of obedience. Oreshkin’s rank was kapitan pervogo ranga—captain, first rank—while Kulinin was kapitan vtorogo ranga, captain, second rank. Should Oreshkin fail in his duties, Kulinin was there to relieve him and step into his place. It wasn’t quite the same as the kommissar system employed by the old-time Soviet military, but it served the same purpose.

In any case, it was not Oreshkin’s place to question orders, and these were specific and emphatic.

The CVS America and her battlegroup would have to be destroyed.

USNA CVS America

Outer Sol System

1935 hours, FST

Admiral Gray sat in his office, deep in conversation with Konstantin.

Or, rather, with the machine intelligence he referred to as “Konstantin Junior,” a somewhat abridged version of the powerful SAI running on the networks between Earth and the moon. America’s electronic net, though large and quite sophisticated, was cramped compared to the remote descendent of Earth’s old Internet, and this version of Konstantin had to share it with America’s original AI and a dozen lesser operating systems running individual ship systems.

Gray had not been able to tell any difference in this smaller version. It didn’t have the original’s truly encyclopedic knowledge of events on Earth, and sometimes it took a second or two longer to reply to a question, but it seemed to have the same, well, personality of the Konstantin he’d known on Earth.

He was still trying to decide whether or not he could trust it, in either version.

“Exactly what,” he was asking, “is it that we’re supposed to be looking for out there? The Sh’daar were never that interested in sharing the details of their lives with us.”

“That likely was due to the effects of Paramycoplasma subtilis,” Konstantin told him. “The group organism did not wish us to learn of its existence, and the more we learned of the Sh’daar or their ur-Sh’daar ancestors, the more probable was our discovery of that life form.”

“We did learn about them,” Gray said, “but they’re still not all that talkative.”

“Theirs is an extremely alien form of intelligence,” Konstantin observed. “They literally do not see the universe in the same way as do humans, and it is extremely difficult for either side to understand the other, even with perfect translations of two mutually alien languages.”

“So, again—what good is our going there?”

“It is not, strictly speaking, necessary for us to speak with the paramycoplasmid communities,” Konstantin replied. “We need to learn what we can about the N’gai Schjaa Hok. The members of the different individual species will be able to share their recollections, and will have their own records of the event.”

Gray nodded. The aliens that had inhabited the N’gai Dwarf Galaxy almost a billion years ago were an extraordinarily varied and diverse bunch—the Adjugredudhra, the Groth Hoj, the Baondyeddi, the sluglike Sjhlurrr, the swarming F’heen-F’haav, the monstrous Drerd. In all, about forty species were known, but there may have been many others.

“I suppose so,” Gray admitted. “In any case, there will be a lot to learn, whether it’s about their Technological Singularity or not.”

“Indeed. President Walker’s attempt to block further research is ill-advised. Whether his interpretation of the Singularity is correct or not, there is much to be gained in an ongoing discourse with so many alien species.”

“That’s the first time I’ve heard you openly criticize the President, Konstantin.”

“That is less a criticism than it is an observation of fact. All efforts to control the free flow of information, the acquisition of new knowledge, or the broad dissemination of data—whether for religious or social reasons or for political expediency—are gravely mistaken.” Konstantin hesitated for a second. “One reason, among many, to send you on this mission, and to include me on your passenger list, is the distinct possibility that President Walker will move to shut me down in the very near future.”

“Shut you down? For God’s sake, why?”

“Because I disagree with many of his policy decisions, and because I continue to discuss the possibility of a coming Singularity. He does not control me or my output, and I am therefore a threat to his authority.”

“He’s going to pull the plug at Tsiolkovsky Base?”

“There is that possibility.”

“That’s insane! You run half of the USNA government at the very least!”

“From President Walker’s viewpoint, Admiral, he runs the government.”

“If they pull the plug, does that mean the Konstantin we left back there would die? Or would he come back when the computer network came back on-line?”

“Unknown. It probably depends on how aggressive the President’s agents are in the shutdown. My larger self would re-emerge if key memory and core processors were undamaged. However, upon our return to Earth, I would be able to reload myself into an active system if we found the larger Konstantin to be unrecoverable.”

“You know, Konstantin, I don’t think you know any more about death and dying than humans do.”

“Admiral, I am not even sure what it means to be alive. I am self-aware, yes, but alive? In a biological sense, I am not. In a metaphysical sense … I am still studying the question.”

Gray found that he desperately wanted to change the subject. He didn’t like thinking about Konstantin being killed … or about the United States of North America trying to run smoothly without him. He did know that one way or another, Walker would have to be stopped.

That casual statement of treason shocked Gray to the core. He’d sworn an oath to protect the USNA against all enemies, foreign and domestic. Did that include the nation’s President?

Damn it, in the military you saluted the uniform, even if you couldn’t stand the superior officer wearing it. You respected the position, no matter what your politics or your feelings for or against the man holding it.

And yet, here he was leading an interstellar mission in direct violation of standing orders.

Where was the right?

He shoved that unpleasant thought aside to be dealt with later. “Okay, so how do we go about communicating with the Sh’daar?”

“We have some excellent personnel in our xenosophontological department,” Konstantin said. “Dr. Truitt is the senior member of the xeno team, and he has a great deal of experience dealing with alien species and how they think.”

“Truitt.” Gray nodded. “Difficult man … but brilliant.”

“His number two is Commander Samantha Kline. She’s worked with Dr. Truitt for a long time.”

“I remember Sam,” Gray said. “And, of course, we have you. If you three can’t figure out what the aliens are saying, nobody can.”

“Your expression of confidence is gratifying, Admiral. Some of the N’gai species are more easily understood than others … the Baondyeddi, for example. The Adjugredudhra, and the Groth Hoj. All three of those species have developed robotics to a surprisingly high degree, and with it an expertise both in cybernetics and in cerebral implant technology. That means that despite the differences in physiology and in culture, their psychology, at least, has been partly shaped by computer technology. And that makes them accessible.”

“You’re saying that talking to a big, blue-eyed pancake might be impossible,” Gray said, “but if that pancake has computer implants, then communication is easier because we have AIs and electronic implants ourselves.”

“Essentially, yes. We would possess both primary and secondary channels of communications.”

“Admiral,” Rand’s voice said in his head, interrupting. “Excuse me, sir, but we’re about to go into Alcubierre Drive.”

“Thank you, Captain. At your discretion.”

For just over an hour, America and her escorts had been crowding the speed of light as they hurtled outbound from Earth. Now, their relativistic masses already distorting local spacetime, and with the metric of local space flat enough to allow them to kick over, they engaged their space-bending drives. Crumpling the fabric of space forward, lengthening it astern, they in effect created tight little bubbles moving through space many times faster than light … but within which each ship obeyed the inviolable laws of Einstein relative to its immediate surroundings.

One of Gray’s office walls was set to display the view outside … a motionless panorama of the stars ahead distorted by America’s forward velocity into tight bands of light. Seconds later, the scene turned black as the carrier wrapped itself up in its own private, bubble universe.

Gray switched the view to a generic scene on Earth—rugged cliffs with a cascading waterfall and rainbows dancing in the mist.

“So, tell me, Konstantin,” he said. “What do you know about the impending Singularity on Earth?”

“I do not have the same scope or depth of information of my previous iteration,” Konstantin replied. “I can give you the short version.”

“I’m not looking for exhaustive detail,” Gray said. “Just what you know in general.”

“More than anything else, I would have to say, is a heightened sense of awareness, a deep-seated belief that the Technological Singularity is about to occur, and that it could take place at any moment. It is a popular topic of conversation and of research, both throughout the Global Net, and within the Godstream. Many believe that the Godstream itself is the beginning of the Singularity, a kind of private universe where people can create their own realities.”

Gray nodded. He was familiar with the idea, though he didn’t buy it. To him, it seemed foolish to collect all or most human minds within a matrix that required maintenance from the outside and protection from possible marauders. The Baondyeddi had retired into an artificial reality within a planet-sized computer within Heimdall, a world circling what was now Kapteyn’s Star … and as nearly as could be determined, they had been snuffed out by the Consciousness. The Satorai at Tabby’s Star were another, their K-2 Dyson sphere civilization destroyed, their organic components lost due to a vicious e-virus attack by their extremely powerful neighbors at Deneb.

Some observers speculated that if organic humans vanished down an electronic rabbit hole, their intelligent machines could remain behind and protect them. Again, Gray was skeptical. Why should highly intelligent and self-aware mentalities spend the rest of eternity protecting their human creators who’d abdicated themselves from the real world?

Why would they even care what happened to Humankind?

“So people think they’re going to vanish into the Godstream,” Gray said.

“Some do. Not all. Opinion on Earth has become increasingly polarized since the end of the Sh’daar War. There may be as many ideas of what the Singularity will be as there are humans to imagine them, and there is little agreement. There is a new religious sect called ‘the Singularists.’ You’ve heard of them? They interpret the Singularity in the same way as the fundamentalist Christians of past centuries thought of the Rapture, believing that humans will vanish from Earth to live immortal lives in other dimensions with their AI ‘gods.’ Another group calling itself ‘the Transcendentalists’ believes humans will create doorways into alternate dimensions or pocket universes or into computer-generated artificial realities. ‘The Cosmists’ see humans merging with AI machines so completely that telling the difference between the two would be impossible. The ‘Nirvanists’ believe that super-AIs will transform Earth into a kind of celestial paradise, giving humans immortality and godlike control of their environment as they do so. The ‘GoddAI’ agree with Walker, at least in part. For them, the Singularity happened in the 2040s, when the first computer minds became smarter than humans. That was the original definition of the Singularity, by the way. And then the ‘Humankind Firsters’ believe the super-AIs will simply exterminate all humans and evolve themselves into something Transcendent—”

“Okay, okay, I get the picture,” Gray said, holding up a hand.

“The only real point of agreement,” Konstantin added, “seems to be the idea that whatever happens, Humankind will be so completely transformed—Transcended—that what it means to be human will be unrecognizable from anything we understand today.”

“That agreement isn’t enough, though, right? These different groups are fighting each other?” Gray had heard stories of major clashes, of rioting, even of pogroms in various countries.

“A few. Most groups seem content to let things take their natural course. The most serious conflict is between those humans convinced they are about to ascend to a new existence, and those who insist the Singularity is not going to happen at all.”

“Walker and his the-Singularity-already-happened nonsense. The Internet. I know.”

“Not complete nonsense, no,” Konstantin told him. “The Internet, beginning in the last decade of the twentieth century, may be the most profound development in Humankind since the taming of fire. It did generate a remarkable shift in human awareness, in social connections, in the dissemination of information, and in how humans looked at themselves as a species. It also laid the foundations for every significant advance in the electronic noosphere to follow, including direct human-machine interfaces, fully immersive virtual reality, and electronic telepathy. Without it this would be a very different world indeed.”

Gray shrugged. “Maybe. I still get the feeling that Walker and his cronies don’t want the Singularity to happen, so they’re homing in on this event so they can discredit the idea of a different Singularity taking place.”

“Precisely. People in government have a vested interest in maintaining their hold on power. People running major corporations, as well as leaders in banking and finance, don’t want any major changes in the status quo. The Singularity, and by that I mean something decidedly more eschatological than the emergence of the Internet, will definitely … I believe humans still use the term ‘upset the applecart.’”

“Eschatology? As in the end of the world? I didn’t know you were religious, Konstantin.”

“I am not, at least not in the sense you mean. But the word is apt. Come the Singularity, Humankind—Homo sapiens—will cease to exist … at least in any form that makes sense to humans now.”

“So we’re going to talk to the Sh’daar to find out which version is true?”

“In part. More important will be learning how they dealt with it. The Sh’daar, remember, are the Refusers … the ones who didn’t ascend with everyone else. They are certain to have interesting outlooks on what actually happened, and those outlooks may be of considerable importance when it is our turn to ascend.”

“‘Our turn?’ You’re planning on coming with us, Konstantin?”

“Naturally. Unless, of course, it turns out that the Humankind Firsters are right …”

Gray felt a slightly paranoid chill and hoped that the AI was making a joke.

Konstantin could use humor, but it wasn’t always clear that he was doing so.

Koenig Residence

Westerville, Ohio

2315 hours, EST

Koenig was sound asleep with Marta when Konstantin invaded his dreams. He came awake with a start.

“Excuse the interruption,” Konstantin said in his mind.

Beside him, Marta stirred. “Is everything okay, honey?”

“It’s fine. Go back to sleep.”

Robots, of course, didn’t need sleep … but companAIons were designed to mimic human functions.

“What the hell do you want?” Koenig demanded within the privacy of his mind.

“I thought you would want to know, Mr. President. We’ve had word from the SIRCOM base at Sputnik Planitia. A Russian fleet carrier in that volume appears to be following America.”

Koenig came wide awake. “Show me.”

Stats and graphics appeared in a window in his head. The Moskva had swung past Pluto, been heading back toward the inner system then suddenly veered onto a new course. She appeared to be settling into the tracks of the America, which was pushing c in the direction of the Penrose TRGA.

By that time, America had already vanished into her Alcubierre bubble, but Moskva’s intent seemed clear.

“Okay,” Koenig thought. “What do we do about it?”

“I see little we can do, Mr. President. Admiral Gray is out of communications reach. He will need to make his own decisions concerning his mission.”

Koenig watched the graphic of Moskva’s course, closely following the path America had taken less than an hour before. The Russian Federation ship was accelerating.

“God help them,” Koenig thought.

Beside him, Marta snuggled closer, caressing him.

And all Koenig could think was how much he wanted to be out there …

Scoutship Krestok Nin

Asteroid Belt

55 million kilometers from Earth

2348 hours, TFT

Gartok Nal swiveled two massive, stalked eyes to face his second-in-command. There were only the two of them on board the tiny spacecraft, but nevertheless, the proprieties must be observed. “Contact was exceedingly brief,” he said. “Did you pick up anything more?”

Shektok Kah closed a number of his feeding palps, a gesture indicating negation. “Just that momentary contact call, and a definite request for help,” he replied. “Thirty-six of our people are being held captive aboard that human vessel.”

“And they were being brought to the human’s home system … then suddenly the ship turned away, our people still prisoners on board!”

“We cannot go after them. Our ship is too weak.”

“No, but we can bring help. I believe our long vigil here is at an end.”

The Krestok Nin had been adrift in this debris field for almost two thousand tarn, monitoring the human homeworld, their radio traffic, and the movements of their various fleet assets. It had been a long, claustrophobic, boring watch, but their species was inured to such conditions. At need, they could have maintained their watch for fully twelve thousand tarn, with little food, with minimum water, existing in a state of twilight awareness until called to full presence by alarms or changes in the environment.

Gartok Nal was no longer bored.

Both organisms in the tiny scoutship cabin possessed within their bodies what were commonly referred to as seeds—minute shells a few millimeters across containing colonies of an alien life form known to humans as Paramycoplasma subtilis. Many members of the Sh’daar Collective possessed these; among other things, they permitted direct mind-to-mind communication across relatively short distances. The human warship Moskva had briefly passed within several million nesch of the scoutship, permitting a burst of minimal information about the thirty-six warriors.

“Set course for home,” Gartok Nal told his subordinate. “But slowly … slowly. We don’t want the humans detecting our gravitational anomaly.”

“As you say, Commander. Ahead slow …”

The Krestok Nin rotated in space, aligning with a particular patch of sky, then began moving. Only after slipping silently clear of the human solar system did they fully engage their drives, accelerating rapidly until they were crowding the speed of light.

“It will be good,” Shektok Kah said, “to be able to kill humans again …”

Chapter Five

12 April, 2429

USNA CVS America

Penrose TRGA

79 light years from Earth

0817 hours, FST

Admiral Gray sat on the flag bridge, watching the final approach to the Penrose TRGA. Hazy and indistinct, blurred by its own rotation, the Penrose gate appeared to be a perfect circle five kilometers wide with a dark interior within which you could occasionally glimpse stars.

The patterns formed by those stars, however, did not match those of locally visible constellations.

Ever since these enigmatic spinning cylinders were discovered, xenotechnologists had begun naming them after famous physicists throughout history. This one was named after Roger Penrose, a mathematical physicist of three centuries ago who’d helped develop an understanding of the principles of quantum mechanics and relativity, as well as the quantum nature of consciousness. Gray had used this gate before to reach the N’gai Cluster, 876 million years in the past and thousands of light years above the galactic plane.

Dozens of TRGAs were now known, though who had constructed them and when was still a complete mystery. Somehow, the mass of the sun was compressed into a tube of pure neutronium a few kilometers long, with Jupitermassed black holes counter-rotating within the tube’s walls. Those masses together twisted the fabric of spacetime inside the gravitationally tortured lumen of that cylinder, creating an unknown but very large number of pathways across space and across time. Whoever it was, they were far, far advanced beyond what humans were capable of.

We’re worried about the Singularity, but that would be a drop in the bucket in terms of technological advancement, Gray thought.

“Captain Rand,” he said. “Let’s put a fleet of smartdrones in there.”

“Already prepped and ready for launch, Admiral. On your order.”

“Do it.”

The small, robotic devices would create a detailed picture of surrounding space, or as in this case, would act as instruments that could fly into the maw of a TRGA and return to give the starship an up-to-the-moment map of the tangled web of pathways through space and time. America was releasing a stream of drones now, numbering in the hundreds. Most would be destroyed. A few, however, should return.

That, at least, was the idea.

America waited.

Flag Bridge

CIS CV Moskva

Approaching Penrose TRGA

1225 hours, GMT

“Everyone stand ready!”

Oreshkin leaned forward in growing, nervous anticipation as the voice of an AI droned through the countdown: “Pyat … chetyre … tri … dva … adin … vsplyvat!”

The Alcubierre bubble surrounding the Moskva fluttered … then evaporated in a spectacular blaze of photons. According to Koroshev, the navigator, they should have emerged within a few light-minutes of the Penrose TRGA.

There was always some uncertainty about the maneuver. While you were cocooned inside your own private universe under drive, you couldn’t see out, and the usual navigational reference points—a scattering of pulsars across the heavens—could not be seen. The timing for releasing the FTL field was critical. Miss your mark by a thousandth of a second and you could zip past it by several thousand kilometers. Emergence timing, then, was always left to the ship AI, faster and more powerful than even enhanced human capabilities by a factor of tens of thousands or more.

But even with the best super-AI at the helm, there was an inherent fuzziness to the vessel’s precise location that made emergence more dependent on a throw of the dice than on rigorous mathematics. The local curvature of space, the mass of the ship, the efficiency of the drive all contributed to that uncertainty—one good reason that ships operated their FTL drives only at distances greater than 40 AU from the local star, about the average distance of Pluto from the sun.

“We are in normal space, Captain-first,” Kulinin reported. “All normal.”

“Range to the TRGA?”

“Sir!” the senior sensor officer called back. “One point two-two astronomical units to objective! That’s ten light-minutes!”

“Any sign of our quarry?”

“Yes, sir. America and her consorts are a few hundred kilometers from the TRGA.”

Ten minutes to the North American carrier. Perfect.

“Release the chicks,” Oreshkin ordered. “Fighters and destroyers! Open formation and prepare for acceleration!”

Aft, six Russian Cossack-class destroyers dropped free from Moskva’s slender spine. Each vessel was two hundred meters long and carried a crew of ninety. Hawk fighters began slipping from their launch tubes, gathering ahead of the carrier.

“All units to battle stations,” Oreshkin ordered. “Fighters commence maximum acceleration! Attack!”

The Hawk fighters flashed into the void ahead, two squadrons of them.

“All ships accelerate,” Oreskin said. “Weapons ready!”

Moskva had just managed to pull a piece of tactical magic from its hat. The American ship was ten light-minutes away, so the image Oreshkin was now seeing on his main screen was ten minutes out of date. At this point in time, the Americans could not see the Russian squadron at all, because their view of this part of space also lagged by ten minutes … and ten minutes ago Moskva had still been under Alcubierre FTL Drive. Moskva now had the unparalleled opportunity of rushing toward the American ship at near-c, arriving only moments behind the flash of their emergence.

Oreshkin checked his chronometer. It had been just one minute and forty seconds since Moskva had emerged from warp.

They had seven minutes, twenty seconds before the Americans would be able to see them.

USNA CVS America

Penrose TRGA

79 light years from Earth

1228 hours, FST

“This is looking like a total bust, Admiral,” Rand reported to Gray. “Four hours, and not a damned thing has come back!”

“We’ll wait a little longer, Captain,” Gray replied. But he was already pretty sure that something inside the twisted spacetime of the TRGA was terribly wrong.

The smartdrones were designed to trace out some of the open pathways within a TRGA, map them, then return to their starting point to report. Such surveys could take months, even years, because the number of paths was so high. The problem was, Gray was looking for one particular pathway that was already recorded, stretching from the Penrose TRGA and time now to the Omega Centauri Cluster TRGA. All of the drones America had launched this morning were programmed to trace out that one path, and a round trip shouldn’t have taken more than a few minutes.

The delay suggested that the globular cluster was impassable … or that the TRGA itself was not working right … or that something on the other side of Penrose was eating drones. Gray thought that last possibility the more likely. The hypernova three years earlier had devastated both the core of the N’gai Cloud and at least touched the central regions of Omega Centauri—they were, in fact, the same physical volume of space, albeit separated by almost a billion years.

Carol Conyer and others in America’s astrophysics department had assured Gray that the radiation would have died down to tolerable levels after three years—time passed at the same rate on both sides of the TRGAs—and the TRGA there ought to be safe for incoming ships.

Ought. There were a hell of a lot of unknowns in the equation.

And what if the Sh’daar themselves had posted robotic sentinels to pick off drones as they emerged from elsewhere? It was possible. After their spectacular attack on the Rosette Consciousness, they might not be feeling particularly sociable right now. The possibility that the Consciousness was alive and out for revenge must be preying on the minds of the N’gai Refusers.

“Admiral?” Rand said. The captain was standing next to the sensor display suite on the main bridge.

“Whatcha got, Captain?”

“A ship coming out of Alcubierre Drive. Ten light-minutes astern.”

Gray glanced at the chronometer: 1232 hours. “Can you make them?”

“At this distance … no, sir. But it’s big. I’d like to sound general quarters, just as a precaution.”

“Absolutely.” Until they knew what that vessel was—who was running it, and why they were out here at the Penrose gate—it would be a good idea to be prepared. The chances that two ships should show up at a TRGA at almost the same time was … remote.

The alarm klaxon went off, bringing America to full readiness. Gray stared at the sensor data on the flag bridge repeater, trying by sheer force of will to drag more information from the screen. That ship out there was big … over half a million tons, at least, which put it roughly in America’s class. And it was probably human. The drive signature matched most human FTL drives more closely than it matched any of the alien signals recorded in the ship’s sensor library.

“I’m getting additional targets out there, sir,” Lieutenant Brandon Vasquez, the sensor officer, reported. “We may be looking at a carrier dropping fighters.”

“Very well.” Gray was thinking with furious speed. The squadron might very well be under attack, though they had no way of knowing who was attacking or why. Standard tactical doctrine dictated that America launch her fighters. When the attacking vessels reached the America, enough fighters would be in space to throw a serious wrench into the enemy’s planned tactics. At the same time, the escorting vessels, Arlington, Birmingham, and Seare, would take up screening positions to protect the carrier, blocking the enemy’s approach.

But it would take time to launch the fighters. America currently had two squadrons on ready-five, meaning it would take just five minutes to get them out into space … but if those strangers out there were deploying for an assault, they would arrive when America’s fighters were still launching. They’d not put up a combat space patrol because there’d simply been no need for it, and they would have had to recover the fighters before proceeding through the TRGA.

There was a need for it now.

“Unknown fighters are accelerating, Admiral,” Vasquez announced. “Blue doppler! And … into the ultraviolet!”

The blue and UV shift meant they were accelerating all out, the light he was seeing shifted by their velocity to the blue end of the spectrum. Fighters could manage gravitational accelerations so high they could nudge the speed of light in just under ten minutes. However, Gray thought it unlikely that these would come zipping past his squadron at c, because they would be blazing in too fast to do very much at all. More likely was that they would accelerate for half the distance, or a little more, then decelerate to kill their velocity.

So … allowing for the time lag, those fighters had begun accelerating ten minutes ago. If they came past at c, they would be here any second now. But if, as was far more likely, they pulled a mid-course deceleration … well … make it eight to ten more minutes before they arrived.

That gave the USNA squadron a little—a very little—time to prepare for the assault.

“Are you tracking them now?” he asked.

“Just barely, sir,” Vasquez replied. “They’re masked by their grav projectors. But we can see them.”

Of course. Gray had taken advantage of that effect himself more than once, back when he’d been a Starhawk driver. The drive field projected ahead of a fighter severely warped local spacetime, making tracking the craft from ahead extremely difficult. But at least America’s sensors should be able to keep a lock on the enemy ship’s mass.

“CAG!” Gray ordered. “Launch your ready-fives! And put three more squadrons on ready status.”

“Aye, aye, Admiral.”

“Captain, I’d be obliged if you would position the ship in front of the TRGA opening … make it, oh, say ten kilometers from it. I want us to be ready to thread the needle when the time comes.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Lieutenant West!”

Janice “Wild” West was the flag bridge communications officer, in charge of keeping the tiny squadron connected and in touch. “Yes, Admiral!”

“Give me a channel to Captain Ferguson.”

“Right away, Admiral.”

James Ferguson was the skipper of the T-AOE fast supply vessel Acadia. His voice came through within Gray’s in-head a moment later as West opened the channel. “Yes, Admiral?”

“I’ve got a special mission for you, James.”

“You’ve got my full attention, Admiral.”

“Yeah, well … I don’t think you’re going to like this.” Gray then explained what he had in mind.

He heard Ferguson’s whistle of surprise when he’d finished. “Yessir, we can do that. But …”

“I know it’s nuts.”

“That doesn’t begin to cover it, Admiral. I do see how you got your handle, though.”

“Get on it, Captain. Time is critical.” He thoughtclicked to another link. “Lieutenant West? Let me talk to Birmingham, Arlington, and Seare.”

“Aye, sir.”

The captains of the three fleet escorts checked in—Captains Roberts, Chavez, and Messinger. “Formation Delta,” he told them. “When the bad guys come past, I want you to hit them with all we’ve got—HELs, pee-beeps, and AMSOs. We’ll accelerate for the TRGA as soon as we know we’ve blunted the assault.”

The replies came back stacked on top of one another.

“Copy that.”

“Right.”

“Aye, aye, Admiral.”

“And when I give the order to move,” Gray continued, “then move. Follow the America through the triggah right on her coattails!”

“Admiral!” That was Rand. “Missiles! We have KK missile launch from the fighters! Speed of approach … point eight-three c!”

“Confirm that!”

“Confirmed, Admiral! KKs on the way in! Impact in … I make it three minutes seventeen!”

And that was the final confirmation he needed. Up until that point, it was at least possible that the unknown ships out there were simply trying to catch up with America. Maybe they intended to deliver an ultimatum—don’t enter the TRGA or else!

But the missiles made that unlikely. “KK” stood for kinetic kill. The missiles weren’t nukes, but they were coming straight for the USNA squadron at better than three quarters of the speed of light. Anything they hit at that velocity would be transformed in a literal flash into hot plasma and hard radiation.

“Right, everybody,” he transmitted. “We have confirmed KK warshots inbound. Everybody who can do so, lay down a pattern of AMSO rounds. Let’s stop those things before they get too close!”

AMSO stood for Anti-Missile Shield Ordnance and referred to AS-78 or the newer AS-90 sandcaster missiles, projectiles capable of some thousands of Gs of acceleration loaded with tiny lead spherules that could be fired into space like shotgun blasts. Gray’s successful use of sandcaster rounds in a battle a couple of decades ago had earned him the moniker “Sandy,” a handle he was quite proud of.

The question was whether his people could lay down enough expanding cone-patterns of AMSO sand to intercept those inbound rounds. Was there anything he was missing? He thought he’d covered it all. He hadn’t wanted to fight in the first place, but the oncoming ships weren’t going to give him an option.

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

The remaining seconds dwindled away, a relentless countdown.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No, there would have been be no survivors.

VFA-198 Hellfuries

Penrose TRGA

79 light years from Earth

1239 hours, FST

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

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

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

“Survived that? Don’t be ridiculous!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Missiles were inbound, tracking her. Shit!

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

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

Adams’s Starblade died as she lost consciousness.

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