Chapter Four

      21 January 2425

      Squadron Briefing Room

      USNA CVS America

      In transit

      0950 hours, TFT

      By now, Omega Centauri was far behind. America and her escorts had threaded their way through the TRGA cylinder at Omega Centauri—­one of seven discovered so far in that star-­packed volume of space—­and emerged again at the original Sh’daar Node cylinder from which the acronym was taken . . . the Texaghu Resch Gravitational Anomaly.

      “Funny name,” a young Starhawk driver with lieutenant’s rank tabs at his throat said. “ ‘Texaghu.’ Does that have anything to do with Texas?”

      America’s fighter squadron pilots had been gathering on the carrier’s briefing-­room deck for the past ten minutes, now, and the place was already pretty crowded.

      “Nah,” Lieutenant Donald Gregory said. “But you’re new, right? Just came aboard a ­couple of months ago?”

      “That’s right.” The pilot extended his hand and Gregory took it. “Lieutenant Jamis Anderson. Late of the great state of Texas, and now with the Merry Reapers.”

      “Don Gregory.” He slapped the VFA-­96 squadron patch on his shoulder. “Black Demons.” He turned to introduce the attractive woman with him. “And this here is Meg Connor.”

      “Very pleased to meet you, ma’am,” Anderson said, a broad grin spreading across his face. “I downloaded your report about you and your run-­in with the Slan!”

      Connor, formerly of VFA-­140, the Dracos, had been captured by the highly advanced alien Slan in an operation at 36 Ophiuchi two months ago, but been rescued by the Marines shortly after. Her observations of her captors had helped Naval Intelligence put together a strategy to deal with the va Sh’daar aliens . . . and led to Admiral Gray’s unexpected victory over them a few days later at 70 Ophiuchi. Since then, her own squadron lost in the Slan attack, she’d been transferred to the Black Demons.

      “Texaghu Resch,” Gregory told him, “is Drukrhu—­that’s the principal Agetsch trade pidgin—­for a star originally catalogued by the Turusch, another Sh’daar client species. Means ‘the Eye of Resch.’ Actually, it’s a transliteration from the language of a species called the Chelk.”

      “Never heard of ’em.”

      “They’re extinct,” Connor told him. “Apparently, the star was seen as the eye of a mythic god or hero in their culture, a being called Resch.”

      “And they’re extinct?”

      Gregory nodded. Whoever or whatever Resch had been, he’d not been powerful enough to save the Chelk. Like Humankind, they’d chosen to fight the Sh’daar rather than have their technologies restricted. “Humans haven’t been there, but according to the Agletsch, the Chelk homeworld is now a lifeless, airless, glassed-­over ball of charred and blasted rock. Seems like they didn’t get the Sh’daar memo about no technic singularities.”

      “Damn . . .”

      “It’s all written up in America’s archives,” Connor pointed out. “Interesting reading . . . and it helps you kind of stay focused on what we’re fighting for.”

      “Better living through higher technology,” Anderson said, still grinning. The catchphrase was currently a popular one, and expression of North America’s determination to continue Humankind’s exponential increase in GRIN technologies.

      “May I have your attention, please,” another voice said over the pilots’ in-­head circuitry. They turned to face the front of the briefing room, where Captain Fletcher, America’s CAG, stood on a low stage. “Please grow your seats and link in. We have the visuals from the recon flyby yesterday.”

      Chairs began emerging from the deck in neatly ordered rows, and the crowd—­more than two hundred strong—­began taking seats. America carried six fighter and strike squadrons, one recon squadron, and two search and rescues . . . fifteen hundred ­people if you included the support, intelligence, logistics, and maintenance personnel. But the meeting this morning had been called just for the pilots and flight officers—­the pointed end of America’s very big and powerful stick.

      With a rustle of motion and dwindling conversation, the crowd of men and women sat down and began linking in. The briefing would be carried out through America’s primary AI, and consisted of a download of information acquired by the recon squadron—­VQ-­7, the Sneaky Peaks. Commander James Henry Peak, who’d given his name to the group twenty-­some years ago, had long since been promoted to captain, rotated Earthside to Naval Intelligence, and eventually retired, but his old squadron had kept the punning name. VQ-­7’s current CO was Commander Thom McCabe, who was on the stage now with the CAG.

      “Good morning,” McCabe said. “I’m sure you’re all eager to see the results of our close recon pass of the Black Rosette yesterday. What Lieutenant Walton saw was . . . ­interesting. . . .”

      Data flowed into Gregory’s in-­head, and he opened an inner window to view it. He saw again the crowded inner reaches of the Omega Centauri cluster, millions of brilliant stars filling the sky, and, ahead, the blurred and eerie doughnut of blue light and gas, turned almost edge-­on, set in an infalling swirl of hot dust and tortured hydrogen atoms. Shadowy, vast structures hung in the distance, made indistinct by the dust . . . the stellarchitecture of the Rosette Aliens. America’s fighter squadrons had flown CAP over the past several days—­the term was from combat air patrol, an anachronistic holdover from the days of wet navies and atmospheric fighters—­but never approached the Rosette. It would be kind of nice, Gregory thought, to actually see up close what all of the fuss and scuttlebutt was about.

      The blurred disk grew larger, and the angle shifted as Walton’s ship approached, giving them a line of sight into the Rosette’s interior. Gregory saw scattered stars . . . a black and empty night sky . . .

      “We’ve slowed down the images by a factor of ten,” McCabe told the audience. “Lieutenant Walton was only over the Rosette for a few seconds, but by slowing down the feed we can see details that are not, at first, apparent. What we’re looking at here, obviously, is deep space . . . but you can see that it’s not the space within the cluster. The stars are few and far between. This particular line of sight, we think, lets us look through to a region out on the galactic rim.”

      One by one, the other spaces recorded during Walton’s passage came into view, each replacing the one that had gone before. The heart of a nebula . . . various starfields . . . the mottled, close-­up surface of a red sun . . . a scattering of distant galaxies . . .

      The final scene was of a searing field of radiant blue light, as though the line of sight was plunging into the heart of an exploding sun.

      McCabe froze the image there. A new window opened to one side, one showing the familiar blurred cylinder of a TRGA. The two images floated next to each other in Gregory’s mind at identical angles, allowing a close comparison.

      “Despite the obvious physical differences,” Commander McCabe went on, “the Rosette is a transport mechanism quite similar to the TRGAs, except for the size, of course. A TRGA, we now know, is a kind of everted Tipler machine. The original device—­the theory, rather—­was developed in 1974 by a physicist named Frank J. Tipler. According to him, a cylinder of extremely dense matter rotating at near-­light velocity would drag the spacetime fabric around it in a way that would permit what physicists call closed, timelike curves, creating gateways or portals across vast distances of both space and time. Two decades later, physicist Stephen Hawking demonstrated that closed, timelike curves were impossible, as was time travel.

      “Evidently, the TRGA Builders did not read Hawking. Instead, they seem to have turned the idea inside out, creating a hollow cylinder about a kilometer across, with solar-­sized masses rotating around the cylinder’s axis