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Authors: Ian Douglas

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Evolved how?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Experimenting how?” Koenig asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“More than an octillion spacetime pathways?”

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter Five

10 November 2424

Sh’daar Node

Texaghu Resch System

210 Light Years from Sol

1024 hours, TFT

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

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

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

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

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

TC/USNA CVS
America

USNA Naval Base

Quito Synchorbital

0840 hours, TFT

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

“Yes, sir?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Twenty minutes.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not good
, he thought.
Not good at all
. . . .

Executive Office, USNA

Columbus, District of Columbia

United States of North America

1215 hours, EST

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Well, some of them have.”

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

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

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

“Tell me something I don’t know.”

“They approached me yesterday with a question.”

“Yes?”

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

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

“You
know
?”

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