LITMIR.BIZ

      Prologue

      Some three hundred fifty light years from the exact center of the Milky Way Galaxy, the Marine OM-27 Eavesdropper Major Dion Williams forced its way through the howling storm.

      The howl, in this case, was purely electronic in the vacuum of space, a shrill screech caused by the flux of dust particles interacting with the Williams’ magnetic shields. But since the tiny vessel’s crew consisted of uploaded t-Human minds and a powerful Artificial Intelligence named Luther, all of them resident within the Williams’ electronic circuitry, they “heard” the interference as a shrieking roar. The tiny vessel shuddered as it plowed through the deadly wavefront of charged particles.

      “Sir! There it is again!” Lieutenant (u/l) Miek Vrellit indicated a pulse of coherent energy coming through the primary scanner. “Do you see it?”

      “Yeah,” Captain (u/l) Foress Talendiaminh replied. “Looks like a gravitational lensing effect.”

      “Yeah, but it’s not noise! There’s real data in there!”

      “What do you make of it, Luther?”

      “Lieutenant Vrellit is correct,” the AI replied, as the data sang across the ship’s circuitry. “There is data content. I cannot, however, read it. This appears to be a new type of encryption.”

      “But the signal’s coming from inside the event horizon!” Talendiaminh said. “That’s impossible!”

      “I suggest, sir,” the AI said, “that we record what we can and transmit it to HQ. Let them determine what is or is not possible.”

      “Agreed.”

      But then, as seconds passed, Vrellit sensed something else. “Wait a second! Anyone feel that?”

      “What?”

      “Something like …”

      And then circuitry flared into a white-hot mist, followed half a second later by a fast-expanding cloud of gas as the Williams began to dissolve.

      The monitor’s faster-than-light QCC signals were already being received some twenty-six thousand light years away, on the remote outskirts of Earth’s solar system. The last transmission received was Lieutenant Vrellit’s electronic voice, a shriek louder than the storm of radiation.

       “Get! Them! Out! Of! My! Mind! …”

       “Star Lord, you are needed.”

      Star Lord Ared Goradon felt the odd, inner twist of shifting realities, and groaned. Not now! Whoever was dragging him out of the VirSim, he decided, had better have a damned good reason.

      “Lord Goradon,” the voice of his AI assistant whispered again in his mind, “there is an emergency.” When he didn’t immediately respond, the AI said, more urgently, “Star Lord, wake up! We need you fully conscious!”

      Reluctantly, he swam up out of the warmth of the artificially induced lucid dream, the last of the sim’s erotic caresses tattering and fading away. He sat up on his dream couch, blinking against the light. His heart was pounding, though whether from his physical exertions in the VirSim or from the shock of being so abruptly yanked back to the rWorld, he couldn’t tell.

      The wall opposite the couch glared and flickered in orange and black. “What is it?”

      “A xeno riot, Lord,” the voice told him. “It appears to be out of control. You may need to evacuate.”

      “What, here?” It wasn’t possible. The psych index for Kaleed’s general population had been perfectly stable for months, even with the news of difficulties elsewhere.

      But on his wall, the world was burning.

      It was a small world, to be sure—an artificial ring three thousand kilometers around and five hundred wide, rotating to provide simulated gravity and with matrix fields across each end of the narrow tube to hold in the air. Around the perimeter, where patchwork patterns of sea and land provided the foundation for Kaleed’s scattered cities and agro centers, eight centuries of peace had come to an end in a single, shattering night.

      The

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