LITMIR.BIZ

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or unlikely it might be. But when you heard the same story again and again from a number of different sources, no matter how outrageous it might be, it seemed more and more possible with each hearing. The word circulating through America’s hab decks now was that a survey vessel, the Endeavor, had been attacked and destroyed by the Sh’daar at Omega Centauri, that Sh’daar forces were emerging in force from the Black Rosette, that America and her battlegroup were to be deployed there immediately. Cross and several others had been talking about the rumors at chow. Gregory had been resisting buying into the tales. Almost a month earlier, he’d heard stories circulating through the junior officers’ quarters to the effect that the battlegroup was bound for Osiris, for home, and he didn’t want to surrender that hope just yet.

      “Having the Nungies parked just sixteen light years from Sol is not my ‘personal problem,’ okay?”

      Gregory slapped his left palm down on the table next to his chair, allowing the exposed circuitry woven into the skin across the heel of his hand to come into contact with the table’s linkpad. Coffee, he thought, and added his personal code. A couple of seconds later, the coffee materialized on the receiver plate next to the pad, built up atom by atom so quickly it seemed to flash into solidity out of nothing in an instant. He picked up the mug—cool to the touch, with an animated image of America dropping out of Alcubierre Drive in a dazzling pulse of light—and sipped the coffee—hot enough to scald, with his preference of cream and sugar automatically added.

      Cross dropped into the seat next to Gregory’s and ordered a glass of scotch on the rocks. Alcohol would have been unthinkable on board a USNA ship a couple of centuries ago … but the swarms of nano circulating through his body would block damage to his organs, and permit a pleasant buzz without allowing him to get drunk.

      “Maybe ‘King’ Koenig doesn’t agree with you,” he suggested after taking a sip.

      “The way I heard it, the Confederation bigwigs were in a panic over just how close the Nungies and their friends were. They were pushing for an Osiris relief expedition.”

      “Some of them, maybe,” Cross admitted. “And the Chinese want Everdawn back, and the Islamics want Mufrid back and … fuck it. It’s all just politics anyway.”

      Gregory nodded in glum agreement. The Confederation seemed glacial in its resolve to win back worlds and systems taken from Sol decades before. There was plenty of talk, sure … talk about Humankind claiming its place among the stars, about systems belonging to humans but now ruled by beings so alien that a meeting of minds with them was virtually impossible. But, somehow, nothing was ever actually done after all of the promises and resolve. The Islamic colony at Mufrid—Eta Boötis IV—was the perfect example. Evacuated when the Turusch had invaded in 2404, Mufrid had been briefly freed a few months later when America and a small fleet returned and raided the system.

      But the battlegroup had moved on and Eta Boötis had been abandoned. The evacuees rescued from the planet’s inhospitable surface, some thousands of them, had been shipped back to Sol and ultimately transferred to refugee camps on Luna and within the Islamic Theocracy on Earth, where they remained to this day—still waiting.

      It was all so … stupid.

      Despite the clamor in some quarters of the Confederation itself, the Directorate in Geneva appeared to be in no hurry to reclaim Osiris or any of the other worlds taken from Confederation control during the past half century. As Cross had pointed out, it was all about politics. Neither the Theocracy nor the Chinese Hegemony were members of the Earth Confederation. Both, in fact, had been enemies of the Confederation at various times over the past few centuries, and Geneva certainly was not going to take care of their territorial issues with aliens before their own problems were addressed.

      Confederation, Theocracy, Hegemony, and the Independents—none seemed able to confront the Sh’daar clients as a united front, as Humankind rather than a ragged confusion of separate nation-states.

      “So,” Gregory said, “you coming in with me?”

      Cross downed the last of his drink and made a face. “Might as well. They’re not letting us off the damned ship, that’s for sure.”

      “All liberty cancelled,” Gregory said. “I know.”

      “I can see calling back the guys who might’ve gone Earthside or out to Luna. But why do they have to lock us up like we were prisoners, or something?”

      Gregory shrugged. “You played the sexinteractives at Angelo’s lately?”

      “Yeah, man. Hot. You’re not only there, smack in the middle of the fantasy of your choice, but it feels like your nerves are ’cubing on double capacity.”

      “Yup. Direct nanostimulation of the midbrain to stimulate a dopamine dump. Instantly addictive. Maybe they just don’t trust us to come back to the ship.”

      “Aw, it’s harmless as long as you’re pumped full of anti-a,” Cross said. “Battlegroup Command is just on a power trip, is all.”

      “Or,” Gregory said, settling back in the chair and closing his eyes, “maybe they just want to make sure we review this stuff.” He brought his palm down on the contact plate and relaxed.

      He had to deliver a mental code group, to get clearance. The information he was downloading came from the Agletsch, by way of Naval Intelligence, and was not for public access.

      After a moment, the data began scrolling past his mind’s eye.

       Executive Office, USNA

       Columbus, District of Columbia

       United States of North America

       2034 hours, EST

      “What the hell do your … masters think they’re doing?” Koenig demanded.

      He was in a virtual conference, standing in a … place, a world with towering mountains of ice on the horizon, and a night sky ablaze with the shifting green and red hues of a spectacular aurora. Stars gleamed, myriad pinpoints peeking through the auroral haze, and the intricate clots and twists and curlings of the Milky Way stretched across the zenith.

      It was a real place, Koenig knew, a Confederation colony established in 2294 by settlers from North America and Russia. Themis was the human name for the cluster of cities on the great southern continent of Zeta Doradus V, some thirty-eight light years from Sol. The place was surprisingly Earthlike in a galaxy of hundreds of billions of planetary bodies, most of which were quite different, quite alien from Earth. A living, vibrant world of vast oceans, violet forests, and brilliant sunlight, Zeta Doradus was best known as the place of First Contact—Humankind’s first meeting with an extrasolar species.

      Two of them—Gru’mulkisch and Dra’ethde—stood before Koenig now, looking up at him with almost comical twists to their stalked eyes—four apiece, rising from the spidery, flattened, sixteen-legged bodies covered in a velvety-brown leather patterned with gold and blue reticulations. Humans called them “bugs” or “spiders,” but in fact they were not much like either, with unsegmented bodies, an unpleasant mode of eating through their bellies, and sixteen limbs—short at the back and quite long at the front. Both were female; their male companions, like the mates of female Angler fish on Earth, were small parasites attached to their bodies. Properly, the beings were known as Agletsch.

      “The masters have told us nothing, President Koenig,” Gru’mulkisch said, speaking through the small translation device affixed to what might approximate its chest. “It is not in their nature to do so, yes-no?”

      “Are you certain that the attackers at Omega Centauri were Sh’daar?” Dra’ethde added. “Others might use the ancient transport systems. Others occupy the Great Deeps of the stars.”

      Koenig glared at the two small aliens. He’d known these two particular individuals for a long time, ever since he’d commanded CBG-18. When the fleet had departed for Operation Crown Arrow, striking deep into Sh’daar

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