LITMIR.BIZ

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be them. I just wish we knew a bit more about the Aggie agenda. What the hell do they get out of all of this?”

      “You will need to treat this … gift of information with caution,” Konstantin said. “The Agletsch are Sh’daar agents, members of the Sh’daar Collective. We must assume the Agletsch have an agenda of their own, a reason to share this information freely. It is unlikely that they would actively help us against the Collective.”

      “Maybe they’re tired of sticking to the Collective’s party line. Maybe they’re trying to rebel.”

      The idea had been explored before. In the past, some Agletsch had seemed to be working outside of any Sh’daar influence. Others definitely worked within. There’d been … hints that they would prefer that their entire civilization be free of Sh’daar influence. And, indeed, the information they had traded to humans in the past concerning various Sh’daar client races had again and again proven to be priceless.

       But what was their angle this time?

       And can we risk ignoring their advice while we try to figure that out?

      “I would like to send our best out there,” Koenig told the AI, coming to a decision.

      “The star carrier America,” Konstantin replied. “Admiral Gray.”

      “You know, Konstantin, we do have other star carriers. Not enough, maybe … but we have others.”

      “Most currently undergoing repairs.”

      “There are the Declaration and the Lexington.”

      “Both untried as yet. And the Declaration is still undergoing space trials. I recommend using America when she returns from the N’gai Cluster.”

      “We were going to deploy America out to the Black Rosette. Operation Omega.”

      “But to explore what might well be an entire Dyson sphere,” Konstantin pointed out, “it would be best to have several fighter wings available. Star carriers offer certain specific tactical advantages not possible with cruisers or even light carriers.”

      “Point,” Koenig conceded, reluctantly. “But we’ve taken some heavy casualties. We may not have the luxury of using our first choice.”

      TC/USNA CVS America

       Flag Bridge/CIC

       N’gai Cluster

       1640 hours, TFT

      Admiral Gray floated in the CIC, gazing into a tangled jungle of suns ahead, against which even the biggest Sh’daar warships appeared to be toys. He remembered this vista from his last deployment here, back when he’d been a fighter driver under the command of Admiral Koenig.

      Now he was admiral … but the view was the same.

      Local space was crowded with suns, including hundreds more brilliant than Venus at its brightest in the skies of Earth. Six stars, in particular, outshone all others—a perfect hexagram of dazzlingly brilliant blue suns gleaming almost directly ahead. The Six Suns were the hub of the N’gai Cluster, a kind of central, focal monument for the Cluster’s star-faring civilization. Each giant star was forty times the mass of distant Sol, orbiting with the others around a central gravitational balance point in a perfect Klemperer rosette. Obviously they’d been engineered that way, probably nudged in from elsewhere in the galaxy and dropped into position. Quite possible those blue-white giant suns themselves were artificial, engineered by some highly advanced science. The stellar arrangement suggested an astonishing degree of technological prowess and skill, one millions of years in advance of current human capabilities.

      Eight hundred and some million years in the future, in the time Gray thought of as the present, those suns had long since gone supernova, reducing themselves to black holes—the enigmatic Black Rosette at the center of Omega Centauri. The N’gai Cluster—a dwarf galaxy—had been devoured by the gravitational hunger of the much larger Milky Way. The Omega Centauri star cluster itself was now known to be the remnant nucleus of this, the N’gai Cluster, 872 million years later.

      Gray stared into the brilliance of the Six Suns, and wondered …

       What were the Rosette Aliens?

      All he knew was that they were enigmatic and highly advanced beings of unknown capabilities and unknown origin who’d appeared at the Black Rosette and begun building … something, a structure vast and utterly mysterious.

       Were the Rosette Aliens somehow related to the Sh’daar?

      Maybe we’re going to find out at last, Gray thought.

      Numerous other artifacts also hung against that dazzling starscape, all indicating an advanced civilization far more technically proficient, far more ancient than anything merely human, such as the TRGA cylinders and artificial planets, not to mention strange structures, vast and incomprehensible. There were enormous tube-shaped habitats hundreds of kilometers across, rotating to provide artificial gravity and displaying terrain across their curving inner surfaces spread out like maps. Black holes ringed by artificial structures were obvious sources of high-tech energy, and starships the size of sprawling cities made their way across the crowded backdrop of the dwarf galaxy’s core.

      A number of Sh’daar vessels, many considerably larger than America, by now had gathered around the human fleet, bending space briefly, and bringing the battlegroup across several light years to the dwarf galaxy’s heart. Now those ships were guiding America and the other vessels to their final destination, an entire world larger than Earth, covered over completely with black metal and the tangled, blazing knots of what could only be urban centers and vast industrial facilities. More of that planet’s surface appeared to be roofed over in artificial, light-drinking ebon materials than was open to the sky.

      It was a single city the size of a planet.

      The metallic world did not appear to have a sun, but was wandering among the densely packed stars of the cluster’s core, bathed in their light.

      “The Adjugredudhran commander of the Sh’daar flagship reports that this is their capital world,” Konstantin-2 reported. “Daar N’gah.”

      “Very well,” Gray replied. “Thank you. Do we have their permission to approach the consulate?”

      There was a long pause. “Affirmative, Admiral. Deep Time currently is in an extended orbit, about half a million kilometers farther on. They request that we give Daar N’gah wide clearance due to local traffic.”

      Which might, Gray reflected, be the full truth, or it might reflect Sh’daar concerns about more rebels appearing and the potential for collateral damage to the planet if another firefight began. Either way, it made sense to him from a tactical standpoint if he were in their position.

      “Tell them we will comply.”

      America, under her own power now, swung wide of the black metal world and decelerated into the indicated orbit. The consulate station unofficially known as Deep Time gleamed ahead in the harsh, reflected light from the Six Suns, a silvery, glittering torus rotating to provide those aboard with artificial gravity.

      Deep Time had started out eight months earlier as a small USNA deep space military base constructed in the N’gai Cloud to keep an eye on the Sh’daar, a concession by the Collective possible only with the base’s near-total demilitarization. No lasers or particle cannon, no high-velocity KK weaponry, nothing that might upset the unknowable currents and eddies of time itself. The men and women stationed here were permitted sidearms, but the posting was strictly made on a volunteer basis. Hand lasers and man-portable pee-beeps were no match for five-kilometer flying mountains.

      A couple of months earlier, while America had been deployed to the far future, the Deep Time station in the far past had been designated as a kind of semiofficial consulate, Humankind’s ambassadorial presence in

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